In agriculture, as in most things, finding truth is not an exact science — it’s an exploration. There are few things more humbling than farming. While nature makes farmers humble, for those that don’t farm, the result seems to be quite the opposite. Social media tends to bring out the most aggressive behavior for those that don’t actually do what they are spouting opinions about. In the wine community, a favorite target for those that don’t do is biodynamics.

You don’t have to talk to too many biodynamic winegrowers to understand that they are not practicing some sort of belief system but are pursuing exploration in search of what works on their farm. There is no more critical cornerstone of biodynamic farming than the concept of the whole farm as a complete organism. The framework of biodynamics only provides a starting place in this exploration. Once the basics are in place — the evolution begins. A most biodynamic concept.

Are there winegrowers who go full-Steiner? Of course, there are. As in most human pursuits, the whys and hows are as diverse as the people involved. However, while some high-profile biodynamic winegrowers also buy into anthroposophy, in my experience, the majority are far more, shall we say, down to earth.

While posting on social media on our biodynamic practices at Troon Vineyard, it is a common experience to have someone launch an attack on the way we farm. Those that focus their ire on us are rarely farmers. This seems to be a sport preferred by those armed with deep agricultural knowledge from Wikipedia and Google. Part of the blame here falls on the biodynamic movement as we let the more flamboyant practitioners and practices grab the headlines. From my perspective, farming biodynamically is more about hard work than spirituality. Oddly enough, the most spiritual thing may be the hard work itself and the connection it builds between you and your farm.

What is spirituality on a farm? It is a connection to the complexities of nature and reverence for what we don’t know. There are a lot of ways for an individual to interpret those mysteries. For me, I admire those that are willing to explore the unknown more than those that claim to know everything.

As biodynamic farmers, we need to embrace science just as the early practitioners did. With few resources other than their passion, including a passion for science, Maria Thun, Ehrenfried Peiffer, and others did their best to apply scientific structure to their biodynamic practices and, in my opinion, deserve more credit than Steiner for the direction of modern biodynamics.

There is an enlightened form of biodynamics practiced today, which respects the past, but is fueled by the emerging science of regenerative agriculture. On our farm, we have extensive data showing better utilization of available soil nutrients, decreased populations of microorganisms associated with poor soil health, reduced levels of water stress, and dramatically improved YAN levels at harvest.

The thing is — if it wasn’t working we wouldn’t keep doing it.

To us, the planets seem very far away, but in the scale of the Universe, we are very close together. The Solar System is just that and to pretend that these relationships do not have any effect on the Earth is more than just a little arrogant. Not knowing is not the same thing as knowing. These relationships should spark our curiosity, not kill it.

As noted by Guido Masé in the article Can Moonlight Affect Plant Growth in Permaculture Principles, “All plants grow differently during different phases of the moon — this has been observed in scientific research since the 1970s and, more recently, documented on the microscopic level by observing changes in rootlet growth. But as to why — this question is still unresolved. Easy explanations of its effects can often be misdirection – the moon may seem to lay out a trail for us, but this trail often leads to places we’d never expect. But just as tidal forces served to shape early life on our planet, the more hidden effects we are just starting to understand may be essential to maintain healthy life on earth today.”

Next time someone tells me on social media that our farming is a load of shit, I will just agree with them as we use almost four hundred tons of it a year. I won’t bother to tell them how much healthier our soil is now, how the health of even our old, sick vines has dramatically rebounded, or how much our grape chemistry has improved. Some people have opinions and some people farm. As strange as it may seem, there are many people who don’t grow anything that want to tell us how to farm.

The thing is — the way we farm is working and we’re going to keep doing it.