By Adam Rabiner
One Man, One Cow, One Planet sounds like a David vs. Goliath story, a lonely warrior crying out against the powers that be. Peter Proctor, a New Zealand farmer also known as “the father of modern biodynamics,” plays the part of David. Goliath is modern agricultural chemical-based practices. The battlefield is the Indian subcontinent. But this is too simplistic a narrative. Proctor, who died last year at the age of 89, first visited India in 1993 and made over twenty-five subsequent trips before moving there for good with his partner Rachel Pomeroy in 2007 when this film was made. Proctor may have started his fight as one man with one cow, but over the years, working with individual farmers, local collectives and councils, and universities, he helped create and mobilize a sizable alternative agricultural movement.
This alternative, biodynamics, is a strange concoction of rational and spiritual elements that have their roots in an arcane 19th century philosophy, anthroposophy, created and espoused by Austrian social reformer Rudolph Steiner. Many of the practices of biodynamics are scientifically sound, for example the view of a farm as an organic, self-sustaining system. However, other elements appear more “out there” such as the belief in the power of a vortex, mysterious energies, and other “non-physical beings and elemental forces.”
Proctor does not differentiate between biodynamism’s empirically proven and more hypothetical sides. He’s a true apostle. Soil is everything in biodynamics. The recipe for the perfect humus, a key ingredient in compost, is an alchemy of magic and muck: cow pat from lactating mothers stuffed in bull horns, buried in the winter and unearthed in the spring, is miraculously transformed by time, climate, the energies in the soil and water, “vapors of digestion,” the movement of the moon and the alignment of the stars. This change is a manifestation of order arising from chaos. Other important practices include how farmers churn a mixture of dung and water to make liquid fertilizer or how they swing their arms in a spiral when spraying this homemade concoction on their crops. All involve homeopathic connections, heavenly bodies, astro-dynamism, and the rediscovery of ancient rhythms and life forces.
If some facets of biodynamism remain a bit odd to the uninitiated, many of the practices are conventional by today’s standards and widely accepted by alternative agricultural movements, such as organic farming. Similar to the locavore movement, biodynamism follows a smaller scale, more sustainable and local economic model. The goal is not to produce for a distant and perhaps global market but to create enough surpluses to feed one’s immediate family with enough left over to sell to neighbors at a roadside store. This human-scaled model is familiar to Indian farmers because it is how things were done for eons before the Green Revolution introduced chemical fertilizers and pesticides which Proctor credits with killing India’s once fertile soil.
Over the course of Proctor’s many years of proselytizing, he gradually went from being the “crazy” outsider to a well-regarded educator of best practices. Proctor trained trainers, teaching farmers to solve their own problems and share their newfound knowledge with others through word of mouth. With lots of effort, Proctor typically visited ten farms in a day, his ideas began to catch on and spread fast. In the state of Maharashtra, there were estimated to be ten thousand biodynamic compost heaps, one thousand programs, and four million hectares of organic farms. In India collectively, there were an estimated two million plus biodynamic heaps.
By the end of One Man, One Cow, and One Planet, you earnestly root for these farmers and hope all of them eventually relinquish their Monsanto seeds in favor of biodynamism. After all, this belief system focuses on food sovereignty, cooperation, harmony, and ethics. It takes into account the well-being of growers, consumers, and the village, something you cannot say about the global, impersonal, and destructive forces of advanced capitalism and industrial agriculture based on toxic chemicals. While we can have our doubts about the efficacy of vortices, members of the Park Slope Food Coop should certainly be able to relate to biodynamism’s faith in our ability to live in an ethical, environmentally responsible, compassionate and harmonious society, free of poverty and hunger, grounded in cooperation.
One Man, One Cow, One Planet sounds like a David vs. Goliath story, a lonely warrior crying out against the powers that be. Peter Proctor, a New Zealand farmer also known as “the father of modern biodynamics,” plays the part of David. Goliath is modern agricultural chemical-based practices. The battlefield is the Indian subcontinent. But this is too simplistic a narrative. Proctor, who died last year at the age of 89, first visited India in 1993 and made over twenty-five subsequent trips before moving there for good with his partner Rachel Pomeroy in 2007 when this film was made. Proctor may have started his fight as one man with one cow, but over the years, working with individual farmers, local collectives and councils, and universities, he helped create and mobilize a sizable alternative agricultural movement.
This alternative, biodynamics, is a strange concoction of rational and spiritual elements that have their roots in an arcane 19th century philosophy, anthroposophy, created and espoused by Austrian social reformer Rudolph Steiner. Many of the practices of biodynamics are scientifically sound, for example the view of a farm as an organic, self-sustaining system. However, other elements appear more “out there” such as the belief in the power of a vortex, mysterious energies, and other “non-physical beings and elemental forces.”
Proctor does not differentiate between biodynamism’s empirically proven and more hypothetical sides. He’s a true apostle. Soil is everything in biodynamics. The recipe for the perfect humus, a key ingredient in compost, is an alchemy of magic and muck: cow pat from lactating mothers stuffed in bull horns, buried in the winter and unearthed in the spring, is miraculously transformed by time, climate, the energies in the soil and water, “vapors of digestion,” the movement of the moon and the alignment of the stars. This change is a manifestation of order arising from chaos. Other important practices include how farmers churn a mixture of dung and water to make liquid fertilizer or how they swing their arms in a spiral when spraying this homemade concoction on their crops. All involve homeopathic connections, heavenly bodies, astro-dynamism, and the rediscovery of ancient rhythms and life forces.
If some facets of biodynamism remain a bit odd to the uninitiated, many of the practices are conventional by today’s standards and widely accepted by alternative agricultural movements, such as organic farming. Similar to the locavore movement, biodynamism follows a smaller scale, more sustainable and local economic model. The goal is not to produce for a distant and perhaps global market but to create enough surpluses to feed one’s immediate family with enough left over to sell to neighbors at a roadside store. This human-scaled model is familiar to Indian farmers because it is how things were done for eons before the Green Revolution introduced chemical fertilizers and pesticides which Proctor credits with killing India’s once fertile soil.
Over the course of Proctor’s many years of proselytizing, he gradually went from being the “crazy” outsider to a well-regarded educator of best practices. Proctor trained trainers, teaching farmers to solve their own problems and share their newfound knowledge with others through word of mouth. With lots of effort, Proctor typically visited ten farms in a day, his ideas began to catch on and spread fast. In the state of Maharashtra, there were estimated to be ten thousand biodynamic compost heaps, one thousand programs, and four million hectares of organic farms. In India collectively, there were an estimated two million plus biodynamic heaps.
By the end of One Man, One Cow, and One Planet, you earnestly root for these farmers and hope all of them eventually relinquish their Monsanto seeds in favor of biodynamism. After all, this belief system focuses on food sovereignty, cooperation, harmony, and ethics. It takes into account the well-being of growers, consumers, and the village, something you cannot say about the global, impersonal, and destructive forces of advanced capitalism and industrial agriculture based on toxic chemicals. While we can have our doubts about the efficacy of vortices, members of the Park Slope Food Coop should certainly be able to relate to biodynamism’s faith in our ability to live in an ethical, environmentally responsible, compassionate and harmonious society, free of poverty and hunger, grounded in cooperation.