Wake up and smell the biodynamic coffee

They call this place Terramater – “Earth Mother” – and the coffee bushes on Adeodato Menezes’s small farm seem imbued with that spirit. “It’s like a woman breastfeeding,” the 63-year-old says, bending down to caress the ripe Catuai cherries low down on the bush. “These are her new babies,” he adds, straightening up to touch the tightly furled leaves, green and tender, that will fruit the following year.

It’s not the kind of language I am used to on coffee farms – but Terramater, in the Chapada Diamantina region of Bahia state, in north-east Brazil, is far more than that. Set up as a Findhorn-style alternative community in the 1980s, it partly serves as a residential centre for disadvantaged teenagers from the favelas (slums) who are students of sistema agroflorestal – a farming system that combines the cultivation of commercial crops with the planting of native trees. It’s a way of preserving the forest environment and rekindling skills used by indigenous people. On this subject Menezes is a world expert.

He is also an ardent follower of Rudolf Steiner and his biodynamic methods, which, like organic farming, eschew the use of agrochemicals. These methods involve not just planting at night, and at times being governed by the phases of the moon, but the application of preparados – solutions made from plants, minerals and other natural materials (such as cow manure) which “inoculate” the soil, passing on “information” about how it can maintain a healthy balance.

The big surprise is that Menezes is a scientist with a degree in agricultural engineering. Educated in the era of “the generals”, the military elite that ruled Brazil from 1964-85 and banned all political parties, he at first accepted the prevailing orthodoxy about agriculture – that land should be concentrated in the hands of a few, its productivity maximised by the use of pesticides and fertilisers. “I followed the rules, I played the system,” he says, “but I didn’t believe in it. I knew I couldn’t work that way any more.”  Read Article

By Andrew Purvis