Biodynamic Agriculture

Biodynamic agriculture is a form of alternative agriculture based on pseudoscientific and esoteric concepts first developed in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner, and it was the first of the organic farming movements, treating soil fertility, plant growth and livestock care as ecologically interrelated tasks while emphasizing spiritual and mystical perspectives. Like other organic approaches it favors manures and composts over synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and it treats a farm's animals, crops and soil as a single system, but its own distinctive methods include an astrological sowing and planting calendar and herbal and mineral preparations, such as ground quartz packed into a cow horn and buried in the soil, that its practitioners describe as harvesting cosmic forces. No scientific evidence has established any difference in outcomes between certified biodynamic techniques and comparable organic or integrated farming practices, and biodynamic agriculture is considered a pseudoscience for its reliance on esoteric and mystical belief rather than demonstrated efficacy. As of 2022 biodynamic techniques were used on about 255,000 hectares across 65 countries, led by Germany, Italy and France, and the approach has also been adopted by a number of notable vineyards.