EARTH LEGACY AGRICULTURE – THE WORK CONTINUES HUGH COURTNEY
Back in August of 1975, I received a call to the ministry in the form of an encounter with Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course at a health food store in College Park, Maryland. That call was to minister to Mother Earth through the biodynamic preparations. My initial encounter with biodynamic agriculture led the following year to attendance at a conference of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association (BDA) held in Spring Valley, NY. It was there that I learned that Josephine Porter, who at that time was making and distributing the biodynamic preparations to the membership, was willing to teach “anyone who wants to learn how to make the biodynamic preparations.” What followed was essentially a nineyear apprenticeship in learning to make the preparations through numerous visits to her farm in Stroudsburg, PA. She was a master of her craft. In the meantime, in 1978, with the financial help of my parents, I had moved to a 109-acre farm in Woolwine, VA. My initial goal was to figure out a way to somehow put the Biodynamic Tree Paste formula developed by Peter Escher back into the biodynamic tool shed. But in May of 1984, that all changed when Josephine Porter passed away and I was asked by Owen Holder, a board member of the BDA, to carry on Josephine’s work of making and distributing the biodynamic preparations. As it subsequently turned out, this was not to be under the auspices of the Association, but as a private enterprise separate from that organization. At that point, I determined to establish a non-profit organization to be known as the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics (JPI), which received a charter in October of 1985 from the Commonwealth of Virginia. Although for a time, the preparation production and distribution did end up under the auspices of the BDA, in 1992, the Board agreed to have JPI assume all responsibility for the work but also provided some grant monies for a time to support 24
the work until JPI reached a point of sustainability. After lengthy discussion with the Pfeiffer Foundation, they agreed to transfer the rights to the formulas for the Pfeiffer Compost Starter and Field Spray to Hugh Courtney and JPI. Thus, production of these valuable contributions to biodynamic agriculture and the world would continue into the future. Beginning in the early 2000s, the BDA ceased the grant support, and I began to look for a way to retire from JPI and started looking for a successor. Initially, JPI gave some thought to purchasing the Courtney farm to continue the work in Woolwine, but subsequently did not develop any concrete plans for such a purchase. In the Spring of 2009, when the possibility of a sale of the Courtney farm to JPI was removed from consideration by my parents, as there had been no offer from the Board of Directors, we initiated under Virginia law an entity that was named Earth Legacy Agriculture, LLC. Its purpose was to continue my work in biodynamics upon my eventual retirement from JPI, provide consultation to serious farmers seeking to convert to biodynamic practices, continue to make and provide biodynamic preparations to discerning clients, produce a library of various pest remedies for the biodynamic practitioner, and continue to educate people in the best techniques of biodynamic preparation making. At that time, it was envisioned that JPI would remain on the Courtney farm under a long-term lease agreement of 50 years. The 15year lease under which JPI was then operating was due to expire on December 31, 2012 and had been granted for an annual rent of $600 as well as commitments to maintain facilities and fences. Cattle at the time, as is the case to this day, were owned by the Courtney farm. In the end, negotiations for a long-term lease fell through and the JPI Board of Directors determined to move to a storefront operation in the nearby town of Floyd, Virginia, and begin the search for another farm property in Floyd
Biodynamics
SPRING 2019
