Ethics in the Organic Movement - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 24

focused primarily on fruit and vegetable production. They refused to use mineral
fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, just as today's organic farmers. They recycled
and composted organic materials (including composting human and urban waste),
established green manure, mulch and used minimal tillage methods, as well as low
soluble mineral fertilizers and stone meals. In general, those following the back to
nature approach established a low-input system, based on the continual recycling of
organic materials found on the farm (Vogt and Lockeretz 2007 ).
These organic practices were accompanied by an ethically oriented lifestyle. For
example, in the life-reform movement, participants refer to an understanding and
respect of animals (Biocentrism), and of ecosystems (ecocentrism). Specifically,
the movement political origins led the life reformers to focus on fairness and care.
Clearly, some of the IFOAM Principles have their roots in this movement.
In the early 1920s, the introduction of larger machinery and the use of mineral
fertilizers on large farms led to soil compaction, the loss of soil fertility and a
serious decline in yields. In response, a delegation of big landowners in Germany
asked the philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who was neither a farmer
nor an agricultural scientist, to advise on how to reduce the negative effects of
these changes on the soil (Vogt 2000 ; Patzel 2009 ; Patzel and Lindenthal 2009 ).
Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, emphasized the humanistic fundamentals of and
biodynamic farming (Steiner 1984 ), which included ideas about the role of the
individual and society instead of the dominate natural science perspective (Steiner
1984 , pp. 48, 76). “It is infinitely important that agriculture should be closely
related to the social life” (Steiner 1973 , p. 249). Steiner's intention was not to offer
a complete description of agricultural practices, but to present a perspective that
farmers could put into practice. Steiner's idea for a biodynamic agriculture was the
“ Verlebendigung der Erde” (roughly the 'vitalization of the earth') through organic
fertilizers. According to Steiner, living soils, animals and compost are key to the
system. In Steiner's biodynamic approach, each farm is seen as an organism, and
field practices must account for cosmic forces (Steiner 1984 , p. 169). For Steiner,
bio-dynamic farmers need to develop their individual farm identity that accounts for
the evolution of nature, society, humankind and the cosmos.
Steiner's perspective does not fundamentally contradict the ethical standpoints
of Könemanns's back to nature approach, yet Steiner's ethics and spiritual indi-
vidualism goes much further. For Steiner ( 1892 )“[

] ethical human life, in
a real sense, only begins where justification by utilitarian principles ends. ([

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das im eigentlichen Sinne ethische Leben des Menschen fängt aber da erst an,
wo diese auf Nützlichkeit begründeten Gesetze aufhören” ) (p. 170). Steiner held
that rules, principles or norms alone do not make an ethical society. To act
ethically in a deeper sense, he argues, is what an individual has to arrange with
him/herself (Steiner 1892 , p. 172). Steiner also put the individual's role in society
more in the foreground. Steiner's contributions to the ethical roots of organic
were profound and comprehensive. We find them today in the IFOAM Principles,
however less emphatic than he did, e.g., in seeing the farm as an organism
as a whole.

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