Stiftung Ökologie & Landbau

About the foundation

The future belongs to organic farming.

This is the maxim behind the general aim of the Stiftung Ökologie & Landbau (SÖL). When Karl Werner Kieffer founded the SÖL in 1961, he did so primarily for the purpose of public education and health promotion. It is thanks in particular to his wife Dagi Kieffer that the promotion of rural agriculture became the focus of the foundation's work as early as the mid-1970s. Her pragmatic approach was that people could not live without healthy food.

Today, the work of the SÖL rests on the three pillars of information dissemination, networking and education.

SÖL has played a leading role on numerous occasions, for example in initiating the scientific conferences on organic farming inGerman-speaking countries, which have been held since 1991. Since 1977, the specialist journal Ökologie & Landbau, the foundation's own magazine, has published current topics from the sector four times a year and edited them for a specialist audience. Together with the Association of Chambers of Agriculture (VLK), SÖL has initiated the "bio-offensive" project. Here, interested farmers are supported in converting their farms to organic production. At the same time, processors and retailers receive support in procuring regional raw materials.

Together with the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), SÖL has been organizing organic field days since 2017, where farmers are given access to the idea of organic farming and its practice.

The Stiftung Ökologie & Landbau is committed to an agriculture that is characterized by farming values, deals responsibly with basic resources such as soil and water, practices species-appropriate animal husbandry and ensures a healthy living environment for people.

It is committed to the further development of organic farming in terms of both quantity and quality. Its main concern is to raise society's awareness of the importance of environmentally friendly and humane land management.

The foundation runs a school and seminar farm at Gut Hohenberg, where schoolchildren, adults and even kindergarten children can gain insights into the interrelationships of organic farming. We are supporting this project in particular in view of the coronavirus-related loss of income. We also contributed to the SÖL's capital stock with a value-preserving donation.