The 2026 Goetheanum Agriculture Conference has now closed, and I am sitting with a quiet, full heart. I will share photos and deeper reflections in time, and as Dr Demeter I have been in conversation with many extraordinary people here, farmers, researchers, doctors, philosophers, scientists, herbalists, compost makers, and quiet cultural stewards. There are stories coming. For now, this is a small field note from within the experience.
Dr Demeter / Emily Samuels-Ballantyne at Magical Farm Tasmania, just prior for departing for the 2026 Goetheanum Conference in Dornach Switzerland. Photography by Ness Vandeburgh Photography
People from forty-six countries gathered around a shared devotion: care for land, life, and the invisible relationships that make fertility possible. Across languages and climates, I felt a deep Con Viv truth alive, that food systems are not mechanical supply chains, but living cultural ecosystems shaped by soil, story, community, and cosmos.
Compost was spoken about as relationship, not waste management. Herbal preparations were described with reverence…. Yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, and valerian were held as mediators between Earth and sky. Many people here have simply followed their hearts into this work, often quietly, often without recognition, because the land asked them to.
Again and again, the conference returned to an ancient remembering: agriculture lives inside a cosmic conversation. Rudolf Steiner spoke of earthly life as inseparable from cosmic rhythms, and here that knowing felt practical, embodied, and quietly radical. I was also reminded of Johannes Kepler’s Music of the Spheres, and of Elisabeth Vreede’s work carrying forward the understanding that the heavens are not distant observers, but participants in earthly becoming.
What moved me most was presence. People were not performing knowledge. They were living it.
If there is one thread I carry forward into Con Viv practice, policy imagination, and the Grow Small, Feed All vision, it is this: the unseen world is asking to become visible again through how we farm, design, govern, and relate.
More soon…including voices from the conference, conversations across continents, and the quiet revolution already growing in soils around the world.
Photography by Ness Vanberburgh at Magical Farm Tasmania