Model of Cooperation

What options does agriculture farming have in times of extensive industrialisation, in a time of processes based on the division of labour, when its success and justification is defined solely by its economic benefits, without respect to social concerns and cultural contexts?

It can, as in the post-war years of the last century, take the path of industrialization with its complex processes – we can see the consequences like the loss of biodiversity, the deserts of cleared agricultural landscapes, the maltreatment of animals in factory farming, the global consequences of the „modernization" of regional agricultural structures (slums and impoverishment of the migrating rural population into the metropolises, deforestation of the rain forest, destruction of regional cultures) in many places today.

But it also can look for new ways of design, by embedding into a place and being the designer of that place, participating in the development of its natural foundation. At Dottenfelderhof we create very much such an agriculture that fulfils responsibility for nature, society and culture.

This is the objective of the Dottenfelderhof Business Community together with the Dottenfelderhof Agricultural Association and the Dottenfelderhof Agricultural School with its research and educational facilities.

Thus, an economic and social organisation has developed at Dottenfelderhof, in which the shaping of nature, the processing of products into high-quality food and the supply of people with this food goes hand in hand with training in biodynamic agriculture, with breeding and with research into the foundations of this form of cultivating land, based on the development of new ownership structures that can secure such management sustainably.