Cultivating Spiritual Forces

My research focuses on the values that animate the farming practices of biodynamic farmers in the Driftless region of the American Midwest. Biodynamic farmers practice what they call a ‘spiritual science’ that conceives of the world as being full of spiritual forces, and they see fostering the proper arrangement of these energies in their crops as the central role of the farmer. This image, taken in the fall of 2024, shows a key event in the biodynamic agricultural year: preparing manure for making compost. In the fall, fresh cow manure is stuffed into cow horns, which are then arranged in a circular pattern in a pit, and buried for the winter. Each spring, the horns are dug up, and the manure, which has dried into a rich, dirt-like substance, is turned into a fertilizer tea that is used to enrich compost. The horns are carefully arranged such that no two horns touch; leaving space between them allows for more effective flows of spiritual forces into the horns. The better the horns receive these energetic forces, the more energy is transferred into the manure, which means more energy goes into the compost and therefore into the crops grown using that compost.