A farmer who puts his hand to the plow must look forward

Otto Scharmer
Field of the Future Blog
7 min readJan 19, 2025

Read the article in traditional Chinese.

On July 31st, 2024, my father, Dieter Scharmer, passed away peacefully. At the age of 94, he had lived and worked almost his entire life on the same piece of land, a farm 50 kilometers north of Hamburg. The farm was founded 800 years ago by the Cistercians and owned for roughly 200 years by his forebears.

After his death, we held a three-day wake on the farm. Family, friends, and fellow farmers from the neighborhood and from afar arrived to say good-bye and to share precious memories with each other. During that time, it felt as if the veil that separates our normal consciousness from the deeper essence of our being had been lifted. On the third day of this special and festive time, we held a sendoff ceremony in the farm’s main house. It was deeply moving to see his grandchildren carry him out on the first steps of his final journey from the farm, accompanied by his large circle of family and friends. As we walked by the old trees in front of the house, the nearby animals also bade him one last farewell: a cow, a rooster, and finally a dove — then silence, reverence, peace. “It was as if all the beings of this place were bowing one last time,” reflected Alfons, a friend who had been a trainee on the farm more than four decades ago.

Born on the farm on December 5, 1929, Dieter devoted his life to cultivating that land. Over the decades, he and his partners transformed the farm in two major ways: from conventional to regenerative practices and from traditional family ownership and leadership to steward ownership and shared leadership.

A few months before his death, Dieter gave a speech to about 1,000 fellow farmers at an international conference in Switzerland. In that speech he summed up his life’s experience by pointing out that the cultivation of the soil and of human beings belong together. In other words: they rely on each other. We cannot improve the structure of the soil without also improving our human and social structures. That was his lived experience over the decades.

Beginnings: Moments of Waking Up

Early in Dieter’s life, two formative experiences foreshadowed these themes and set him on his path. When he was a young man, a friend handed him a book that outlined a paradigm of agriculture very different than the one he had learned in his vocational training. This new approach was based on holistic and regenerative principles, considering the farm as a living organism rather than a set of input-output operations. Those ideas struck a deep chord. One morning soon after, he discovered that five of his cows had died. He immediately recognized that they were lying in a meadow where the state had recently conducted some agricultural research experiments. He knew instinctively that those experiments had caused the cows’ death. “In that moment I knew that this type of agriculture was wrong.”

That wake-up moment inspired him to visit, with his brother, the few farms that back then had already started experimenting with biodynamic regenerative techniques. Shortly thereafter, he launched his own composting experiments as a way of learning by doing.

The second formative experience was in Denmark, where he attended the Danish Folk High School for one winter term. Founded by N.F. S. Grundtvig in the mid-19th century, the Danish Folk High School taught practical skills and cultivated inner growth, holistic learning, and civic responsibility. He was struck by the manner in which faculty and students interacted — eating, conversing, and living together as a community. In stark contrast, on his family’s farm there were two tables and two rooms: one for the owner family and one for the workers. He sensed immediately that he wanted to bring the school’s community-based learning model home to Germany.

These formative experiences laid the foundation for the bold choices he was about to make.

The Choice

When Dieter eventually took over the leadership of the farm from his father in 1957, he converted the farming methods from conventional to biodynamic, and he began replacing the traditional owner-worker hierarchy with a smaller team and a more collaborative approach.

In late 2023, when I was helping him prepare his speech for the Swiss conference, I asked him to tell me more about those early years, the mid-to-late 1950s, when he took over the farm. What was that period in his journey all about? It was about the decision, he responded, The Choice.

The choice betweeen what and what, I asked? His decision wasn’t whether to commit to those fundamental changes. It was whether to make the transition gradually — step by step — or to do everything, immediately, now (“alles, sofort, jetzt”). For him the conversion was a no-brainer, the obvious thing to do.

Dieter, needless to say, went all-in: everything, immediately, now. And so did his 18-year-old wife, Margret, whom he met shortly afterward and proposed to a few days after their first meeting. Together, they committed to going all-in for a lifetime.

Hof Dannwisch in the 1960s (dannwisch.de)

Road of Trials

And nothing less was required. Their commitment was put to severe tests in the form of significant setbacks — including crop failures and animal epidemics. Converting your farm in the late 1950s and early 1960s to a new method that few people knew anything about, without transition support, direct sales channels, community, or demand from the marketplace — all that amounted to a challenge of a high order.

Dieter and Margret swam against the stream for a long time. And as a result, they lost many of their longtime friends and community. But gradually they formed new collaborators and collegial friendships in the context of the biodynamic farming movement.

What made it all work in the end was the emerging regional network of farmers experimenting with these methods, and an increasing stream of young people who came to the farm to learn the new methods of biodynamic and regenerative farming. And steadily, market demand and societal awareness grew as well.

House on Fire

The farm progressed and thrived into the late 1970s, when the next challenge landed. In 1978, the first of two successive fires burned down most of the farm. On the day after it went up in flames, my grandfather, in the final week of his life, paid his last visit to the farm. With the debris of the farm still smoldering, he walked straight to my father, took his hand, and said, “Head up my boy, look forward.” He reminded him of something all farmers know from their own experience: “A farmer who puts his hand to the plow must look forward!”

The experience of loss and letting go prompted a remarkable response among friends and fellow farmers across in the neighborhood and across the country — and from Dieter and Margret. As a teenage boy at the time, I noticed that, in moments of profound challenge, disruption, and loss, some people shrink and other people grow as they rise to the occasion. Dieter was at the heart of that collective rising. Everyone on and around the farm pitched in to rebuild it even better than it had been before.

Dieter Scharmer’s last speech

The picture above is a shot from the closing moments of his speech in February of 2024. He first opened his arms wide — indicating with one hand the soil and with the other the human being — before then bringing both hands back together, indicating that soil cultivation and human cultivation belong together. His prayer-like gesture was perhaps not an accident. Inner and spiritual development was the foundation of his and Margret’s work and journey. The cultivation of soil and the cultivation of the human community are two sides of the same coin. That was their credo. Which is why they loved these words of Novalis: “Our calling is the (self-)cultivation of Earth.” (Zur Bildung der Erde sind wir berufen.)

In their later years my parents relished hosting stimulating conversations in their little retirement home on the farm — a single space with a round coffee table at its center that was always open to the entire community. In the context of these generative conversations they would have probably agreed with this small modification of Novalis’s observation: Our calling is the (self-)cultivation of soil, community, and conversation.

Margret and Dieter Scharmer (2019)

World on Fire

Today, as we all know, it’s not a single farm but the entire world that is on fire — or on the brink of it. Given the critical planetary moment that we are approaching as a global community, what is the gift that Dieter and Margret’s journey is offering to us? Perhaps that gift includes some of the following principles:

  • Trust your own eyes and your own thinking.
  • Go to places of potential where you experience the new.
  • Find friends and form communities of coherence.
  • Connect to your deepest sense of purpose or possibility.
  • Be willing to swim against the stream (and don’t give up after just one decade).
  • Be present and open in moments of disruption and letting go.
  • Support your inner development through lifelong study and practice.
  • Always hold the space for generative conversation and collective creativity.

I believe these lessons are timeless. But they have been never more relevant than in this moment. I bow in profound gratitude to you, my parents Dieter and Margret, for allowing me and my siblings to grow up in a place where all these principles were embodied through you.

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Field of the Future Blog
Field of the Future Blog

Published in Field of the Future Blog

How can we build our collective capacities for transformation in the face of accelerating social and environmental breakdowns?

Otto Scharmer
Otto Scharmer

Written by Otto Scharmer

Senior Lecturer, MIT. Co-founder, Presencing Institute. www.ottoscharmer.com

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