Animals animate farm and landscape. What sounds very lyrical at first is actually plausible. No one will deny that a farm where one smells and sees animals produces in one quite different images - animated images - than a purely arable farm without a barn with livestock. What the farm animals are to the farm are the birds and the insects in the landscape, at the farm's threshold to its environment. Through them, the farm is embedded in a larger organism and does not exist apart from nature. Rudolf Steiner devoted the entire 7th lecture in Koberwitz to this connection. Every animal interacts with other living beings. A simple example is the relationship network of black woodpecker, bee and ant. The black woodpecker builds its nest in tree cavities in forests. After some time, after the young woodpeckers have fledged and the tree cavity is abandoned, it is populated by bees. At the end of the season, the swarm dies. The dead bees are now picked up by ants and utilized in their colony in the dead wood. The ants themselves serve as food for the black woodpecker to raise its young. This closes the circle. If one link falls away, for example the bee or the tree, this has an immediate effect on the interactions and a self-sustaining system can lose its balance. When an imbalance prevails, for example due to monoculture, excessive livestock, or the absence of habitat in the landscape, balancing forces kick in. These show up, for example, as changes in animal behavior, in the emergence of pest populations, or in disease: The grasshopper begins to swarm, the million-dollar beetle makes its name, a virus spreads. Animals are balancing agents both on the farm and in nature.
For the farmer, this means becoming aware of his responsibility and accepting it. The farmer is not only the shaper of his agriculture, but also of the landscape and nature. Many farmers are already taking measures to create habitats, for example by covering the ground as much as possible, leaving field margins and planting hedges - they are all beneficial to the fauna. Nevertheless, as a farmer you also have to find measures that are most suitable for the particular location and goal. With a beautifully blooming flower strip you do not necessarily have an abundance of insects and healthy bees as a result. Integrating animals into the farm and landscape is challenging in many ways, especially for specialty crop farms. How can the integration of animals into the agricultural organism be strengthened and what are the opportunities? We would like to work intensively on these questions at the section as well.