A Japanese Buddhist Master reveals 21 rules of life that will blow your mind
For years I struggled to find the peace I really wanted.
You know the dream:
Happiness
Not overthinking
No anxiety
Physically fit
And the to live every moment without being distracted by the past or the future.
During that time, I lived with anxiety, insomnia and way too much useless thinking going on in my head. It was never easy.
One of the reasons I was never truly at peace was because of one recurring problem: I couldn't learn to "accept" where I was without wishing it were different.
Because avoiding and fighting against what is happening inside you only makes it worse.
Unfortunately, acceptance is also really hard to cultivate. We're practically wired to not accept the moment if it's not 100% comfortable.
So, what can we do?
What helped me was coming across Japanese Buddhist master Miyamoto Mushashi's 21 rules of life.
Known as Japan's greatest ever swordsman, he wrote these 21 rules 2 weeks before his death.
Each rule teaches you to accept your circumstances in life, detach from outside forces you can't control and be comfortable with who you are.
I find these rules powerful because the only way to cultivate acceptance is through continued practice in your actions and your attitude. The two things we actually have control over.
And these rules give you the necessary guidelines to do just that.
It might take months to rewire your brain, but it's well worth it.
Check them out:
1) Accept everything just the way it is.
Acceptance is perhaps the most important attitude to overcome mental challenges in life.
It's a state of mind. There's no destination or goal with acceptance. It's simply the process of exercising the mind to be tolerant of anything life throws at us.
Why is it powerful?
Because instead of fighting against negative emotions like anxiety and stress, you're actually accepting them the way they are. You're not bitter, and you're not creating more negativity out of your negativity.
Through acceptance you pave the path for negative emotions like anxiety to become less powerful. You're not fighting against them and making them worse.
But to be clear: Acceptance is not the following: It's not indifference or apathy. It does not involve giving up or not trying. It's simply about accepting things without judging them.
It is what it is. Whatever happens happens. It's about being patient and allowing the natural flow of things to take place.
2) Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
As humans, we're unhappiest when we become dissatisfied with what we have, and decide that we want more.
When we seek pleasure for pleasure's sake, we put ourselves in an endless loop of desiring that's only temporarily satisfied when we experience that pleasure.
But feelings don't last forever. And before you know it, you'll be back desiring again.
This doesn't mean you can't have fun and enjoy pleasure when you experience it. It just means you won't be constantly seeking pleasure for its own sake. You appreciate what you have in every moment, and sometimes that will be pleasurable emotions.
But you also won't be unhappy when you aren't experiencing pleasure.
3) Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
Same as above, feelings don't last forever. Emotions are transient. You won't be happy all the time, and wanting to be so will only make you unhappy.
4) Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
When you think of yourself too much, you amplify your ego and your insecurities.
Happy people are the ones who focus on helping others. There's a beautiful Chinese Proverb which describes this perfectly:
"If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody."
In other words: Be humble, don't take yourself too seriously and focus on helping others.
5) Be detached from desire your whole life long.
Buddhism says that desiring leads to suffering. Why? Because when you're desiring, you're dissatisfied with what you have right now.
And when you get what you want, this leads you down an endless loop desiring.
If you can forget about the idea of wanting, you can learn to be comfortable and grateful for what you have right now, which is key to inner peace.
6) Do not regret what you have done.
Regret is a useless emotion, isn't it? You can't change what's happened. Yes, you can learn from what happened, but that doesn't involve experiencing regret.
I know that sometimes we can't help but regret things in life, but it's important not to dwell on it. It's useless to do so.
7) Never be jealous.
Another useless emotion. It also means you're insecure with yourself, because you're envious of someone else.
Instead, look inside yourself and be grateful for who you are and what you have.
8) Never let yourself be saddened by separation.
It sucks to separate from someone you want to be with. But getting sad over it won't help you or them.
Sometimes you just need to toughen up and appreciate what you have, not what you lose.
9) Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
Again, complaining without action doesn't help you achieve anything. It only serves to raise your toxic energy.
And don't let what other people do affect you as well. You're not in control of what they do. But you are in control of how you react to what they do.
10) Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
This one's probably a controversial one for many. For me, too. I think we can all agree that you don't want to be guided by lust. It's similar to chasing emotions that don't last forever and will only give you temporary fulfilment.
Love, however, is a different story. I don't know about you, but I think that love is one of the most important emotions to be guided by. Your family is everything, whoever they are, and your life is much more fulfilled when you do whatever you can for them.
11) In all things have no preferences.
Similar to desiring, by having preferences, you're not happy with what you have right now. You're dissatisfied and unable to enjoy the present moment.
So if you can, try not to prefer something over something else, especially if you can't control it.
12) Be indifferent to where you live.
If you can change where you live, then by all means go ahead. And don't stop looking for opportunities to do so.
But besides doing that, it's more fulfilling to appreciate where you are right now, rather than wishing it were different.
13) Do not pursue the taste of good food.
Interesting one. Focus on eating to be healthy and for nourishment. Desiring delicious food can lead to addiction and attachment. This goes for alcohol and drugs, too.
14) Do not hold onto possessions you no longer need.
It's easy to get cluttered with junk that you don't need. But if it's not benefiting your life, get rid of it. More space and more clear thinking is what's needed. Not more stuff.
15) Do not act following customary beliefs.
Follow your own common sense. Do what makes sense to your own values, not what other people think. Decide for yourself.
You know what's right and wrong. You don't need someone else to tell you.
16) Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
A tribute to his swordsman time, but we can apply this for our lives, too. It's better to be an expert in one thing, than okay at everything.
17) Do not fear death.
Extremely hard to do. But it's something none of us will escape. We can either learn to accept that our and our close ones time will eventually come, or fight against it causing anxiety and sadness for the rest of our lives.
18) Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
What good will they do you when you're gone? Only collect what is useful. Don't waste your time.
19) Respect Buddha and the Gods without counting on their help.
Take responsibility for yourself. Don't count on luck or god to pull you through. Tackle the endeavors you know are within your capabilities. Keep doing the right thing and everything else will fall into place.
20) You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.
Don't do anything that you won't be able to live with for the rest of your life. Your actions define you, not your beliefs.
21) Never stray from the way.
Stay humble, do the right thing and always keep learning and growing.
Modern medicine has some good points, for sure, and is great in an emergency, but it's time we learn that today's mainstream pharma industry (Modern medicine), with its focus on drugs, radiation and surgery, is at its foundation a Rockefeller creation. But how did the pharma industry come to be so prominent in our modern world?
Where it all began - John D. Rockefeller(1800s)
Let's go back in time to the late 1800s. John D. Rockefeller, the head of the Rockefeller family had just become very rich through extracting oil from the ground. Now he is looking for ways to capitalize his oil, and he comes across the idea of using coal tar – a petroleum derivative – to make substances that affect the human mind, body and nervous system.
Wait… Petroleum Drugs?
Yes, these drugs are excellent at masking or stopping symptoms, but overall do not cure the underlying cause of a disease.
Rockefeller then bought out part of the massive German pharmaceutical cartel, I.G. Farben. This was the very same cartel that would later assist Hitler by manufacturing chemicals and poisons for war. Funny how it all comes together huh?
Destroying the Competition
Now armed with the ingenious idea of petroleum drugs, He wanted to eliminate the competitors of his new-found investment, so he hired a man called Abraham Flexner to submit a report to Congress in 1910.
This report "concluded" that there were too many doctors and medical schools in America, and that all the other healing methods which had existed for hundreds or thousands of years were unscientific quackery.
Unfortunately, Congress acted upon the conclusions and made them law. Incredibly, modern medicine became the standard, even though its 3 main methods of treatment in the 1800s had been blood-letting, surgery and the injection of toxic heavy metals like lead and mercury to supposedly displace disease!
From then on, it was downhill for the "alternative methods" that were repeatedly and constantly suppressed by the larger powers at play.
It's funny how a drug showing promise to treat a specific disease is usually pushed into human clinical trials, yet cannabis, a plant that has been shown to have anti-tumoral effects for decades, is still awaiting them. Think about that for a moment.
Natural Solutions vs. Rockefeller Medicine
At this point let us turn from the problem to the solutions – and fortunately there are many. The famous ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote:
"Nature heals. The doctor's task consists in strengthening the natural healing powers, to direct them, and especially not to interfere with them."
The immune system is your number one defense against any disease – not a vaccine.
Most natural medicine is designed to treat the body holistically, not to "cure" one disease only to have it transform and mutate into another ailment.
One such example is even cited in the Holy Bible. Genesis 19 and Deut. 29, mentions a certain nutrient that seems to inhibit the aging process, protecting your cells from the ravages of time.
One that has the ability to prevent, stop, and even reverse some of today's deadliest diseases.
And when mixed with any diet, it strengthens and enhances your health and immunity better than any man-made remedy.
The forecasted rain never did arrive, just occasional mist.
But the predicted wind did indeed come up for this past week's Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race, lots of it, heavy out of the east, consistently at least 20 to 25 knots, with frequent higher gusts. The bay was often a blanket of whitecaps, with sloppy swells.
The race course, connecting and settling old bay rivalries, between Annapolis, Md., and Norfolk/Portsmouth, Va., leads generally north to south, 127 miles.
Racing south, then, for the 2017 running of the 27-year-old Chesapeake race, made for ideal schooner sailing, a single point of sail, called a reach, with the wind coming generally across one side of the boat, neither directly down her bow nor over her stern.
Wednesday and Thursday were not so much days for tactics, strategies for tacking across the wind or playing currents, but more a time for "brute strength," observed Chris Gasiorek, Mystic Seaport's vice present for watercraft preservation and programming, on hand to help the Seaport's schooner Brilliant flex her muscles.
Indeed, she did, like her competitors, galloping down the bay at speeds a bit eye-opening even for big schooners, topping 12 knots at least once.
Nicholas Alley, only the fifth person to captain Brilliant since she was donated to the Seaport in 1953, said, after crossing the finish line at 3:06 a.m. Friday, more than 13 hours after starting, that was probably the longest stretch of speeds that fast for the boat in the six years he has been running her.
Brilliant begins to overtake schooner Adventurer, right, on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2017, toward the start of the race. (David Collins/The Day)
The schooners, all different sizes and shapes, are handicapped for the race, and, until the official results were announced at a pork and oyster feast Saturday afternoon on the Portsmouth waterfront, it was educated guess work how the math would leave Brilliant against principal competitors in her class, like the 1928 100-foot schooner Summerwind, owned by the U.S. Naval Academy, or the 62-foot Light Reign, raced by the light artist James Turrell, a 1984 MacArthur Fellow known best for his decadeslong refashioning of an extinct crater in the Arizona desert into a naked-eye observatory.
(I learned on this race that schooners attract a lot of interesting people.)
Never mind speed. Brilliant could win most any classic boat competition based on appearances, hands down, if originality was a factor.
I came to appreciate much more how true she is to her pedigree, designed by Olin Stevens and built in 1932 by the famed Henry B. Nevins shipyard in City Island, N.Y., after chatting with Bob Chapin of Preston, a retired toxicology scientist at Pfizer, who, like his cousin Nancy Chapin of Roanoke, Va., a math tutor, was along on the race as one of the paying passengers who help the crew.
As we sat perched on the cabin top in full foul-weather gear, talking above the constant roar of water rushing down the sides of the hull, Chapin explained some of the work on Brilliant that he does as a volunteer each winter.
He pointed out a brick-sized wooden door in the side of the boat, at our feet, just above the deck, one of a series running fore and aft, meant to be opened to allow more water to drain quickly from the deck, when necessary.
Crew members preparing to raise the jib on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2017. (David Collins/The Day)
Chapin said each one is removed each fall and taken inside to Brilliant's work shed, where the hardware is cleaned, greased and polished and the wood is sanded and painted.
Multiply that task by maybe a thousand or more, all the intricate pieces of the boat, which is literally taken apart and put together again each year, with fresh paint and varnish on most exterior surfaces, and you can begin to imagine the maintenance that goes into preserving her authenticity.
Free labor from people like Chapin is testament to her enduring allure.
Except for new teak wood decks, almost everything on the Brilliant, other than sails and canvas, is original issue from 1932. Even the brass winches, used to mechanically tighten sails, are rebuilt with new custom-machined parts, when necessary, rather than replaced.
The Naval Academy's Summerwind, of the same era, for instance, has beautiful masts, too. But they are carbon fiber and made to look like they are varnished spruce. You can tell the difference.
Brilliant is not only an extraordinary museum piece, certainly the only of her kind to so accurately tell the story of that period of yachting, but it is one the museum enthusiastically sends to sea, even to race sometimes in 30 knots of wind. It's what she's always done.
Her original owner, Walter Barnum, specified in instructions to the builder that Brilliant be able to roll over in a hurricane and come up again with hatches intact.
Chapin, after our chat, passed over a cup of warm nuts, an afternoon snack for the sea-sprayed and busy crew sent up from cook Ger Tysk, who, with Madeline Weisman, the mate, round out the full-time crew for Brilliant's youth summer training cruises, the boat's primary mission. Capt. Alley, Tysk and Weisman all have the patience with newcomers that comes from leading hundreds of teenagers through the schooner learning curve.
On occasions calling for more professional seagoing firepower, other sailors from the Seaport's staff fill out the crew. For the bay race, Kevin Murray, head of the Seaport's boat donations program and someone with a tall ship sailing resume, joined Gasiorek, whose broad marine background includes skippering tall ships, several circumnavigations and turns captaining freighters around the world.
Thursday morning, as we motored in the early pre-dawn light from the finish line to Portsmouth alongside the Summerwind, Gasiorek told the story of how he and the Summerwind crew once earned a national lifesaving medal in a race in Maine.
The schooner, then owned by the Merchant Marine Academy, was captained by Gasiorek, then academy waterfront director, who jumped into a dinghy during the race, shrouded in fog, when someone from a competing boat fell overboard into the 58-degree water.
He had to use a life preserver to propel the dinghy to the victim; its oars had been removed before the race to lighten the load.
"Stupid me," Gasiorek recalled saying to the victim, chatting to make sure hypothermia had not set in. "I forgot the oars."
"Stupid me," the victim said back while being helped into the dinghy, "I fell off my boat."
The only calamity I saw on the Chesapeake was when the wind suddenly burst a spinnaker, a big parachute-like sail, on Light Reign into shreds. At least it is easier to replace a spinnaker than it is to see the stars with the naked eye from an Arizona crater.
Brilliant finished third in her class in the race, respectable but not among her many firsts over the years.
If I were judging, I certainly would have given her firsts in a lot of categories: beauty, spirit, consistency and authenticity.
Eating real, nonprocessed food is the key to sustaining good health, but even when it comes to whole food, its quality is largely determined by how it was grown. Certified organic food is recommended to avoid toxic contaminants such as pesticides. But even organic foods may be lacking in important nutrients if grown in nutrient-poor soils. To truly build good topsoil, you have to implement regenerative farming methods, many of which are not automatically required by organic standards.
Biodynamic certification, which is a step above organic, is the topic of today's discussion with Elizabeth Candelario, managing director for Demeter,1 a global Biodynamic certification agency. Candelario spent most of her career in the wine industry. While she was working as a marketing director for a winery in Sonoma County, the winery decided to transition from conventional to Biodynamic farming, which is how her interest in Biodynamics began.
You had winery families that were interested in passing that winery down from one generation to the next. The best example of that is the Frey Vineyards up in Mendocino County, where they literally have four generations of family living [there] … They were really thinking about the ecological aspect of what they were doing and how they were farming. So, it wasn't unique that the winery I worked at chose [Biodynamic] …
That experience — I not only witnessed the transformation of the estate, but I also witnessed a transformation in the people we were working with — was, for me, emerging between my career [in] the wine industry and my interest in social mission … I joined Demeter about almost 10 years ago."
The History of Biodynamic Farming
Organic is well-known in the U.S. market. Biodynamic is a fairly unknown concept, although its history spans back nearly nine decades. Biodynamic farming is a spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture initially developed by Austrian scholar Rudolf Steiner,2 Ph.D., (1861-1925).
It's an approach that can provide farsuperior harvests compared to conventional chemical-based agriculture, while simultaneously healing the Earth. As organic farming, the concept of biodynamic emerged in response to the industrialization of agriculture. Candelario explains:
"Steiner was a polyglot. He was a very smart man. He was interested in economics and social systems. He's most known here in the U.S. as the founder of Waldorf education. Toward the end of his life, he was approached by a group of farmers that were very concerned about what they were seeing on their farms. This was back in the 1920s …
After World War I, chemical companies got very crafty repurposing nitrogen that had been used to make bombs as fertilizer, and nerve gas as synthetic pesticides. They had stockpiles of these chemicals and realized they had application on farms. This was around the time of the industrialization of the manufacturing model. The idea was that you wanted to produce the highest output at the lowest cost.
It's not surprising that that kind of industrial view also influenced the way people started thinking about their farms. This idea of importing things from the outside, these natural resources, to increase production really mirrored that industrial model. But what was happening was that farmers were really beginning to notice that their seeds weren't germinating.
Their animals weren't as healthy. The food wasn't as good. Because of that, they approached Steiner and asked him for his perspective on what was happening on their farms. He answered them in what is now referred to as "The Agriculture Course or The Foundations for a Renewal of Agriculture" — a series of lectures he delivered."
The Farm as a Living Organism
Steiner's view was as simple as it was revolutionary. He said, "You need to stop thinking of your farms as factories and envision them as living organisms — self-contained, self-sustaining, following the cycles of nature, and able to create their own health and vitality out of the living dynamics of the farm." Seventeen years later, Lord Northbourne coined the term "organic" based on Steiner's view of the farm as an organism. So, Biodynamic is really the origin of organic farming.
Both focus on bringing life back to the soil and avoiding the decimation of the topsoil with synthetic fertilizers, which are toxic to microbial life. Demeter was started by a small number of farmers who attended Steiner's agriculture course. "They decided that what he had talked about was so important that they wanted to codify it in an agricultural standard," Candelario says.
To ensure the standard would maintain its integrity in the marketplace, they decided to develop a strict certification program. Demeter was formed in 1928 in Germany and remains the oldest ecological certification organization in the world.
Even back then, they had a formal certification process and a certification label, Candelario explains. While largely unknown in the U.S., Demeter is well-recognized within Central Europe. In Germany, 10 percent of the organic farmland is Biodynamic. There are even Demeter stores.
I've fully embraced the Biodynamic concept and am currently in the process of converting the Mercola line of products from organic to Biodynamic certified and locating sources of raw materials to do that. Many are still not available within the U.S., but we're in the slow process of conversion. One of the Biodynamic products we'll release this fall comes from an Egyptian farm called SEKEM.
"SEKEM just celebrated their 40th anniversary and their commitment to social mission is incredible," Candelario notes. "Because of the values implicit in Biodynamic agriculture, you see lots of examples of projects that have a huge social mission component."
Organic Versus Biodynamic
One of the easiest ways to grasp the concept of biodynamic is to think of it in the context of organic standards. While similar, there are distinct differences between the two standards. Organic standards are set by the National Organic Program (NOP); Demeter sets the standards for Biodynamic. Candelario explains:
"Organic is really about what you don't do. In organic, you don't use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. You don't use genetically modified organism (GMO) seed. You do everything you can to avoid GMO contamination; no sewer sludge on the farm and no irradiation of products.
What's happening with the burgeoning interest in organic, which is a really good thing, is there's a lot of pressure on that standard, so you have products coming into the market that do the minimum of what is required, sitting right next to another product that's also labeled organic that does much more.
Biodynamics fundamentally maintains the core principle that the farm is a living organism. We start by saying that the organic standard is the base to the Demeter standard. If a farm is Demeter certified, it means that it's met the organic standard, even if it's not certified organic. But then, the standard is much broader, maintaining that idea of the farm as a closed system. You look for solutions to disease, pest and weed control to come out of the farm system itself."
Biodynamic Standards Require Farm to be a Self-Sustaining Whole
In organic, a 10,000-acre conventional farm that does not use prohibited materials on 1,000 of its acres can get organic certification for those 1,000 acres. To qualify for Biodynamic certification, the entire farm must meet the standard, as the whole farm is viewed as an integrated living organism. Ten percent of that farmland must also be set aside for cultivation of biodiversity. This can be accomplished by leaving natural oak groves or waterways, or it could be created through insectaries and hedgerows.
"If a farmer is having a fertility issue, in conventional farming, a conventional farmer might say, 'Let's just bring in those synthetic fertilizers.' An organic farmer might say, 'Let me look and see what organic fertilizers I can bring into the farm.' That's a step better, but you're still mining a natural resource and importing it to the farm. A biodynamic farmer's going to say, 'What is it about my farm system that isn't capable of delivering the fertility that my crops need?'
They answer that from a biodynamic toolbox, which may be green manures, composting, cover cropping and incorporating animals. The mindset is quite different. There are eight Biodynamic preparations. They're made from materials a farmer can find on the farm. They're used as compost amendments, foliar sprays and soil amendments.
In organic, there's just one processing standard for all products. In Biodynamic, there are 16 processing standards. The intention is to allow the integrity of the agricultural ingredients to define the finished product, so you have high content of Biodynamic ingredients with minimal processing. It's a real foodie standard."
Having animals integrated on the farm is a core principle of Biodynamic farming, but it doesn't end there. Great focus is also placed on animal welfare. While it's possible to gain Biodynamic certification for a farm that does not raise livestock, it's actually quite difficult to achieve optimal soil health without the integration of herbivores. They're really an integral part of a self-sustaining system.
The Certification Process
The certification process itself is very similar to organic. There is a base standard that needs to be met, regardless of size (and there is no size limitation). A farm or brand that wants to get a product certified submits an application. There is an inspection of the farm or the processing facility to ensure that the standard is met, and each farm or facility is re-inspected on an annual basis.
The certification cost is also very similar to organic, ranging from $250 to $750. Annual inspection costs are minimized to the extent that it's possible by pooling inspections in one geographic area, allowing members to share the cost of an inspector.
Moving Forward
A catch-22 preventing Biodynamic from spreading faster is the shortage of certified products in the national marketplace. Most Demeter members are small family farms that only sell locally or regionally. "We realized we really needed to focus on getting some national brands to get products in the market so that we could use those products to educate consumers," Candelario says. Five years ago, Demeter started working with Whole Foods to select companies and brands whose values aligned with Biodynamic.
"[We'd] approach them to say, 'Would you consider bringing these Biodynamic products into the market before consumers even know what it is?'
It's a wonderful story because we now have 25, some of the leading national brands — soon to be joined by you as well — like Lundberg Family Farms, Lakewood Juice, The Republic of Tea, that have worked really hard and invested a lot to bring these products into the market.
I would say the supply chain understands Biodynamic — the brands we've talked to, the retailers and other important players. But we're just on the verge of really doing the consumer education that we need to do."
The key, and the intention of this interview, is to help you understand and recognize the importance of the Demeter certification label. That's really going to be the new platinum standard for high-quality, nutrient-dense food. While many Biodynamic ingredients must currently be sourced overseas, from communities like SEKEM in Egypt, the goal is to grow most of these ingredients right here in the U.S. for American-based brands.
Healing the Planet Through Agriculture
As noted by Candelario, the vision of Demeter is to heal the planet through agriculture, and we can do that by transitioning farming from conventional to organic and, ultimately, to Biodynamic. At present, the marketplace is being used to drive the adoption of Biodynamics on the farm, which is why it's so important for consumers to understand its principles, its benefits, and to start asking for certified products. Demand is ultimately what drives change the fastest.
In the case of Biodynamic, there are many reasons to support it. Foodists and those seeking optimal health will want it because it's a mark of superior quality and nutrition. Animal-rights activists would be wise to support it as it places strong emphasis on animal welfare. Environmentalists will want it because of its healing impact on the Earth and normalizing effect on weather.
"Paul Hawkin just wrote a book called 'Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.' I really recommend it. In that book, he talks about how, in order to address climate change, we need to do two things. We need to address emissions.
That is the burning of fossil fuels, the agricultural activities that actually release carbon into the air. The other half of the equation is we have to sequester carbon. We have to pull that excess carbon that's in the air back down and into the soil.
Guess what happens when we pull carbon out of the air? It happens every day when the sun is shining. That's what photosynthesis does. It takes that carbon from the air and pushes it down into the soil. Not only are we sequestering carbon, we're making more healthy and nutritious food.
In conventional [farming], sequestering carbon doesn't happen because conventional fertilizers stop that process where the plant is basically rewarded by the microbiota in the soil to pull that carbon out of the air.
Synthetic fertilizers kill the microbiota in the soil. You don't have that carbon drawdown that you're looking for in conventional agriculture. By definition, the more carbon you put in the soil, the more you're building a resilient soil. You're building a water conservative soil. You're building the potential to have incredibly healthy food."
Soil Is an Incredibly Efficient Carbon Sink
Measuring the organic content of soil is an easy way to assess soil health. Most conventional farms have an organic content below 2 percent. Virgin Midwestern prairie used to be 7 to 8 percent. Good soil has a deep black color, because carbon is black; it's rich and actually smells good.
As noted by Candelario, a French initiative called the 4 Per 1,000 Initiative3 found that if we were to increase the carbon (the organic matter) in all agricultural land around the world by a mere 0.4 percent per year, the annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere would be halted, because so much carbon would be drawn from the atmosphere.
One facet of Biodynamic farming that might raise a few eyebrows is Steiner's soil amendments, some of which may sound fairly mystical at first. For example, one involves packing dung into a cow's horn that is then buried during a specific moon phase.
The use of these kinds of Biodynamic preparations is a requirement of the Demeter standard, and while they may sound strange, there's solid support for their use. (Farmers who for whatever reason cannot make these preparations can purchase them from Josephine Porter Institute4 or Biodynamic Source.5)
"You can understand the preparations on a very practical level," Candelario says. "There is preparation 500, which is taking cow manure, putting it in a cow horn and burying it over the winter. There is preparation 501, which is taking silica, putting that in a cow horn and burying it over the summer. And then preparation 502 through 508, which are basically herbs — chamomile and valerian — those are used as compost amendment.
[The] analogy I like to use is to think about a sourdough starter … It's a catalyst. And when you think about the idea of the farmer not being dependent on chemicals … and saying, 'How can I affect the fertility of my farm, the health of my compost pile, just from the materials I can find on my farm?' These materials were things that farmers already had on their farms.
[Let's] talk about the 500 — First of all, putting it under the ground in the winter creates a constant temperature. It's the refrigerator where that cow manure can age. When you pull it up and you pull that out on the counter, it smells like chocolate. It's this beautiful material.
It's put in water. It's dynamitized by creating a vortex; really stirring it, and then it's spread on the soil. It's sprayed as a tea. [You use] one cow horn's worth of manure per acre. We have research on our website that shows increased microbial life in the soil based on that. That's really not surprising when you think about it. The silica is used as a foliar spray."
More Information
As organic standards are becoming increasingly watered-down, there's an intensifying need for a more robust standard that cannot easily be bastardized. The USDA Organic label simply does not represent regenerative agriculture, and it's important to realize this. Many organic farms are not even using cover crops, let alone integrating holistic herd management. Biodynamic certification fills this need, and really surpasses even the most stringent organic standards ever devised.
Again, key features of Biodynamic are the facts that the entire farm must qualify; it must operate as a self-sustaining whole; a portion of the land must be set aside for biodiversity; and animal welfare is addressed. I am actually in the process of converting the vacant lot next to my home to become certified Biodynamic.
For more details, please see Demeter-USA.org. You'll find the standards listed in the "For Farmers" section. The website also provides a directory of certified farms and brands. This directory can also be found on BiodynamicFood.org. Demeter's U.S.-based sister organization, the Biodynamic Association, provides a lot of educational material as well, including an interactive Biodynamic webinar series, video and audio lectures, and a quarterly Biodynamics Journal. There's also an international Biodynamic Association.
I really think there's a clarion call right now, especially for the natural food industry, to focus on regenerative and Biodynamic agriculture. Because at the end of the day, Biodynamic farms are uniquely suited to address carbon sequestration in a way that other industries are not. The good news is that consumers have tremendous power when it comes to driving this change. Every time you shop for food, you're voting for one agricultural system or another, so make deliberate, intentional choices.
