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Home Magazine issues June 2025

The Organic Whole

Anneliese Abbott by Anneliese Abbott
June 1, 2025
in June 2025, Vegetables
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The Organic Whole

Camphill Village Kimberton Hills cows on pasture.

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Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s Legacy at Kimberton Farms

Anneliese Abbott

Just thirty miles west of Philadelphia is one of the most important farms in the early history of biodynamic farming in the United States — Kimberton Farms. 

Suburban sprawl is creeping out from Philadelphia, but the tiny town of Kimberton still looks much like it did in the 1940s, and the farm itself is still in a predominately rural area. Split in two by the meandering curves of French Creek, the Kimberton Farms complex includes about 800 rolling acres of fields, pastures, forests and buildings. Today, the complex includes a Waldorf School, a Camphill Village for special needs adults, and several privately owned farms. 

While it’s not the oldest biodynamic farm in the U.S., Kimberton Farms comes close — the land has been managed using biodynamic methods since 1940.

Bringing Pfeiffer to the United States

Ehrenfried Pfeiffer ran the first biodynamic training school in the U.S. at Kimberton Farms.
(Scharff archives, Fellowship Community, Spring Valley, New York)

Kimberton Farms was the passion of Alarik Myrin, a Swedish immigrant who made his fortune in the oil business. Myrin was deeply concerned about the soil erosion that was destroying farm fields all over the world. At the same time, he was worried about spiritual erosion — the deadening materialism of the modern age. There had to be a deeper meaning to life, and Myrin found that meaning in Anthroposophy, a spiritual sect founded by Rudolf Steiner. Myrin was especially attracted to two practical applications of Steiner’s ideas — the Waldorf schools and biodynamic farming.

In 1940, Myrin purchased four adjacent farms, totaling over 800 acres, about thirty miles from Philadelphia. He named the property Kimberton Farms School, both because he wanted to start a Waldorf school and because he wanted to teach people how to farm biodynamically. For the farming component, he hired one of the world’s leading experts in biodynamic farming — Ehrenfried Pfeiffer.

A disciple of Steiner since the 1920s, Pfeiffer was the author of the 1938 book Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening. His succinct, practical explanation of biodynamic methods resonated even with non-Anthroposophists. American back-to-the-landers from all backgrounds — including Catholic rural-life advocates — were promoting biodynamic farming in 1939 and 1940, based on Pfeiffer’s book. 

At the School of Living in Suffern, New York, they sometimes referred to biodynamic methods as “organic agriculture” or “organic gardening.” That’s because the core of biodynamic farming was an emphasis on the farm as an organic whole. Soil, plants, animals and even the farmer were all connected — in a unit that Pfeiffer called an “individuality,” which would later be known as an “ecosystem.”

Biodynamic farming aimed to make each farm individuality as self-contained as possible. That meant careful cycling of nutrients by making compost, rotating crops and interspersing cultivated fields with wild hedgerows to provide wildlife habitat. Livestock and crops were both essential to make a farm a true organic whole, and orchestrating the connections between them was both an art and a science. 

Pfeiffer’s writing about biodynamics was grounded in practical experience, especially at the 800-acre biodynamic Loverendale Farm in Holland. Under Pfeiffer’s management, Loverendale produced enough grain, vegetables and dairy products to feed 700 local families. The farm’s loyal customers said that the biodynamic produce tasted much better than food from other farms and was so nutritious that they didn’t need to eat as much to feel satisfied.

But when the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, the Dutch flooded part of their polder land — including Pfeiffer’s farm — as a defensive measure. The Dutch water defenses couldn’t stop bomber planes, though, and the effort was futile. The land remained flooded for the duration of the war, and Myrin’s offer was a lifesaver for Pfeiffer. He fled war-torn Europe and moved into a farmhouse at Kimberton in December 1940.

Kimberton Farms School

The headquarters of the new Kimberton Farms School was in an imposing three-story stone mansion, topped with a glass-walled conservatory. Just down the road from a historic covered bridge over French Creek, this building provided classrooms and living space for most of the school’s students.

Pfeiffer offered short, intensive courses on agriculture at Kimberton. The most comprehensive was in the winter of 1942, where students spent six weeks learning about every possible aspect of farming — soils, plants, animal care, weather, history, ecology and more. Pfeiffer himself taught many of the courses; the rest were covered by other experts. 

Since they were in the winter, the short courses could only offer so much hands-on experience. To really get practical farming knowledge, serious students lived at Kimberton for a year or more, learning everything from planning crop rotations to how to drive draft horses in the fields.

The dairy operation was the heart of the Kimberton Farms School. Everyone spent at least a few weeks on milking detail, and students would muck out the stalls and use the manure to build biodynamic compost piles. After carefully layering the cow manure together with weeds, grass clippings and food scraps, the students inoculated the piles with biodynamic preparations. As Pfeiffer explained to his students, the preps served as microbial inoculants, guiding fermentation of the compost heap in the proper direction. The final product, as one student described it, was “soft, brown, woodsy-smelling humus — one of the most wonderful things on earth.”

The herb garden was a two-acre plot with a hundred different types of herbs. Some were culinary herbs, used in the school’s kitchen. Others were medicinal, sold to an herbal remedy company in New York City. Still others were used in the biodynamic preparations — chamomile, yarrow, dandelion, valerian and stinging nettle. Fermented together with specific animal organs, these herbal preparations provided the microbial inoculants that helped turn the piles of manure into high-quality compost.

The vegetable garden at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills supplies the community with vegetables year-round.

In addition to the cow pastures, fields and beehives, the farm also had a greenhouse, managed by an experienced gardener, Harvey Beard. Beard was initially skeptical of biodynamic methods but was eventually persuaded when he saw how much more vigorous and cold-hardy the biodynamic transplants were.

Two of the students at Kimberton in 1942 were Paul and Betty Keene. They’d just spent a year learning homesteading skills at the School of Living in Suffern, New York. After completing another year of training at Kimberton, they used biodynamic methods to restore the soil on their own farm in Penns Creek. The Keene farm, Walnut Acres, would later become the first mail-order organic food company in the United States.

Another visitor at the Kimberton Farms School was J.I. Rodale. Rodale had just bought his own farm about an hour away, near Emmaus. He wanted to learn more about biodynamic farming methods, though he preferred to use Sir Albert Howard’s Indore Method for composting instead of the biodynamic preps. Rodale called both the Indore Method and biodynamic composting “organic farming,” possibly influenced by the biodynamic concept of the organic whole. 

Rodale held Pfeiffer in high regard and often published his articles in his new Organic Gardening magazine. The first issue, released in May 1942, featured an article by Pfeiffer about how to make biodynamic compost. Later issues included articles by Pfeiffer and other biodynamic farmers about a wide range of practical gardening topics. Rodale even advertised Kimberton Farms short courses in his magazine.

Although it was incredibly influential, Kimberton Farms School didn’t last long. By December of 1943, Myrin and Pfeiffer had some kind of disagreement. They were both still committed to biodynamic farming, but their unrecorded dispute about how to operate the farm became unsurmountable. The farm school closed in 1944. Myrin focused his efforts on the Waldorf School, while Pfeiffer bought his own farm in Chester County, New York.

The problem with Kimberton, Pfeiffer believed, was that it was too big to be a workable example for the typical American farmer. “The average farmer wants to see the biodynamic method demonstrated under exactly the same conditions under which he has to work and make a living,” he wrote to his friends. The Chester farm was smaller and more similar to an average northeastern dairy farm.

Despite his high hopes, Pfeiffer was never able to turn his Chester farm into a school like Kimberton. Soon after he moved, he became gravely ill and spent the next year in the hospital with tuberculosis. Because the disease could be transmitted to cows, he wasn’t allowed to work on his own dairy farm. His wife, Adelheid, did all the work to restore the Chester farm, which turned out to be more difficult than they had expected due to the war-induced labor shortage.

In 1950, after Pfeiffer recovered, he moved to Threefold Farm in Spring Valley, New York — the headquarters of Anthroposophy in the northeastern U.S. Pfeiffer continued to write and teach biodynamic farming there, but he was never again able to offer the fully immersive educational experience that Kimberton had provided. 

Kimberton Today

This building, now part of the Kimberton Waldorf School, housed the Kimberton Farms School from 1941 to 1943.

Kimberton continues to be operated as a biodynamic farm today. Or, to be more accurate, it continues as several biodynamic farms — Pfeiffer’s complaint that it was too big to be operated as a single unit seems to have been valid. Part of the land — including the building that once housed the farm school — is still the Kimberton Waldorf School, where children are taught according to Rudolf Steiner’s methods in a peaceful rural setting.

Just across Seven Stars Road from the Waldorf School is Seven Stars Farm, famous in the surrounding area for its delicious certified organic yogurt. The farm’s sleek herd of Jersey and Guernsey cows spend their time either out on pasture or in the stanchion barn, where they’re served a total mixed ration of mostly hay and haylage. 

While Seven Stars uses a similar production system to other small dairy farms in the area, it’s still completely biodynamic. All of the cows have their horns — a signature aspect of a biodynamic dairy herd — and the farm makes their own biodynamic compost and preparations. 

On the other side of French Creek is Camphill Village Kimberton Hills. This complex provides housing and care for special needs adults, who live in groups of five to ten with a host family in one of the houses scattered around the property. Set far back from the main road, the village’s quiet fields, flowerbeds, and forests provide a safe and peaceful setting for the residents.

While Camphill Village isn’t completely self-sufficient, they produce most of the vegetables, dairy products, and herbs for the community. A baker makes whole grain sourdough bread, baked in a wood-fired oven. 

A mixture of Camphill residents and young volunteers work to grow and harvest the vegetables, which are grown on a series of fields downhill from a historic barn. The farm provides vegetables for Camphill Village all year round, even in the winter. During the summer, they also supply a 150-share CSA.

The Camphill Village dairy farm produces milk mainly for the community, though if they have extra they’ll sell it to Seven Stars. Tom, the farm manager, assigns tasks at the dairy farm to the village’s residents according to their abilities. “We couldn’t get everything done without the residents,” he explained. Camphill residents also work in the herb garden. Even if it’s just sitting on a stool and picking chamomile flowers, they play an essential part in keeping the herb garden productive and growing.

Camphill Village resident harvesting chamomile flowers for the biodynamic preparations.

Kimberton is a peaceful, calm place, healing to body and soul. The farm complex may look different today than it did in the 1940s, but each farm is still being operated in the true spirit of biodynamic farming — as an organic whole.

Anneliese Abbott is the author of Malabar Farm: Louis Bromfield, Friends of the Land, and the Rise of Sustainable Agriculture, and she runs the site historyoforganic.com. She has a master’s degree in agroecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and farms with her family in Otsego, Michigan.

Tags: BiodynamicsEhrenfried Pfeiffer
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Anneliese Abbott

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Anneliese Abbott has a B.S. in Agronomy from Ohio State and an M.S. in Agroecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She runs a small CSA in Michigan, is the author of "Malabar Farm," and is currently doing research on the history of organic farming in the United States.

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