The Farm as a Living Organism
The Farm Organism is a fundamental concept within the biodynamic agricultural method, which began in 1924 with a series of eight lectures on agriculture by Rudolf Steiner. In Lecture Two, Steiner describes the farm as “an individual entity in itself—a self-contained individuality.” From the 130 people who attended these lectures 100 years ago (Paull, 2011), biodynamics has since taken root worldwide, and research has shown impressive results. The biodynamic farm embraces holistic management and care (Rigolot & Quantin, 2022), providing a beneficial environment and activities that support therapeutic education for neurodivergent individuals. The benefits of autistic individuals being outside is highlighted in the literature, most commonly through qualitative research (Palmer et al., 2022, Sargent et al., 2023, Ji et al., 2022).
A biodynamic farm strives to produce its own fertility, set aside land for biodiversity conservation, integrate animals, and work in harmony with both earthly and cosmic rhythms (Smith, 2009 p.g. 136-155). It applies biodynamic preparations (Waldin & Petherick, 2025, pp. 74-75) and aims to grow the most nutritious food—rich in living forces. While all farming involves some level of exploitation of the land, biodynamics recognises this and takes on the responsibility of giving back, restoring balance through conscious and regenerative practices. A biodynamic farm is a living organism “held within its geographical confines but holding the boundless universe in its arms” (Osthaus, 2010, p. 10) Within PSTE the Farm Organism transforms into an ‘educational organism’ (Gordon, 2024, p.75)
Students can become active participants in the Farm Organism, and their actions have real-world consequences, providing access to “nature-based feedback loops” (Howe & Robinson, 2025, p. 341, Gordon, 2024, p.g. 73-76). Kim et al. (2025, p. 15) write, “therapeutic landscapes and humans interact vibrantly to create a therapeutic experiential landscape.” Encoded within biodynamics and the concept of the Farm Organism is care, which further enhances this “therapeutic experiential landscape.” Each day, the animals need to be fed and the garden tended—within which there is space for learning, enjoyment, and play. Experiencing the farm and its relationships helps provide a continuity, the nourishing wholeness, contrasting to a dissociative education where an environmental science class, may rarely venture out the classroom, to explore the flora and fauna on its own school grounds.
The Farm Organism and the Divided Brain
“We only see what the part is when we see it in its context.”
— Iain McGilchrist, TEDxGhent, 2012
The Farm Organism constitutes an integrated whole. On a biodynamic farm, we can observe the web of living relationships that bind all elements together. Take a single, simplified strand: the cows graze on the pasture, their manure is collected and composted using biodynamic preparations, and the resulting compost is applied to the vegetable beds in the market garden. Vegetables are grown, harvested, and either sold in the farm shop or served in the college canteen or residential homes. A student who eats this produce may also be the one responsible for mucking out the cows. In this way, everyone participates in a continuous, meaningful cycle that connects care for the land, food production, and personal responsibility.
In contrast, a conventional farm often separates these processes into isolated functions. Cows may be fed imported grain or silage rather than grazing freely, and their manure might not be returned to the soil but instead treated as waste. Vegetables are commonly grown with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, disconnected from the farm’s own fertility cycle. Produce is harvested, shipped, and sold with little knowledge of its origin. The people consuming the food are typically far removed from the land and rarely engaged in the processes that support their nourishment.
King Charles III, in Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, highlights how the shift from a holistic worldview to one dominated by left-brain thinking has led to a separation of humanity from nature, urging us to “understand the significance of Nature’s processes and to live by her cyclical economy” (The Prince of Wales, Juniper, & Skelly, 2010, p. 20). As Cain (2012) argues, humans must reconnect with the natural world, “subject to its rhythms, cycles, and economic rules,” rather than seeing themselves as separate. A sixteenth-century landscape painting (Figure 2), which depicts seasonal tasks, crafts, and human involvement in the land before industrialisation, reminds us of the importance of rebalancing our relationship with nature. This romanticised painting punctuates the need for education that fosters embodied learning and active participation in ecological processes, as it illustrates the interconnectedness of human life with nature’s rhythms.
The Left and Right Hemispheres and How We Perceive the World
When we compare the biodynamic farm to the conventional farm, we observe two contrasting visions: one of interrelationship versus one of reductionism. The biodynamic approach embraces a holistic vision, seeing the farm as a living organism where every part is interconnected (Courts, 2025, pp. 81-82, Stuart-Smith, 2017, pp. 104-108), while conventional farming often focuses on the separation and optimisation of individual components.
This duality is reflected in the neurotypical brain, which is hemispherically asymmetric—our perception of the world simultaneously recognises both connection and separation. This nuanced understanding is mediated by the corpus callosum, allowing us to integrate diverse perspectives into a coherent whole.
Iain McGilchrist suggests that while the left hemisphere is necessary for precision, categorisation, and manipulation of the world, it should ideally serve the right hemisphere, which is more attuned to relationship, context, and the living whole. Unfortunately, the “emissary” (left hemisphere) has usurped the role of the “master” (right hemisphere), resulting in a culture that prioritises control over care and abstraction over lived experience (McGilchrist, 2010, p.g 2-14.) The Industrial Revolution, McGilchrist argues, “enabled the left hemisphere to make its most audacious assault yet on the world of the right hemisphere” (McGilchrist, 2010, p. 386). Framed through a simple hemispheric interpretation, the work of biodynamics, RMT, and much of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy can be seen as a challenge to a left-brain-dominated world. In order for humans to find meaning and live in harmony with nature, we must rebalance this orientation. For me, this right-hemispheric impulse is most poignantly embodied in the concept of the Farm Organism.
The idea of left and right brain specialisation has often been criticised as pseudoscientific, largely due to oversimplified portrayals in popular psychology, I will be exploring hemispheric differences in a more nuanced way throughout this work. Drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s interdisciplinary research, I take seriously his distinction that “it’s not what they do—it’s how they do it” (McGilchrist, 2010, p. 2), which reframes the hemispheres not as performing completely different tasks, but as offering qualitatively different modes of attention and understanding. Addressing youth days after the agricultural lectures, Steiner (1924) warned that “if you allow the twentieth century to become as materialistic as the nineteenth century has been, you will have lost not only your own humanity but that which is human in the entire civilisation.” Moving to a level of neuroscience, McGilchrist makes a similar observation: “The left hemisphere’s dominance in modern society has led to a neglect of holistic thinking.” (McGilchrist, 2010)
Embodied Learning and Hemispheric Integration
When I first encountered Gables biodynamic farm in 2020, joining RMT as a Biodynamic Trainee, I deeply resonated with the sense of interconnectedness in the land, both on an experiential and intellectual level. After becoming aware of McGilchrist’s work, I often notice myself shifting between the two hemispheres of my brain and can sometimes feel lost—either in the details or the broader picture. When working outdoors on a biodynamic farm, I feel at ease—able to find my place within the Farm Organism, discovering a sense of relational positioning. As Iain McGilchrist writes, “The right hemisphere sees things as a whole, before they have been digested into parts. It also sees each thing in its context, as standing in a qualifying relationship with all that surrounds it, rather than taking it as a single isolated entity” (McGilchrist, 2010, p. 49). When students feel isolated or lack a sense of meaning, should we not reorient education toward a right-hemisphere mode of attention, before separating everything out into its individual parts?
Autism, Education, and Neuroscience
The majority of students at RMT are diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) which is a broad spectrum with many unique experiences; the traits of autism appear to be extremes of a left- or right-brain dominant understanding of the world. Criteria A and B of the DSM-5 highlight two core aspects of autism spectrum disorder: persistent deficits in social communication and interaction, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities (National Autistic Society, n.d.). These can be meaningfully interpreted through the lens of Iain McGilchrist’s theory of hemispheric specialisation. Deficits in reciprocal social engagement—such as difficulty with eye contact, nonverbal cues, and emotional attunement—suggest reduced functioning or under-integration of the right hemisphere, which McGilchrist (2009, pp. 407–408) associates with contextual understanding, empathy, and holistic perception. “Repetitive behaviours and narrow interests (Criterion B) align with left-hemisphere dominance, which favours predictability, categorisation, and control. When this dominance is unbalanced by the relational and integrative capacities of the right hemisphere, it can manifest in the rigid thinking and sensory fixations often observed in autistic individuals.
The educational system today is largely designed by and for the left hemisphere of the brain, resulting in abstract learning, standardised testing, and categorisation. This may explain societal patterns where much of our emotional experience is neglected. Gert Biesta (2009) attests to this trend, urging us to reconnect with the question of purpose in education, thereby inviting a more right-hemisphere-informed perspective. Farm-based education still engages the left hemisphere, but within a broader, right-brain context. Within mainstream education, forest school sessions are increasingly adopted as a “radical corrective” (Gordon, 2024, p. 71), reintroducing embodiment and the experience of being part of an ecosystem—something students, especially those with ADHD, require in order to regulate outside of the classroom. Hemispherically, such approaches offer students vital respite from a predominantly left-brain educational paradigm. As Szabo-Hemmings (2023, p. 103) writes, “Children don’t need to stare out the window if they are out the window.”
Due to contralateral control, the left hemisphere governs the right hand, while the right hemisphere controls the left hand, interestingly autistic individual often exhibit higher rates of left-handedness or mixed-handedness (Floris, 2013; Markou et al., 2017, p. 260). Along with reduced brain asymmetry (Leisman et al, 2022), meaning their brain activity and structure tend to be more symmetrical compared to neurotypical individuals. In neurotypical brains, language processing is predominantly managed by the left hemisphere, functioning much like a single person leading a task—allowing for streamlined and efficient communication. However, in many individuals with autism, language functions engage both hemispheres more equally, similar to two people simultaneously trying to coordinate the same job. This bilateral involvement can sometimes cause interference or ‘cross-talk’ between the hemispheres, which may contribute to challenges such as delayed language development, atypical speech patterns, and difficulties with the social use of language (Gage et al., 2009).
The experience of working on a PSTE based biodynamic farm offers a profound form of embodied learning—one that engages not only cognitive understanding but also sensory, emotional, and intuitive knowledge (Jespersen & He, 2015, p.g 65-67). This holistic engagement naturally fosters hemispheric integration, allowing the often-dominant left hemisphere’s logical and reductive tendencies to be balanced by the right hemisphere’s capacity for relationship, context, and holistic perception.
In many modern educational systems, the emphasis on abstract, verbal, and analytical skills aligns closely with left-hemisphere dominance. However, embodied learning reconnects us to lived experience and the rhythms of the natural world—processes primarily mediated by the right hemisphere. Tasks such as observing soil health, caring for animals, or synchronising with seasonal cycles require a mode of awareness that transcends words and categories, cultivating integrated brain activity that supports both hemispheres (De Jaegher, 2013)
On the farm, students experience a sense of wholeness. As they become integrated into the Farm Organism, they are subsequently able to engage with the finer details. For instance, at Gables Market Garden, they harvest kale and prepare it for sale at the farm shop, involving tasks such as counting, weighing, and evaluating the produce. These activities are typically considered left-brain functions; however, they are situated within a broader, embodied context influenced by the right hemisphere. After three years teaching neurodivergent students in the garden, I’ve found this integrated approach fosters balance. Based on my teaching experience, my intuition suggests that some autistic students often begin by focusing on details and, in doing so, may lose sight of the overall context. Instead, I propose that guiding them from the whole into the details might facilitate a more cohesive understanding, enabling them to relate the individual components to the broader framework.
Engaging with gardens through direct, sensory-rich experience provides a powerful way for young adults with intellectual disabilities (YAwID) to access real-world feedback that supports emotional regulation and social integration. Kim et al. (2025) highlight how physical interaction with natural materials promotes mental and physical health, fosters community connection, and offers a path toward social participation through meaningful employment. From a right-hemisphere perspective, this kind of embodied, relational, and context-sensitive learning is vital. The right hemisphere is more attuned to lived experience, emotional nuance, and integration with the environment—faculties often under-supported in conventional, abstract, or overly structured educational settings (Gainotti, 2021). Garden-based learning therefore not only enhances individual well-being but aligns neurologically with how many neurodivergent individuals best engage with and make sense of the world.
Belonging and Contribution
“When I saw the garden changing, could feel the mystery of life. I became confident and thought that I could also make it. I think the garden became my happiness” – Participant M – Kim et al. (2025)
Many young neurodivergent individuals face challenges in engaging as active members of society (Kim et al., 2025). However, places like RMT provide them with opportunities to develop essential skills, build confidence, and practice self-regulation through diverse environments where they can engage in “meaningful activities” (Torquati et al., 2019, p. 3). Sue Smith (2017) further emphasizes that gardening offers “the kind of complex environmental stimulation that brains thrive on” (p. 104), highlighting its therapeutic potential for neurodivergent individuals.
As Kim et al. (2025) note, “garden [and farm] therapy is readily accessible to individuals with intellectual disabilities because it does not depend exclusively on verbal instructions in its pedagogical approach.” We often assume that psychological difficulties can be resolved primarily through talking. However, McGilchrist (2014) reminds us that emotional regulation is not limited to the brain; it also involves the nervous systems of the gut and heart, which play a significant role in shaping our inner experiences. For autistic individuals, expressing feelings verbally can be especially challenging. Within the setting of the biodynamic Farm Organism, they are offered a space where expression can emerge through bodily movement, sensory engagement, and relationships with people and place (Courts, 2025, p.88)—without the pressure to rely solely on words.
Learning outside connects students to all the life that surrounds them and offers shared experiences that help facilitate friendship and bonding. As one participant shared, “When I’m out in the garden with my friends, hearing the birds chirping around me, it helps me clear my head more than listening to music” (Participant E, as cited in Kim et al., 2025, p. 13), inferring that the Farm Organism has the capacity to absorb negative emotions. Open space diffuses outbursts, while traditional classrooms may intensify them—especially for SEND learners. A farm based education enables students to express consciously and subconsciously how they are feeling to the plants and animals and to “find links between their lifecycles and their own” (Kim et al., 2025). Many students with ASC struggle to self-determine, but the farm offers chances for expression, responsibility, and accomplishment. These experiences help students begin to build the capacity for self generated conscious action, an aspirational aim at RMT, so they are better able to self determine their future.
Conclusion
Through the lens of three key studies (Leck et al., 2015; Howe and Robinson, 2025; Kim et al., 2025), this literature review affirms the pedagogic and therapeutic potential of biodynamic ecology when framed through the Farm Organism. Each paper contributes to a growing understanding that gardens and farms are not merely spaces of production, but rather relational, sensory-rich environments that may foster emotional regulation, agency, and belonging. Leck et al. (2015) emphasize the therapeutic value of being held in rhythmic, embodied routines. Howe and Robinson (2025) suggest that even small urban ecosystems could cultivate metacognitive and emotional growth. Kim et al. (2025) demonstrate how young adults with intellectual disabilities may find refuge, purpose, and connection through direct engagement with nature.
When read alongside McGilchrist’s theory of hemispheric integration, these studies support the proposition that biodynamic education, rooted in a right-hemisphere mode of relational and contextual attention, offers vital opportunities for neurodivergent students to flourish. Rather than relying solely on verbal or abstract forms of knowledge, the Farm Organism enables holistic learning through rhythm, reciprocity, and direct sensory experience. This rebalances education’s left-brain dominance, helping learners perceive the whole before its parts, and find their place within it.
The positive benefits of the Farm Organism are not easily isolated or measured in conventional terms (Lennartsson et al., 2025). Learning unfolds through every activity on the land, with both students and educators participating within the whole. From my experience at RMT, I have observed that the progress we see in students often emerges after months or even years of consistent engagement, role modelling, and incremental learning within the diverse and holistic environment that constitutes the Educational Organism.
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