Allied disciplines
I have come to agrohomeopathy having been much more involved in biodynamic agriculture. Only after having begun to research biodynamics in earnest did I come back to my homeopathic roots and find all these researchers.
Biodynamic agriculture is an interesting companion to homeopathy. Both use dynamisation, but biodynamic farmers do not do this in a series of steps. Instead they dynamise their field sprays for an hour without adding or removing anything except what spills from the barrel. However, a pin head of silica dust stirred in 40 litres of water for an hour can have dramatic effects on a hectare of land. For a practically inert material to work in these doses reinforces the suspicion that, as with homeopathy, we are talking of forces rather than chemical interactions.
Biodynamics started in the 1920s with a series of lectures by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. However, even before these agricultural lectures were given, Steiner was guiding researchers using a more standard potentisation technique. The foremost amongst these was Lilly Kolisko, whose superhuman efforts in those years and up to the second world war were recorded in ‘Agriculture of Tomorrow’. (I think this is essential reading for those interested in homeopathy, along with Rudolf Hauschka’s ‘Basis of Potentisation Research’. These early graphs of effect against potency seem to me to be wonderful routes into the question of what potency should be applied. But I digress … )
Lilly Kolisko died in 1976 and, as it happens, it was in this year that several people independently took up the reins with work on potentised biodynamic preparations. In New Zealand Glen Atkinson began potentising these eight preparations and making various combinations for specific agricultural purposes. What particularly interested me was that a test was made on his ‘Warmth Spray’ (now sold as ThermoMax or BdMax TM) for the Pip and Stone-fruit Growers of NZ, whose crops had been decimated by a late frost through their orchards. The government lab, HortResearch, tested Glen’s potentised mixture and it was the best available. This unsolicited testimony (the spray was sent in by an orchardist and not by Glen) from an independent laboratory of the effect of a potentised preparation upon plants, seems to me to be a world event. Since then various combinations of Glen’s potentised biodynamic preparations have been used on thousands of hectares to protect against frost, or to increase photosynthesis in dull light conditions, or to increase dry matter without splitting the maturing fruits.
In the UK, early trials in the dairy farms of the peak district, Staffordshire and Shropshire, are showing increased grass yields with Glen’s preparations. Perhaps even more remarkable, a farmer called up the suppliers worried that his slurry pit had clarified and stopped smelling. He wondered where his nutrients had gone to and would they block his irrigation system, now that they had settled at the base of the pit. (They didn’t, and hadn’t disappeared but behaved as aerobic pits do.) Others confirm that there is dramatically reduced smell from the slurry pits and when the slurry is spread, there is greatly reduced burning of the grass on to which it is spread. Glen’s experience from other countries is that there will be less bloat and a generally improved response of the animals.
A question: if the right homeopathic remedy stimulates the body’s own healing mechanism when taken by a human subject, what is it that is stimulated when a 200,000 litre slurry pit is given a litre of E7? Do slurry pits have an immune ability?
