Some of the best wine, according to the vintners who sell it, is made from grapes grown using the biodynamic method, and it all sounds good to me. It’s sustainable organic farming and one of its principle features is the use of cow horn manure.

What you do, or preferably direct your younger children to do, is hand-stuff a mixture of cow manure and five specific plants into empty cow horns, bury them in the fall, and harvest them in the spring. Then you mix the resulting fudge with water and spray it on your fields. It’s a happy inoculation of the soil with beneficial microbes. All good stuff.

Presumably this method builds on reliable ancient practices, although the name of the specific mixture, “Biodynamic Preparation 500,” does suggest some modernity. There is also a “Biodynamic Preparation 502” consisting of yarrow flowers placed in a stag’s bladder, hung in the summer sun, and later buried in the ground.

I’m on board. But why a cow horn? Why a stag’s bladder? Asked why he stuffed his Preparation into a cow horn, a New Zealand vintner waffled visibly. “That’s a good question!” he said, which is the current way to say “I have no idea,” and then explained that he doesn’t know exactly, except that it “somehow enhances the energy and properties inside the horn.” My suspicion is the original developers of this method had cow horns sitting around doing nothing, and perhaps some stag’s bladders, but no Ziploc bags. Tradition runs strong.

Call me a skeptic, but I tend to distrust any instructions about burying shit in cow horns that does not also include a reference to young naked lads, drumming, chicken blood, or the autumnal equinox at midnight. I did find it encouraging that one source recommended digging up the cow horns “when the cosmos are in alignment.” That’s important: you get one cosmo in retrograde and it throws off the whole method. The discoverer of this deserves every kudo we can give him.

It’s a sound method, like many others that use soil activators by encouraging beneficial bacteria and fungi and the like. Biodynamic farming was officially developed by Rudolf Steiner about a hundred years ago. Steiner was an occultist, social reformer, architect, clairvoyant, literary critic, and accordion virtuoso. In the olden days you could be all the things, because the world wasn’t as clogged with experts as it is now. He was the founder of anthroposophy, a scientific exploration of spirituality, and claims to have, at age 15, gained a complete understanding of the concept of time, which was precocious by anyone’s standards. He was also a leader in pseudoscience, pseudomedicine, and pseudohistory—all the major pseudos, really, which are distantly related to cosmos. Also? Cow horn manure.

In fact he was way ahead of his time in pseudohistory, although in its modern form it is less a deliberate reinvention of verifiable historical fact for nefarious purpose than a truly towering fountain of ignorance, the worst ever, incredible, like the world has never seen. Whatever it is, it belongs in a cow horn, buried deep.

Anyway, I’m skeptical of some of the finer details of Biodynamic Method, but in general approve of its practice, and farmers’ embrace of a relatively new movement. You sure don’t want to use any of that crusty older shit.