Bruno Follador

Nature Institute Adjunct Researcher

Bruno was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and from an early age he felt a deep connection to nature. Having been brought up in one of the largest and most populated cities in the planet — a city with one of the highest income disparities in the world — he developed an acute interest in, and concern for, not only the environment but also social and cultural life.

He studied Geography at the University of São Paulo with a special focus on agrarian geography and theory of landscape. While participating in a biodynamic gardening and bee-keeping training at the Pfeiffer Center, in New York, he had his first contact with Roland Ulrich and with farm-scale composting and the chromatography method developed by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. In 2010, he moved to Germany where he became a researcher and consultant at Ludolf-Andreas, a non-profit lab, working alongside Roland Ulrich as they deepened the work with chromatography and farm-scale composting. Together they implemented a pioneering biodynamic farm-scale project at the Hofgut Rengoldshausen farm (Germany) as well as led workshops and consulted in places such as Weleda (France and Switzerland), Agribio (Italy), and farms around the Lake Constance region (Germany).

Beside the practical applications of this research, his endeavor is to foster and develop a personal relationship to composting and to the farm as a whole living individuality. This Goethean phenomenological approach seeks not only a shift in agricultural practices, but primarily a shift in human consciousness out of which new ways of interacting with nature in agriculture can develop.

From 2014 until 2018, Bruno directed the Living Soils initiative at The Nature Institute. Since June 2018 he resides in Brazil.

Articles

“Soil, Culture, and Human Responsibility” (2016)

“Portraying Soils and Compost: Color, Form, and Pattern” (2015)

“The Creature That Has Never Been” (2015)
Revised version of an article that first appeared in the Spring, 2015 issue of the Biodynamic Journal.

“Of Wines and Compost” (2015)

“The Inner and Outer Gesture of Composting” (2014)
Revised version of an article that first appeared in the Spring, 2014 issue of the Biodynamic Journal.

Video

The Science and Art of Composting — an interview with Bruno Follador (2018)
Bruno speaks about his work with composting — learning the language of a landscape through what is expressed in the compost and searching for the questions that can bring him into ever greater relationship to nature and the world.