The organic revolution:
The career of organic farming

Agriculture in harmony with nature, circular economy, resource conservation and animal welfare are only seemingly modern buzzwords. The industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century also fundamentally changed agriculture. New cultivation and fertilisation methods brought higher yields, but it soon became clear that they degraded the soil and created a dependency on chemical additives. Resistance formed early on in agricultural circles, led in Germany by the anthroposophical movement centred around Rudolf Steiner. With his ‘Agricultural Course’ in 1924 on the Koberwitz estate in Silesia, he laid the foundations for biodynamic farming: The farm is understood as a holistic system in which everything is interlinked and which functions as a closed organism, the number of animals kept is linked to the size of the available land, only they provide the fertiliser for the farm's arable crops, which in turn produce the feed for the animals.
Alongside anthroposophical biodynamic agriculture, the organic-biological method is establishing itself, which also dispenses with the use of chemicals and esoteric aids.
In the 1970s, organic farming became an alternative to conventional farming for more and more farmers. A growing demand for healthy products and the perseverance of the organic pioneers led to the introduction of EU-wide regulations in 1991 that set out quality criteria for organic products.