The Spirit of Rudolf Steiner in County Kildare, and 100 similar communities in 20 countries

“Jeannemarie, Jeannemarie watch! Lucinda, watch me sing hot cross buns!” Andrew Murphy, attracting their attention, began to sing, “Hot cross buns, hot cross buns, if you have no daughters give them to your sons”.

Andrew, a tall, handsome man in his twenties, is a student at the Camphill Community Dunshane in County Kildare, Ireland. Jeannemarie, a senior co-worker who honed her considerable baking talents while working at European style bakeries in California and Washington, was kneading the dough for the traditional Easter food of Andrew’s song. Lucinda, Jeannemarie’s six year-old daughter, was hanging out, helping her mother, and listening to Andrew sing.

All students at Camphill have some form of disability: Tourette syndrome, autism, Down’s syndrome, blindness, and a range of other special needs. At Camphill, it is not so much about therapy as it is about community. The focus is on the student’s ability not their disability. In fact they don’t even identify or discuss specific disabilities. Rather, the goal is to create a space where each individual can express themselves to their fullest capacity.
Last year on Easter, there was a palpable buzz in the air. That afternoon most of the students’ parents would be coming to pick them up to go home for the holiday. In the morning there was a community breakfast. The hall was decorated with brightly coloured eggs hanging from tree branches. Before breakfast, a group of students performed a bell concert. Their precious effort: some struggling, coming in a bit late on their part, others nailing their cues with compulsive intensity, put a bit of magic in the air.

The sweet tranquillity was broken when Dermot, one of the students, spontaneously broke into the Frank Sinatra song “New York, New York”, belting it out with Sinatra like swagger. When he was done, he was delirious with joy and the whole place cracked up.

The first Camphill Community was started in the 1940’s in Scotland by Karl Koenig and is based on Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of education. A Down Syndrome child who was carrying a candle at an Advent ceremony inspired Koenig, who moved from Austria to Scotland prior to World War Two to flee Nazism. Koenig dedicated his life to creating a community for children with learning disabilities. Today there are over a hundred Camphill communities in twenty countries.

Rudolf Steiner, influenced by Goethe’s philosophy that God is revealed in Nature, was a brilliant early 20th century seer, and innovator in farming (Biodynamic), medicine (Homeopathy), education (Waldorf School), and architecture. Steiner developed a method of educating children with special needs largely influenced by his experience tutoring a severely autistic young man who later went on to medical school and became a doctor.

During my visit to Dunshane, I became curious as to what role food played in this unique community. Dunshane has a one and a half acre biodynamic kitchen garden, a small herd of dairy cows and goats, a cheese-making room and a bakery. Baking is one of the classes that students attend throughout the course of the week along with gardening, cooking and basketry. Bread is baked five days a week to supply the four households on the 20-acre property. Aine (pronounced anya), a student whose stature is strikingly diminutive, and who radiates an ebullient energy, is a star in the bakery. Her specialty, scones, is a Dunshane favorite.

Co-worker Hugh (pronounced oog) is a French Moroccan from Paris. He is a peasant in the best and most complimentary sense of the word; a peasant in the sense of one who is connected with the earth and its natural cycles. In his cooking, baking or cheese making his recipes rely on solid peasant intuition, physical senses, skills and appreciation for the process. It is a pinch of this, a bit of that, depending on the varying flavour or freshness of the milk, the weather, and his mood. His style embodies the essence of craftsmanship, rather than the uniformity of industrial food production. When I first met Hugh, he was doing a spring fast drinking only the sap of a freshly tapped beech tree as a cleansing tonic, which is his annual practice during Holy Week, the week before Easter. Hugh worked with a small farmer in France where he learned the craft of farm-style cheese making. At Dunshane, using milk from the community’s cows, he makes Ricotta, Tome, Gruyere and Parmagian, as well as fresh yogurt.

Two years ago Dunshane planted wheat as a fundraiser for the local Waldorf School. Fields were plowed and seeded by a traditional farmer (there are very few left in Ireland) using a horse drawn plow. At harvest time local elders showed the Waldorf School kids how to cut and wrap the wheat sheaths by hand in the traditional, pre-mechanized manner. The wheat was milled and sold locally. At Dunshane they made bread, pizza dough and pasta, from the wheat that they grew.

When the first Camphill began in the 1940’s, there was a mandate to grow food due to the hard times of postwar Europe. Today the one and half acre kitchen garden at Dunshane provides an opportunity to share the ethos of Camphill, and plays a role in skill building activities. Geoffrey, the head gardener said, “When Koenig developed Camphill it was always about a land-based ethos, about building a community around land work.”
The house and estate are over 150 years old and the garden’s original purpose was much the same as it is today: to provide food for the household table. Geoffrey, using biodynamic growing practices, harvests something from the garden every week of the year. Ireland's climate is influenced by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, and is in the path of the prevailing south-westerly winds coming off the Atlantic. As a result, Ireland isn’t exposed to extremes in weather. It rarely gets warmer than 70 degrees F or drops below freezing.

Geoffrey likes to experiment to understand those climatic limits. It was no surprise when he found out that okra, a sun and heat loving plant originally from Africa and popular in the American southeast, did not thrive in County Kildare. He is also experimenting with some English adapted melon varieties. He uses raised beds to mitigate drainage in the persistently wet Irish weather.

Biodynamic (BD) preparation 500 and other BD preps are sprayed two to three times annually. BD 500 is cow manure placed in a cow horn and buried from autumn to spring to garner the subterranean forces, which are most vital during winter. Geoffrey grows nettles, which is high in iron, and makes a tea, spraying it on seedlings to strengthen them when the weather turns bad and slugs are prevalent. He also grows horsetail (equisetum), which has a high silica content, and sprays it to harden plants protecting against rot and disease.

Marcus, a senior co-worker from Washington State, works with the students in the garden and helps stir the biodynamic preparations. Stirring is a homeopathic potentization process that involves putting the preps in a bucket of water and stirring vigorously to create, what Peter Proctor a Biodynamic practitioner and author calls, “A life-giving vortex and pulse”.

Stirring is done for an hour, repeatedly creating a vortex and breaking it up. Marcus said, “When I stir the preps, I try to focus on what I’m doing and focus on just that moment and try to visualize what is going on with the stirring. What I envision is that everything is breaking apart and then coming back together again. There is sort of releasing into chaos and then coming back into harmony and union again. It’s a sort of breathing in and out that happens.”

Steiner taught that, “Matter is never without spirit and spirit never without matter”, a foundational principle of Biodynamic agriculture.

The garden, half of which is perennials, offers an array of food: blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, beets, carrots, brussels sprouts, leeks, kale, potatoes and much more, including a large variety of flowers, which Geoffrey says, not only attract beneficial insects, but also people into the garden. Geoffrey’s winter salad mix is exceptional, consisting of Asian greens, a spicy red giant mustard, white mustard, purple strata broccoli (which he refers to as “A gorgeous thing with lovely flavor”), Chinese cabbage, arugula, and the highly nutritious Black Tuscany kale.

Tobias, an Englishman and the Dunshane farmer in charge of the diary cows, taught Lila, a senior co-worker from California, the craft of milking. Lila said, “At first I was a bit apprehensive because I’d never been around cows. They’re very large animals, some of them have horns, and sometimes they’re stubborn. In the beginning, we’d go out to the field and bring them back in, and sometimes they wouldn’t move, and we’d have to hit them until they came. During the milking, obviously you get close to the animal. Now I’ve become comfortable around them, and I realize how great cows are. I wouldn’t have thought before that cows are beautiful animals. But now I realize that they all have their own personalities and are actually quite beautiful.”

Heinz Grotske, former editor of the Biodynamic Association’s quarterly Biodynamics, said that, “bio refers to life and organisms while dynamic refers to the changing cyclical rhythms of nature. Thus, Biodynamic agriculture refers to a way of farming that is full of life, rhythm, and variety.”

At the heart of the mission of Camphill is a social and spiritual renewal for all members of the community. Steiner said, “In the inner being of an individual, truth speaks in different tongues and dialects”. The struggles, challenges and accomplishments of Camphill community members -a diverse array of individuals, cultures and capacities-reflect the different dialects and tongues with which truth speaks.

Arty Mangan, Bioneers Food and Farming Director