An Interview with Francis Thicke of Radiance Dairy in Fairfield, Iowa

By Parker Forsell

Winter 2003 edition of The Stinging Nettle (the newsletter of the North Central

Region Biodynamic Group)

Radiance Dairy is the home of Francis and Susan Thicke. The farm encompasses 236 acres of rolling ground in southeast Iowa. They have been in the area since 1992 and on the present farm since 1996. Francis grew up on a dairy farm in southeastern Minnesota and holds a B.A. degree in Music and Philosophy, an M.S. in Soil Science, and a Ph.D in Agronomy. He worked in Washington D.C., for the USDA-Extension Service as the National Program Leader for Soil Science, before moving to Iowa to start their dairy.

Radiance Dairy milks 65 Jersey cows and bottles the milk on-farm; this is the only on-farm bottling operation in the state of Iowa. They also make cheese and yogurt and market the majority of their product to their community in Fairfield. The cows are grazed and moved to a new pasture paddock twice a day, after each milking. Thicke sees the importance of an integrated system, remarking that his grazing system makes not only economic sense, but energetic and ecological sense. The cows put their nutrient rich manure out in the pasture and haul the milk “home”, in contrast to a conventional system where the feed is hauled to the cows and the manure is hauled back out.

So, basically, we’re eliminating a lot of steps and [use of] energy. The manure is building fertility in the soil, enhancing processes, building organic matter…That’s the key thing, that the pieces are integrated. We are also using mobile chicken houses….the chickens follow the cows by about three days, by that time the flies will have laid their eggs, the chickens will scratch about and eat the fly larvae and the flies.

Within his integrated system Francis is also concerned with adding a lot more trees to the farm, his goal is to have trees in every paddock. He sees multiple advantages to this approach, the trees provide shade for the cows, but the cows can also be maneuvered, through their desire for shade, to add manure to certain areas of the farm where the soil is poor and in need of nutrients. He also likes the idea of using honey locust trees because they don’t have a very dense canopy, and let light through to help promote grass growth. The honey locust trees also have pods that are high in protein and good nutritionally for the cows.

While Thicke is a trained agricultural scientist, he is just as interested in talking about his more esoteric ideas related to farming. While he hasn’t yet used the biodynamic sprays or worked directly with geocosmic cycles or rhythms, Francis has been studying different esoteric philosophies for many years. He has been practicing meditation for the past 30 years, and came across the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in the 1970’s. Thicke’s Jersey cows still have their horns, and this is another practice that is unique to biodynamic farms. He told me though, that the idea to leave the horns on his cows stemmed from Steiner, but not from reading the Agriculture lectures. The idea stems from observing the cow as a highly integrated system.

Craig Holdrege reports that if one begins to look carefully at the cow, one can begin to sense the lack of incisors, the presence of horns, a four-chambered stomach, and cloven hooves, in relationship to one another (Holdrege, quoted in Talbot 2002). There is a point where man’s tinkering disassociates itself from the kind of thinking that addresses organisms as completed forms. The Cartesian worldview of the past three hundred and fifty years has been based upon human’s ability to detach and break into pieces the object being described, analyzed, or experienced. The detachment has enhanced our ability to describe, weigh, and measure the processes of nature and to a large extent led to the control of nature. The holistic science that characterized humanity up until the Scientific Revolution was involved in attempting to penetrate the meaning of processes (Barfield 1977). Distinct from describing exactly through mathematical formula, the study of processes involves participation between the investigator and the object of investigation; a flowing process that is on-going and in constant evolution.

Francis speaks of gaining knowledge about his land through an on-going process. It’s not necessarily through measured data, but often through observational data.

It’s a co-creative process. I think you have to realize that you get information more over time, just sort of a knowingness about what’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t come in English, it’s more just a sort of knowingness, of what’s the way to do things. So I think that that’s the way nature can help work through us. I see it as a co-creative thing, it’s not a matter of trying to figure out the design. It’s more like trying to learn from nature.

I prod Francis for an example on how this co-creative process works in the physical organization of his farm.

For instance, how we set up the paddocks…I didn’t know how it was going to be, because the land is very rolling, it’s not a square. I didn’t try to do it all at once, I tried to take time and just think about it and over time a pattern started to emerge. Part of it is what you can learn from other people and part of it is a kind of listening and feeling. I think it’s on the ‘feeling level’ and what feels right. You know if it feels right it’s kind of ‘yes’ and if it feels a little funny it’s kind of a ‘no’. (laughs)

Francis laughs a lot at his observations, even though he is very serious about his practices. His farm is lush and beautiful, even in late March when I visited. Although he isn’t a really big guy, he has a big feel about him, a smiling, friendly biggness. I feel comfortable asking penetrating questions, since he is very open to discussing his animistic approach to the world. I also find it interesting that he has traveled in two different realms, the world of the Ph.D agronomist, and the world he occupies now, as a kind of Goethian farmer/scientist. He mentions an Iowa State University paper that he read recently where a veterinarian discussed that they now had to do laboratory tests, when years ago veterinarians knew the behavior of animals and could spot abnormalities quickly and with amazing results. Thicke attributes this to intuitive skills.

We are now trained on the intellectual level and we ignore our intuitions. I think you have to re-culture that and you have to trust, when you have an intuition, follow through with it…at least at some level, because if you shut it off then you shut off that stream, or connection. So I think you need to work, to follow it kind of innocently, you can’t strain to make these things happen, it doesn’t work that way. You have to follow it over time and kind of culture it.

I mentioned that Don Adams [of Madrid, Iowa] had spent a lot of time internalizing the processes on his farm even before turning to biodynamics, because it made sense to him. It made sense both economically and ethically to be less connected to other systems outside his farm. Francis goes on:

I think it does represent a real common sense approach. But if you look closely at it, what does that mean. It can mean being well intune with what nature is really doing. Uncommon sense is what your getting from outside. Scientists like to look at it as information, information is all important, and you have to integrate this information, get your knowledge from information. But the whole Eastern approach involves intuition, it’s not information but knowingness. In Eastern traditions you didn’t have any data, the old shamans, they just knew. So it’s a knowingness and science can’t understand that because there isn’t any data. (laughs)

Craig Holdrege (1996) writes that the study of complexity in evolving systems calls on the investigator to use a type of fluid thinking, as opposed to the object-thinking mentioned in the mechanistic paradigm of Descartes. Holdrege compares the fluid thinking to the work of Goethe, “If we wish to arrive at a living perception of nature, we must make ourselves as mobile and flexible as nature herself, following the example she sets forth” (Goethe 1977,48; Holdrege translation).

Francis seems to move readily within this fluid type of thinking while also grounding his observations with physical examples. At one point in reference to a question about gaining knowledge of his land, he replies:

When I first started here, I could hardly find an earthworm on the farm. I’d kick over 25 cow pies in the Spring and be lucky to find one worm. Last Spring I was kicking over cow pies, after four years on the land, and I was finding 30 earthworms under one cow pie. So it’s an incredible change and the earthworms are an indicator of processes. I figure if the earthworms are increasing I’ve got aeration of the soil and I’ve got cycling of nutrients.

A few minutes later he is talking about quantum physics and the possibilities of Einstein’s discussions involving the unified field. Francis excepts the possibility that all the knowledge of the universe may be contained in that hypothesized, unified field. Thoughts such as these push him to believe that the real frontier of science involves the study of consciousness and he begins elaborating on other less tangible forms of knowledge.

I ended our interview remarking that it sounded like he had an on-going conversation with the natural world.

I kind of feel my own spiritual development intertwined with my learning about the farm. To me it’s as important for me to learn from the farm as it is for the farm to be improved by my activities. You know, the best answers are really contained in the land, the best use of the contours, the best use of all the qualities working together. I think the land really has the answers and it’s not really me organizing it, the land has its own organizing power. That’s part of this co-creative process, you know we have to be involved and give our best creative input, but it’s all there anyway (laughs).

“Whenever we assume the organic unity of ‘anything’, we necessarily appeal to an immaterial ‘something’ that informs its parts, which otherwise [would] remain a mere disconnected aggregate.”

-Steve Talbot

Through all this interesting talk involving Francis’ fluid, esoteric thoughts the idea of implementing biodynamics continued to dangle in the air. Francis is unsure at this time of the level of commitment he has to practicing biodynamics. He is interested, especially in the work of Steiner, but also has a fairly comprehensive network of ideas related to his farming. Francis is very close to his brother Art. Art never left the family farm and turned to organic in the 1970’s. Francis describes his brother as a natural intuitive who feels that the energy work described in biodynamics can be done on-farm. In relation to the preparations that they buried on the farm last fall, Art remarked, “you know Francis, we can grow all those energies on our farm ourselves.” Never the less, he [Francis] remains interested in learning more, but mentions the difficulty of getting the preparations out on two hundred acres and realizes that ultimately this can only be accomplished by purchasing or manufacturing equipment. He also has very little experience working with adjusting his operations to the geocosmic cycles described in the biodynamic literature.

Francis readily describes his worldview as influenced by a kind of practical animistic approach to the natural world. He remains skeptical, but positive about the current economic and political system. He in fact sees the world in the midst of a great transition, one that will find more and more relevance in what has for sometime been seen as esoteric or old fashion wisdom. In regard to farming, he feels that it is critically important for education to be restructured so that students have more opportunities to be on farms.