The TWCF is financed at the start of the season by free pledges from about 95 households, who may then take as much as they need from the farm storehouse. This system is somewhat open to abuse, of course, but it has worked for ten years. I observed some bitterness in one of the growers about the behavior of certain members, and of the members in general. I believe one of the diagnostics of any social arrangement is the type of individuals or individual actions produced. If the free communal system encourages misgivings, perhaps it would in fact be better to have certain payments for certain shares, like most CSAs. Among the TWCF people, there is a resistance to linking the food with the money but I think this concern is a little misplaced; this would not be commodification as such because the food is being produced as use value and not exchange value, regardless of how it is operationally allocated.
The farm is now in a transitional period. As a result of being ejected from some land and facilities, it has had to move or rebuild almost all its physical plant. I took part in construction of a store and root cellar, and helped outfit a new dairy barn and milk kitchen. Additionally, through the loss of its organizational patron, it is now engaged with questions of a new legal and structural environment. I did not truly get to see those questions settled; probably they will not be settled until the core group makes some determinations as to what capabilities the farm will require; making contracts, holding land or other possessions, etc.
From six acres, using a production regime known as biodynamic farming, they provide vegetables for roughly 300 persons. There is a formal biodynamic organization, with its own explanations. Certain well-known features of this regime are; mixed animal and vegetable production, planting by the phases of the moon or other celestial indicators, and the use of certain herbs in preparing compost. Biodynamic farming, as such, is descended from the so-called Koberwitz lectures of Rudolf Steiner , an Austrian spiritualist said to have deduced many of the biodynamic methods from the precepts of Anthroposophy.
Realistically, the Koberwitz lectures seem to be a quite ordinary petit-bourgeois response to the penetration of capitalist regimes into German agriculture of the period; for example, the biodynamic emphasis on soil health and humus building as counterpoints to Liebig's industrial NPK formulations. I don't see Steiner as the author of the techniques. They more or less follow from individual and collective/historical experiences of farming, and can be found in the body of European peasant traditions predating anthroposophy. Stinging nettle, yarrow, dandelion, valerian, oak bark, and chamomile are used in biodynamics because they are said to mediate certain planetary influences. But many non-anthroposophists use a mix of nettle, yarrow, and a copper penny as compost starters without making any particular spiritual appeals for it.
According to Maria Thuen, (author of a popular celestial planting calendar), one may dispense with the herbs altogether through proper meditation. Biodynamics ultimately is a battery of techniques embedded in a folk cosmology. These techniques may be very useful, and I entertain any testable hypothesis about them. Someone at the Temple-Wilton Farm once described permaculture as "biodynamics without the cosmos." This seems apt and I would encourage people to compare the two.
As for Anthroposophy itself, I see it as a modern face of Romanticism stemming from Platonic/Goethian idealism. It can fairly be described as a throwback to 18th-century German reaction against the Enlightenment.