Cows, Horns, and Biodynamic Dairy Farming

Biodynamic dairy cows--like this one at Seven Stars Farm--keep their natural horns

It’s 6:30 a.m., the sun is shining, and it’s milking time in the Camphill Village Kimberton Hills dairy barn. I walk over from Sherry’s house, duck below a temporary rope fence, and get to the barn just as the three milkers are getting ready to start. When I tell them that I’m writing a book on the history of organic farming, Derek invites me to follow him around and watch the milking. The cows are already lined up in the row of stanchions, patiently chewing their cud. Someone turns on the vacuum pump for the pipeline milking machine, and a rhythmic thump-thump-thump-thump echoes through the barn. Derek sanitizes the first cow’s udder with iodine, squeezes milk from each quarter into the strip cup, and hooks up the inflations to the cow and the milk pipeline.

Before hooking a cow up to the milking machine, every dairy farmer strips each quarter to make sure the cow is healthy

This is my first visit to a biodynamic dairy farm, and I’m impressed with what I see. The Kimberton cows are healthy, and their red, brown, black, striped, or spotted hair looks sleek and shiny. The biggest difference I notice from other dairies I’ve visited is the horns. Most modern farmers, organic or conventional, disbud their dairy cattle. But biodynamic cows proudly wear their small, curving horns, balancing out their big round ears and peaceful-looking eyes. I realize I’ve never seen a dairy cow with horns before, but it somehow looks right.

Cows at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills patiently wait to be milked

Rudolf Steiner, the founder of biodynamic farming, talked a lot about cows and their horns in his 1924 Agriculture Course. Horns and their “locality”, he explained, channel “astral-ethereal formative powers” from the cosmos into the cow and play an essential role in developing the proper shape and form of the animal. According to Steiner, cow horns still possess their power to channel cosmic forces after the animal is dead. Two of the most important biodynamic preparations, 500 and 501, are made by putting cow manure or quartz silica into cow horns, burying them during a specific time of the year, and then diluting the composted contents in water and dynamizing it by a specialized stirring technique. The activated preparations are then sprayed on biodynamic fields.

At nearby Seven Stars Farm, also in Kimberton, I’m able to see the finished horn manure preparation (500). An enthusiastic young man, after showing me the yogurt-packing plant and giving me a quart of fresh yogurt to take home, takes me out to the barn and shows me the wooden chest filled with peat moss where they store the biodynamic preparations. The 500 prep is a dark brown, earthy-smelling, rich compost—completely changed from the wet, sloppy manure that was buried in the cow horn.

The horn manure preparation (500) is one of the distinctives of biodynamic farming

I do notice that some of the dairy cows have injuries on their udders. I ask Derek about it, and he explains that those are wounds inflicted by other cows with their horns. “They know where the most sensitive parts are,” he explains as he carefully cleans an udder wound on one cow. “They can be really mean.” That, of course, is the main reason most non-biodynamic dairy farmers disbud. But Derek said they have very little trouble with infection and the wounds usually heal quite quickly.

Overall, I’m very impressed with these biodynamic farms. I may not fully agree with all of Steiner’s teachings, but biodynamic farming definitely works. The biodynamic cows are some of the healthiest I’ve seen, and they exemplify the best in organic farming practices.

After they're milked, the Kimberton biodynamic cows head back out to a fresh paddock of pasture