Biodynamic is the new "organic"

>No difference in beneficial outcomes has been scientifically established between certified biodynamic agricultural techniques and similar organic and integrated farming practices. Biodynamic agriculture lacks strong scientific evidence for its efficacy and has been labeled a is a pseudoscience because of its overreliance upon esoteric knowledge and mystical beliefs.

Sounds like a load of crock.

Too bad menstrual cycles can vary from 21 to 35 days.

Rudolf Steiner is awesome and is the reason your grandma didn't die from cancer before she could give birth to your shitty parents. OP is certified pleb.

I live in a town of hipsters, hippies and vegans. I'm gunna start using this word to describe literally everything I eat now. Gunna order nachos and pizza out with friends and say it's healthy cuz it's biodynamic, then watch them get fat for keks

if they live together. Most notable that their sleep time is forcefully synced, the same room temperatures, similar food habits, same mood spikes due to empathy are also important. Probably more

Biodynamic actually has a specific, globally accepted meaning though unlike "organic" which has like 35 different certifying agencies in different jurisdictions making it up as they go along

>It's marketed (fairly) as a "step above" because "organic" has been diluted by big agriculture at least in the US
You are either really stupid, or insane

Repeat after me: organic means it has carbon and water is a chemical.

There, don't you feel better now?

He's making a valid point at least with regard to USDA certified rules. Big agriculture and chemical corporations wrote and signed off on the rules. They own FDA and USDA through their ownership of congress. So in many cases these rules have watered down and reduced the credibility of the certification. It's also extremely costly if you're a small and medium sized grower, so many don't even try. It favors mega corporation production.

>people experimenting with spraying BD501 directly on photos taken of a field. and getting the same results of spraying the field. shit blew my mind!

So the whole thing is pretty much new age snake oil then?

are those... cow horns filled with poop?
do europoors pay extra money for this?

what the fuck is this? horns full of shit?

youtube.com/watch?v=tiMMoqngdt0

wow this is pants-on-head retarded
>must be a female cow horn
>activating the soil life forces
>waking up the land to the season

>activating the soil life forces
That's actually not incredibly retarded, desu. The inherent soil microbiome interacts with the fecal micro-organisms in a symbiotic way, turning the faeces into "black gold". It literally stimulates beneficial bacterial life, within the soil, while it's fermenting.

Personally, I'm not entirely certain about the other things, but the 'activation of soil life forces' is actually demonstrable and relatively sound.

I agree with this. My organic garden of @ 1/2 acre depends on a living soil and it has to be maintained. One of the things I use is composted manure where I've mixed cow manure with leaves, grass and kitchen scraps. The manure definitely helps the compost decompose more rapidly than without it. Biodynamic practitioners also focus on using different plants than just the standard clover and vetch as cover crops for fallow fields depending on which nutrients might be lacking.

They have some excellent ideas and practices based on sound science, but they do seem to incorporate some mysticism into it. Certainly doesn't hurt anything by doing that, just appears a little unnecessary to someone like me.

Biodynamic methods are incredibly complicated. There's only one guy in my state (a farming state) who's a certified biodynamic gardener. You have to make soil preparations at a certain time of the year and during a particular part of the moon cycle, stir them in a specific direction with your hand, say certain things over them as you stir. I don't understand how it all is supposed to go together, but it appears to work spookily well.

dude the guy in this video is claiming that there's something magical about burying two handfuls of cow shit inside a horn that makes it sufficient to fertilize 2.5 acres of land. I'm not saying that compost is bullshit (lol get it), but it is completely magical thinking that this cow-horn-burying-woo-woo business is any different from any other composted manure in its nutrient content or microbe profile

>That's actually not incredibly retarded,
It really is. none of pseudoscience makes it not look fucking retarded. Just because you can spell "symbiotic" doesn't suddenly make you a genius, retard. And you apparently have no clue about what symbiotic means to begin with.

their trick is an ancient and mystical practice called "confirmation bias"

if any of this crap actually worked to increase yields or make healthier plants or what have you, do you really think big agriculture wouldn't have started hiring illegal mexicans to mix potions and sing to tomatoes long ago?

yeah, magic definitely is complicated and requires a lot of handwaving
you need to do all the ritual with specific ingredients at the right times, while saying specific words, etc.
oh wait, it's the 21st century and noone from the civilised world believes in magic?
well would you look at that

Of course I would expect Veeky Forums to focus on the small part of it that is the mystical aspect and therefore renounce the entire method as invalid. The fact is they focus on sustainably producing crops by using resources produced on the farm, the same way humans have produced crops until the last half of the 20th century with the ascendancy to power of big chemical.

The mystical aspect is a component, sure. But the reason following the moon cycle for certain tasks seems mystical for example, is because there have not been peer reviewed studies done confirming it or not. But that part of it isn't where the value lies anyway.

This stuff isn't as complicated as it seems. you dig a hole in the ground, put a stick in the middle to stack your cow shit filled horns (large end pointing towards the center of the earth) and cover them with dirt.
you do this in the fall I believe and dig them up in spring. the cosmic rays of the sun penetrate the earth to the center and then come back out the same way they came in, that's what helps the shit turn to "black gold" like some one mentioned.
there is other things buried too, like yarrow root filled cow skulls, dandelion filled deer bladder and a few other.
when you have your black gold and your ready to spray your field, you fill a bucket 2/3 full of water and add a few tablespoons of your black gold. when you stir it, you have to bring the vortex of the water to its highest point when that happens stir the opposite way and repeat for an hour straight. all while thinking loving thoughts in the vortex of sitrred water. you'll need to help to tag team it.
after that, strain it and put it into your sprayer. and spray the field. the microorganisms will go to work!

A lot of people underestimate what intention is capable of. like the spraying of photos rather than the field its self

there's no way this isn't bait

>I don't understand human biology that well, probably not don't understand biology in general, but I'll be damned if I let that stop me

Doing things "because thats how they used to be done" is fucking dumb, there is a reason people stopped doing them

Its not bait, its just strange shit
here are the other things used

Field preparations, for stimulating humus formation:
500: (horn-manure) a humus mixture prepared by filling the horn of a cow with cow manure and burying it in the ground (40–60 cm below the surface) in the autumn.
501: Crushed powdered quartz prepared by stuffing it into a horn of a cow and buried into the ground in spring and taken out in autumn. It can be mixed with 500 but usually prepared on its own (mixture of 1 tablespoon of quartz powder to 250 liters of water)

The application rate of the biodynamic field spray preparations (i.e., 500 and 501) are 300 grams per hectare of horn manure and 5 grams per hectare of horn silica. These are made by stirring the ingredients into 20-50 liters of water per hectare for an hour, using a prescribed method
Compost preparations

Compost preparations, used for preparing compost, employ herbs which are frequently used in medicinal remedies. Many of the same herbs are used in organic practices to make foliar fertilizers, turned into the soil as green manure, or in composting. The preparations include:

502: Yarrow blossoms are stuffed into urinary bladders from Red Deer, placed in the sun during summer, buried in earth during winter and retrieved in the spring.
503: Chamomile blossoms are stuffed into small intestines from cattle buried in humus-rich earth in the autumn and retrieved in the spring.
504: Stinging nettle plants in full bloom are stuffed together underground surrounded on all sides by peat for a year.
505: Oak bark is chopped in small pieces, placed inside the skull of a domesticated animal, surrounded by peat and buried in earth in a place where lots of rain water runs past.
506: Dandelion flowers are stuffed into the mesentery of a cow and buried in earth during winter and retrieved in the spring.
507: Valerian flowers are extracted into water.
508: Horsetail
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture

Is this really a thing coasties are buying now? Makes me glad to be in flyover

>Crushed powdered quartz
So like sand?

>magic horn sand
it's the current year and people pay premium prices for potatoes that have voodoo spells cast on them

Why did somebody stuff what appears to be bull horns full of goat shit?

technology moved forward a lot, but we didn't. many people still believe in magical thinking and superstitions, just in a new-age pseudoscience format, rather than straight-up magic
never underestimate confirmation bias, placebo and other wonders of the human psyche, user

chemical companies got the best of us, just because it's easier doesn't mean its better.

biodynamics is hard work, farming is hard work, its not hard to believe farmers were looking for easier methods. they just are not as good and deplete the soil

markets are efficient, user. if any part of biodynamics worked better than evidence-based agriculture, big ag wouldn't turn its nose up at it, but rather appropriate it. you better believe that enchanting cow poop and making herb potions can be automated, and the market doesn't just leave money on the table. the fact that the only market for biodynamic/organic food is idiot hipsters looking for moral superiority is clear unimpeachable proof that nothing about those methods is more efficient

This isn't even mystical. You're replenishing the soil with a nutrient and bioactive mixture derived through decomposition. I do it in my organic garden by working in composted manure but for larger acerages I can definitely see where a spray would be more sensible particularly when coupled with a smart application of nutrient returning cover crops.

The anons poking fun at it are the kind of people who have never seen a vegetable growing irl or never planted anything without saturating it in miracle-gro and sevendust.

Are they hollowed out animal horns filled with shit?

organic at least makes sense scientifically and is good for the environment
this is just literal magic

>people can be so ignorant that the concept of fertilizer blows their mind
Mesopotamians figured this shit out about 10,000 years ago user.
>ey have some excellent ideas and practices based on sound scienc
It's just crop rotation.
Because 99% of the shit they do is pointless, 0.5% is done in the most retarded fashion, and 0.5% is just organic gardening.
'Biodynamic farming' is quite possibly the most retarded thing I've ever heard. This may surprise you, but this in the 21st century. We know how plants grow, what plants need to grow, and how to maximize crop yields.

Stirring a tablespoon of cow shit into a 50 gallon tank of water is going to accomplish nothing compared to an actual fertilizer like 10-10-10. This shit is just as stupid as homeopathy.

Sustainable organic/biodynamic growing is effecient and when done responsibly (i.e. not by big agri like the organic you find at walmart or comparable) has far less negative impact on the environment. But it requires more effort than viewing soil as simply a mechanism to hold roots and transport petroleum based chemicals to the plant. It also eliminates big chemical. So no, big chemical is not interested in examining it.

>This may surprise you, but this in the 21st century

No, but what may surprise you is that people are waking up to the fact that they don't want to live in a world like pic related where the air they breath, the food they eat, the water they drink and the ground they walk on are poisonous.

>I don't understand farming
Chemical fertilizers are more efficient versions of natural fertilizers. Instead of relying on microorganisms to breakdown cow shit, you instead give the plants that shit directly, no magic mumbo jumbo necessary.

I wish people like you would actually buy a farm and try to turn a profit so I could laugh at you when you fail.

Everything is poisonous though. Last week it was fat and now it's carbs. I don't want to live to 100 anyway. Water is a chemical.

no actually neither of those things is true. organic is just as much a meme based on magical thinking.

the popular perception of organic food is that it doesn't allow any kinds of pesticides, but that's wrong. what it doesn't allow is pesticides that weren't already in general use around ~1930 or so, which means it doesn't allow targeted, low-toxicity pesticides created using modern chemistry and the scientific method, but DOES allow extremely toxic, poorly targeted pesticides from an earlier era. prime example: rotenone.

as for fertilizers, the organic label precludes those on similarly nonsensical grounds. for example, if I want to add nitrogen to my organic field, it is perfectly alright for me to add sodium nitrate, because it is mined from the ground. what would not be ok is taking that sodium nitrate and removing the sodium before use, because that would make it an "artificial" chemical. why is that a problem? because continual use of sodium salts on your fields will cause sodium accumulation that will eventually leave the field completely unusable. and for a more consumer-oriented example, hundreds of people die every year of gut infections from the poorly composted manure used on organic vegetables.

organic food is also considerably WORSE for the environment than conventional agriculture, mainly for one simple reason: organic farming techniques get much shittier yields. this means that for every bushel of soybeans or pound of coffee beans extracted, you're plowing under more acres of what would otherwise be a productive wild ecosystem. it's true that conventional farming produces somewhat more carbon emissions from fossil fuel inputs, but due to greater land-use efficiency, each calorie of conventional food has a significantly lower carbon footprint than organic. needless to say, this land use difference also makes conventional farming a win for biodiversity/ecosystem protection

1/2

>nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash are horribly dangerous chemicals that pollute the earth
Just admit you have no idea what you're talking about, you've never farmed, been on a farm, or actually talked to a farmer.

>organic is a big thing even though it eliminates big chemical
>biodynamic isn't a big thing because it elminates big chemical and, like totally, requires you to view soil spiritually brah, to respect excrements by waving hands and speaking magical formulas
>now pass on the deer bladder friend, gotta sacrifice it to Perun for those sicc crop gains

the last argument I see people making a lot is that organic farming is better for long-term soil conservation. this is also false.

the traditional means of preparing a field for planting is to till the whole thing in order to kill weeds and eliminate their seeds before planting your desired crop. this has the undesirable side-effect of loosening the soil, allowing topsoil to blow away, and digging up the nice buried carbon in the deeper soil layers that helps with nutrient retention and providing a home for beneficial microbes. these microbe communities are anaerobic, meaning digging them up kills them by exposing them to oxygen, and allows that deep carbon sink to rot, becoming CO2.

because of herbicide-resistant GMO crops, conventional farmers have been able to move to no-till farming. this means that instead of preparing a field for planting by digging the whole thing up, they just spray it with roundup to kill the weeds, and don't disturb the topsoil except to put seeds in it. this winds up being both superior for long-term soil health and also improves carbon sequestration. but the organic cult disallows transgenic crops for reasons that have nothing to do with any proven harms, but everything to do with a magical belief that "natural" is better

2/2

look at the quantities involved and application rates, user. I garden organic too, just cause there's no point in the time and expense of precision agriculture for a plot my size, and I use compost, cover crops, green manure, etc. but this is literally spreading a couple cups of low-grade compost over LITERALLY 2.5 ACRES and expecting that's gonna do a goddamn thing. I use like an entire cubic yard of compost in my 200 sq ft garden every spring, and there's zero visible trace of that shit left after a couple weeks. do you really think an application rate as low as the enchanted cow horn shit has real, measurable effects?

I just really love this coastie conception of the guy in charge of a multi-million-dollar 1000+ acre farming operation being a gap-toothed bumpkin who's been bamboozled into inefficient and self-destructive growing techniques by brochures from chemical companies and just really needs some san francisco crystal healers to come teach him what he's doing wrong

>but this is literally spreading a couple cups of low-grade compost over LITERALLY 2.5 ACRES and expecting that's gonna do a goddamn thing

This is not low grade compost. it is high grade humus rich in nutrients and BILLIONS of microorganisms!

Humus is the dark organic matter that forms in the soil when plant and animal matter decays. Humus contains many useful nutrients for healthy soil, nitrogen being the most important of all

even if you have a small garden your plot would benefit from BioDynamics. it lasts forever if you keep it in a Earthenware container in a cool spot. then you could mix it, strain it and put it in a small pump sprayer.
I guarantee your soil would be better (more microorganisms) with BD than the compost, cover crops, green manure, etc that you use now.

cow manure NPK: 0.6-0.4-0.5

as I said, low-grade, and you are falling for a meme. everything in the world has billions of microbes in it, including seawater, your skin, and antarctic glaciers

>rotenone

Rotenone is not permitted for use in agriculture in the US at this time. Pyrethrins , broad spectrum pinsecticide are permitted under USDA certification rules which was permitted based on big chemical writing the rules.

>using any technique to sustain soil fertility than compost, composted manure, cover crops, or crop rotation

It may be "certified" USDA organic to use other methods since the rules were written by big agri and big chemical, but a small and medium sized producer does not use them.

>it's impossible to farm large scale organically

Boy have you swallowed a line of propaganda hook, line and sinker. Big chemical is spending a lot of money trying to keep people convinced of that and paying off our congress to prevent subsidies to those who choose to attempt it. Wake up. Responsible organic production not only results in a living environment, it's effecient once established.

>herbicide GMO's

Even now, already, species of weeds have evolved to resist the most poisonous and dangerous herbicide known, round-up. Whatever will they come up with next.

Really difficult to understand how someone without a hand in the pot could argue it's better to saturate the earth and food with poison. Really gets the ol' butter churn to pumpin'.

More like cold blooded welfare queen suckling at the teat of agro subsidies and dumping vast amounts of nitrogen fertilizers and glyphosate into the water supply in exchange for free money from uncle sam, producing shit-tier food I have no interest in eating

Why would I want wooden tasting monoculture garbage from a Dow Chemical plant in flyover land when I can get delicious biodynamic food from moonbat hippie cultists in upstate NY?

>incorrect about rotenone
§205.602 Nonsynthetic substances prohibited for use in organic crop production.
(a) Ash from manure burning.
(b) Arsenic.
(c) Calcium chloride, brine process is natural and prohibited for use except as a foliar spray to treat a physiological disorder associated with calcium uptake.
(d) Lead salts.
(e) Potassium chloride—unless derived from a mined source and applied in a manner that minimizes chloride accumulation in the soil.
(f) Sodium fluoaluminate (mined).
(g) Sodium nitrate—unless use is restricted to no more than 20% of the crop's total nitrogen requirement
(h) Strychnine.
(i) Tobacco dust (nicotine sulfate).

>muh no true scotsman

>impossible to farm large-scale
that's not what I'm saying. there are many large-scale organic farms. but organic farming does not produce as much food per acre, regardless of scale. that is why your organic vegetables are twice as expensive. that is also why it's worse for the environment

>calling me a paid shill
very creative. roundup has roughly the same toxicity to mammals as table salt. I dated an ultra-hippie organic farmer last year and even she knew this. something tells me you're not getting your information from unbiased sources. here's a good meta-analysis on the impacts of biotech crop introduction: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111629

you don't seem very scientifically literate though so I'll copy-paste the key point for you:
On average, GM technology adoption has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%. Yield gains and pesticide reductions are larger for insect-resistant crops than for herbicide-tolerant crops. Yield and profit gains are higher in developing countries than in developed countries.
(inb4 conspiracy theory where all research that makes you feel uncomfortable is faked by biotech companies)

wanna try again, user?

cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-alternative-agriculture/article/comparison-of-taste-quality-between-organically-and-conventionally-grown-fruits-and-vegetables/4FD617DD7770A641BC792B01C128CBD6

people are statistically unable to distinguish between conventional and organic for most items, and have no pattern of preference in the ones they can distinguish. but maybe you're a special taster, and not just looking for a way to feel morally superior

Wow what a surprise, USDA organic mega-agro garbage from 1500 miles away tastes the same as USDA conventional mega-agro garbage from 1500 miles away

You've convinced me to stop buying good tasting local biodynamic vegetables

Big agro: 1
Good food: -9000

kek. That's their entire point, and big agro-chemical wrote the certification requirements to be prohibitive to small and medium growers. Use of broad spectrum plant derived insecticides? Big agri-chem, not small and medium sized growers. But the big agri shills also fail to point out even for themselves, they have to provide a plan for implemention of an organic pest control system not relying on broad spectrums and evidence they implemented it. Fucking big chem and big agri shilling on a mcchicken condiment analysis website. They're getting desperate because the natives are getting restless.

MACHI - Make America China!

The only Rudolf Steiner I know of is a gun nut from Arima. He helped a lot in the mission to the bandit hideout in Shure.

I don't think you read the paper, user. it seems like you might not be interested in having a reasoned exchange of views :(
there was no USDA organic certification at the time the paper was written in 1992, and the authors describe physically going to each farm and picking the produce themselves to make sure they got equivalent ripeness. as a scientist myself I can assure you we don't have the time or money to fly 1500 miles away for a silly experiment like this. so what they were testing was 'driving-distance farm describing self as organic before big organic existed' vs. 'driving-distance farm that did not describe self as organic'
do I have to do all your reading comprehension for you?

Half the produce I buy isn't certified anything because it costs too much and the farm is too small. The other half is Demeter certified Biodynamic. They are equally good. And they are both quite a bit better than the poison you people are trying to shove down my throat. I mean sure when a giant monoculture farm opens up next door to the other ones I buy from, I'll be sure to give it a try. Somehow it seems more likely the crops will end up at a Whole Foods on the other side of the country, but I'm a fair minded person and as soon as I have a chance, I'll try it. Then again I really don't see those mega Cargill ADM setups trying to sell spring garlic or potatoes other than the 3 commercially relevant ones found at your average Whole Foods, or much else of interest for that matter, but hey. Like I said, I'll try it if you offer. Your move.

oh I don't care what you eat, and despite the repeated assertions that I'm a professional conagra shitposter or something I have no ability to or interest in changing the farming practices in your area. I'm glad that you've found a way of feeding yourself that you enjoy. having grown vegetables for years I totally agree with you that the high-yielding and easily transported commercial varieties of many vegetables are sad and tasteless compared to the more delicate varieties that can't travel far from their origin. I would probably seek those out if I had the time and money (but my monsanto shill checks never arrive for some reason). I'm just trying to make the point that the ~method~ of growing [other than probably transportation time I guess], rather than the ~variety~, has really minimal measured impact on taste preference for average people.
actually something that excites me about biotechnology is that we'll soon be able to target flavor and shelf-stability genes in order to rationally combine them into crop varieties that can make it to normies at the grocery store without sacrificing flavor. I think that's the kind of technological advance that stubbornly sticking to the idea that anything "unnatural" is automatically bad is going to needlessly prevent, while also leading to the environmental/economic consequences I tried to outline above

yea but hippies, hipsters and vegans'll buy into any fancy-sounding word that they don't understand. Just say that your yoga teacher told you that it's OK to eat as much X Y or Z as you want because it's biodynamic and they'll believe anything you tell them.

>Each one of these horns can treat 1 hectare
It's literally a handful of poop.

A handful of poop is not even enough to do 5 square metres of soil.

>if I can't afford it it means people who can can don't understand it
>my appreciation for subject matter is more pure and genuine because I am poor
Every board on Veeky Forums

I'm a bio and ag engineer whose done a bunch of jobs in the farm and food industry. Last job I worked at was designig dredges fornpig lagoons. I've never once heard the word biodynamic. After Googling it and seeing 'quartz crystals' and 'cosmological effects' I'm pretty sure this is just another brand of homeopathic hipster garbage with maybe a handful of legitimate practices mixes in.

But you know whatever you want to spend money on is fine. Most farmers love people willing to pay extra for something that doesn't cost them any additional money. I'd bury crystals with my crops if some new age retro hippies would pay to dollar for it.

Silly normie, the farmers *are* the new age retro hippies

The place I buy from has an on-site Waldorf school through which they indoctrinate their young

I feel sorry for people who don't have any authentic new-age moonbats selling expensive, high quality produce, meats, eggs, and dairy nearby

Enjoy your chicken nuggers from birds born without beaks, drenched in HFCS from Bt corn

Wasn't this popular in the 60s?

If you are ag engineer you should heard about biodynamics because its one of the branches of organic agriculture.

> Too bad menstrual cycles can vary from 21 to 35 days.

Sometimes the moon isn't in the mood.