Biodynamic Preparation 500 (Horn Manure)

Preparation 500, horn manure, is cow manure that has spent the winter buried in the earth inside a cow's horn, and is then stirred into water for an hour and sprayed onto the soil. It is the first of the biodynamic preparations, the one that works on the earth pole of the farm, and it is applied to every field, orchard, and vineyard of a biodynamic farm at least once a year. Steiner gave it in the fourth lecture of the Agriculture Course, the eight lectures held at Koberwitz in June 1924 for farmers who had asked for a way to renew a soil and a seed they saw failing. The preparation concentrates the etheric and astral forces of the cow's digestion, holds them through the winter in the earth when the earth is most inwardly alive, and returns them to the soil in spring, where they wake its life and draw the plant's roots down.

Why the cow, and why the horn

The cow is the animal of digestion. Its whole organisation is given over to metabolism, and the manure it produces has passed through a process in which astral forces have worked on plant substance in the most thorough way any animal achieves. The horns and the hooves are the places where the cow's organism is closed off to the outside: no forces stream out through them, and what would otherwise stream out is thrown back into the digestive organism. A cow's horn is therefore a vessel that reflects inward. Manure packed into it and buried is surrounded, through the winter, by the forces the horn holds in, and by the life of the earth, which in winter is drawn inward and is at its most active below the surface. Steiner's finding was that manure treated this way becomes a fertiliser of great concentrated force, so that a small quantity serves a large area.

The horns are taken from cows, not bulls, and by later practice from cows that have calved. A horn can be used for several years.

The making

Fresh cow manure of good consistency, from healthy animals on pasture, is packed firmly into the horns in autumn, around Michaelmas at the end of September or into October. The horns are buried in a pit in fertile, well-drained soil, open end down, and covered. They remain in the earth through the winter and are lifted in spring, around Easter, before the soil warms. The manure inside is transformed: it has lost its smell and its fibre and has become dark, crumbling, colloidal, with the scent of forest earth. A horn whose contents still smell of manure, or have gone grey and dry, has failed, usually from wet ground. The finished preparation is stored in glazed earthenware pots, surrounded by peat in a box, in a cool, dark place, and kept slightly moist.

The stirring

The preparation is never applied dry. It is stirred into water for a full hour, and the stirring is part of the preparation, not a way of dissolving it. Rainwater or clean well water, warmed to lukewarm, goes into a barrel or a clean vessel. The horn manure is added and the water is stirred with a stick or by hand in one direction until a deep vortex forms down to the bottom of the vessel; then the direction is reversed, the vortex collapses into chaos, and a new vortex is built in the other direction. This alternation continues for the whole hour. Steiner's account is that the rhythm of vortex and chaos opens the water to the forces of the preparation and to the surroundings, so that what was concentrated in the horn is taken up by the whole volume.

Steiner's rate was the contents of one horn to about half a bucket of water for a small area. Later practice settled the quantity by land: a hectare takes between half a horn and a horn's contents in roughly 30 to 60 litres of water, with the exact figure differing between the European Demeter bodies and the Australian practice developed by Alex Podolinsky. Stirring machines are accepted where the same alternation is kept.

The application

The stirred preparation is used within a few hours; it does not keep. It is sprayed onto the soil, not the leaves, in large drops, with a brush and bucket, a knapsack sprayer with a coarse nozzle, or a tractor sprayer at low pressure. The time is the late afternoon or evening, when the earth's forces are drawing inward, on moist soil, in autumn after harvest and in spring before or at sowing and planting. By Maria Thun's planting calendar, a root day with the moon descending is the favoured time. Twice a year is the minimum on a Demeter farm; growers apply it more often to new ground, pasture after grazing, and trees and vines at planting.

Its partner

Preparation 500 is one of a pair. Its counterpart is preparation 501, horn silica, ground quartz buried in a horn over summer and sprayed in the finest mist onto the leaves in the morning, which works on the light pole as horn manure works on the earth pole. With the six compost preparations, 502 to 507, and the horsetail tea, 508, they are the set given at Koberwitz, and horn manure is the one every biodynamic farm begins with.