Italian universities stop legitimizing biodynamic pseudoscience

Here we go again: again in an Italian university, for three days, it meets the colorful world of supporters of biodynamics, to give itself a repaint of officiality and scientificity and try to present itself as now consolidated within the academic and scientific knowledge of our country. The purpose is clear: each of these events is a signal for adepts and consumers, but also for all the others, which serves to counter the simple observation of the absurdity of certain practices and certain concatenations of empty words.

That is, a way in which marketing is done by highlighting real problems, even if sometimes grotesquely hooked to traditionalist ideologies, then proposing bogus solutions passed off as the new science and the true revelation capable of healing everything. For this purpose, the university is very useful and much coveted: and so, the great hall of the Roma Tre University is being used to hold the 37th convention of the association for biodynamic agriculture in the next few days, with the cunning title “peasant strategies for bioagriculture”which a specific cultural area of ​​this country likes so much.

Now, that an association with its own agenda seeks the best means to achieve it, certainly does not arouse surprise; what is instead horrifying is the idea that the Italian university community, and specifically that of the University of Roma Tre, can easily accept a demonstration where it is proposed to pass off retrograde and anti-scientific positions as if they were the latest of Italian culture.

Here are some examples taken from the abstracts of the “plenary presentations” that will take place. We will discuss how “the molecular heterogeneity of biodynamic humus escapes the conformist reductionism of the immediate cause-effect relationship, allowing the multiplicity of actions that gives biodynamic agriculture a superior technological role compared to simple organic agriculture.” u

Or how “the dominant narrative demonizes natural systems, in the name of a reductionist science that is unable to correctly assess biogenic methane emissions on global warming potential.”

Or how “biodynamic agriculture sheds light on the miracle of the seed and pays homage to the only real primary factory on the planet: chlorophyll photosynthesis.”

Faced with this umpteenth wound brought to the heart of the Italian scientific community, SeTA – Science and Technology for Agriculturea, an association of which I belong together with many illustrious representatives of agricultural sciences and other related disciplines, and the CiCap, the committee founded by Piero Angela in the front line against pseudoscience, wrote a letter, which I reproduce here, in the hope it can be read by as many people as possible, but above all by colleagues from Roma Tre, the national scientific community and institutions interested. Perhaps, I and we all hope, the initiative will be ignored by the majority, who will react after hearing the news of its taking place at a university.

The letter from SeTa and CiCap

To our great surprise and sadness we learned that the 37th International Conference of the Association for Biodynamic Agriculture “PEASANT STRATEGIES FOR BIOAGRICULTURE”, will take place in Rome from 25 to 27 January 2023 and will be held in the Aula Magna di Architettura "Adalberto Libera" of the Roma Tre University. The Conference boasts the collaboration of the Department of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Forestry Sciences and Technologies of the University of Florence, of the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Salerno and the patronage of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security and of other entities.

Biodynamic agriculture is considered by the scientific community to be a pseudoscientific practice, with some esoteric and witchcraft implications. We therefore believe that hosting such a conference in a university environment is in itself an act that contributes to legitimizing pseudoscientific and mysticistic practices, which evoke unknown cosmic energies as procreators of life and fuel anti-scientific tendencies. Moreover, these are mandatory practices for farmers who want to obtain the relative certification (for a fee) from Demeter International, a private German association that holds the registered trademark “biodynamic agriculture”.

Furthermore, the vaunted collaborations with other universities and the ministerial patronage, admitted to be confirmed, are even more disconcerting. It would be as if university astronomy courses gave space to astrologers or other operators of the occult.

We therefore invite the competent bodies to suspend any type of collaboration and/or endorsement with this Conference due to the cultural damage that this entails. In the event that these collaborations are not confirmed, we invite the entities involved to distance themselves with a public denial.