Syntropic Agroforestry

Syntropic 

Syntropic systems are systems that accumulate energy and structure. In the case of Syntropic Agroforestry, it means collecting chemical energy in an area in the form of organic matter and biomass, and building structure in the form of a biodiverse ecosystem with complex systems of relationships.

Agroforestry

Agroforestry is agriculture that includes trees. It is the practice of growing foods, medicines, fibers, dyes, wood, or whatever else you need, in systems that include trees and shrubs.

Syntropic Agroforestry is a polyculture agricultural (gardening/farming) system that includes trees and shrubs, and uses planting, pruning, and harvesting strategies and other ecology wisdom to accelerate the rate of accumulation of biomass, organic matter, biodiversity, and available nutrients in the system. A lower extraction rate is practiced so the amount of available nutrients cycling in the system grows rapidly, resulting in large productivity. Syntropic Agroforestry therefore produces large amounts of a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods, medicines, etc. This powerful agricultural ecosystem restoration technique is used to turn barren, degraded land back into productive farms or gardens quickly while it benefits the larger ecosystem around it. If a well-thought-out, well-tended syntropic farm or garden goes fallow, it will continue to be a highly productive food forest. This is one of the most powerful, beneficial forms of regenerative agriculture. 

Syntropic Agroforestry is a marriage of ancient Indigenous agroforestry technology from the area now called Brazil with very forward-thinking soil, ecology, and plant physiology “western” science. Ernst Gotsch developed much of the modern science in Syntropic Agroforestry decades ago, married these systems of knowledge, and coined the phrase Syntropic Agroforestry. Today he runs a large farm in Brazil, and teaches around the world. You can follow his work on agendagotsch.com. His students Namastê Messerschmidt (insta: @namasteagroflorestal) and Scott Hall (syntropia.com.au) are two of the most accomplished practitioners and teachers of this technology in the world. This methodology is mostly unknown in the United States at the time of this writing (2023). It is highly recommended that interested students travel to Mexico or further into Latin America to study with Namastê or to Australia to study with Scott Hall. Workshops in the US with other practitioners/teachers will be posted to the events page on this site. 

• Alternating rows of annual crops, plants for mulching, and trees/shrubs
• Rows aligned north-south (so trees don’t shade annual crops too much)
• Biodiverse polyculture
• Planting densely (plants close together)
• Canopy stratification (vertical levels filled in with plants)
• Strategic pruning
• Working with succession
• Low extraction rate
• Metaorganism perspective (ecosystem as the organism)
• Long timeline perspective

Rows of annual crops, rows of plants that are grown just for mulching to feed the system, and rows of trees, shrubs, and woody vines are mixed together in different patterns, depending on the needs of the farmer or gardener and of that ecosystem. Subsistence farmers focus on biodiversity. A person growing for market will highlight cash crops. If we start in a desert or in a denuded field, we will grow a larger area of plants for mulching with, and may grow more area of trees to mulch with, to expedite the recovery of that ecosystem. We will later transition to more annual crops or more food production trees, depending on our needs and goals with that farm. 

Rows are planted from north to south to allow direct Sunlight into the annual crop rows when the tree rows grow tall. Most of our annual crop species want some shade during the day. If annual crop production is important to us, we prune the food trees back enough that they don’t filter too much light out of the annual crop rows. 

Biodiverse polyculture is used in both the annual crop rows and the tree/shrub rows. A biodiversity of plants supports a biodiversity of microbes and fungi, who can then make a diversity of nutrients, foods, and medicines available to the plants in the system. This biodiverse fungal network creates a complex communication and resource sharing system between the plants.

Planting densely (spacing plants closely together) creates full photosynthetic ground cover, which supports the Small Water Cycle, making the garden more water-efficient, and creating healthier topsoil. It increases the total photosynthesis in an area which results in an increase in sugars being fed by plants into the soil food web, increasing nutrient cycling and building soil more quickly. Planting densely also allows young plants to rapidly connect into existent and/or newly emerging mycorrhizal networks, so they can be healthier sooner. New mycorrhizal networks quickly connect in with each other. The entire underground plant-fungi-bacteria network becomes one system; the collective root system of each individual plant. Because plants grow up close together, the garden becomes a single Metaorganism quickly, establishing resilience early in its Life. 

Filling in the canopy vertically with leaves at all levels further strengthens the small water cycle and increases the biotic pump force of that plot. The increase in the total amount of photosynthesis increases nutrient cycling and builds soil more quickly in multiple ways; by sending more sugars into the soil food web, by dropping more organic matter onto the surface, which makes more topsoil, and by keeping things more humid, which allows bacterial and fungal decay (nutrient cycling and the creation of topsoil) at the ground surface. We use biodiversity to fill in the canopy. Stratifying the canopy in this way fills in the third spatial dimension after planting densely over the ground fills in the first two. This maximizes the productivity of the farm or garden, using all space to everyone’s advantage, from bacteria and fungi to plants and animals.

Most plants have not evolved to thrive in a full day’s worth of Sunlight. They will be healthier if they get some shade during the day. The same species of plants will want more shade the higher the elevation of the garden or farm because the Sun’s light is more intense at higher elevations. Syntropic Agroforestry acknowledges all of this and creates the varying amounts of shade that plants want by stratifying different canopy layers. 

Plants of all heights grow together in the syntropic garden to get the exact amounts of Sunlight that they prefer. Corn, an emergent species, provides a little shade for the okra and tomatoes, who provide a little more shade for the zucchini and kale, who provide even more shade for the spinach and basil, etc. The trees provide a little shade for everyone. The corn is spaced thinly enough to allow enough Sunlight down into the lower layers. We plant more densely the further down we go. We end up with a happy family of individuals who can grow up or out exactly as much as they need to, so they can each control how much light they receive, within the range of light and shade they originally evolved to grow in. We make sure of this by providing some, but not too much shade, and by filling in all spaces with plants, but less densely the higher up we go. Figuring these parameters out for all of the species you want to grow at your elevation takes some time and experience in your garden.

All plants evolved in ecosystems in which they were small, medium, or large in relation to the other plants in that ecosystem. In Syntropic Agroforestry we choose four sizes to teach with; short, medium, tall, and emergent (tallest). Only the emergent species in any ecosystem want a full day’s Sunlight. They begin filtering some of the light which then gets filtered more and more the further down we go through the canopy layers to the ground. All other plants evolved to not have to deal with that much Sun energy and are less likely to thrive if they have to. The shorter they are in their ecosystem of origin, the less Sunlight they want. An emergent species in a grassland ecosystem may be a 6-8 foot (2-2.5m) tall grass, whereas an emergent species in a coastal forest might be a 100 foot (30m) tall palm tree. In both the annual crop and tree/shrub rows, our biodiverse, canopy-stratified planting strategies make sure that each plant is getting as much light as is optimal for it, and not more. This consideration gives Syntropic Agroforestry the power to pack a lot more plants into a space, to receive much more and much healthier produce out of it, and to build soil more quickly in the process. 

Strategic pruning is another powerful piece of Syntropic Agroforestry. Pruning is used to coax certain plants in the system to release their stores of sugar and other foods into the soil food web. This accelerates biological activity, bringing even more available nutrients into the system. Organic matter pruned from living plants is left on the ground as new mulch to feed the soil. We see that pruning increases organic matter on the surface and within the soil. Plants also release growth hormones into the system when they’re pruned. The increase in available nutrients and pulses of growth hormones into the soil food web cause the plants around the pruned plants to grow even larger and healthier. If we’re wise about how and when we prune, the pruned plants end up producing more biomass and organic matter each year, build more soil, and benefit the entire system more than they otherwise would. 

Succession is an order of things happening through time. Ecological succession and the succession of growth and harvest of different species during a growing season are important parts of syntropic planting strategies. This is the complex part of Syntropic Agroforestry so it requires some study and practice. (It is wise to take workshops if you’re interested in practicing this methodology, especially from Ernst, Namastê, and Scott Hall.) We plan our planting strategies so that whenever an earlier-harvested plant is removed from the space it’s occupying in the dense, stratified garden, there’s always a young, later-harvested plant right there ready to grow into that vacated space. We also consider planting times (planting earlier or later in the season) and time to maturation in putting together a full 3-dimensional puzzle that fills itself in every time we harvest a section of it. 

Lower extraction rates yield more productivity in total calories and in nutrient density. Syntropic Agroforestry works with natural systems. We work to cultivate the entire local ecosystem; the Metaorganism. A significant fraction of everything grown in a syntropic garden is grown to feed the system - to mulch with, to feed the insects, fungi, bacteria, and worms, increasing the amount of nutrient cycling and the rate of soil-building. This increases the productivity of the system dramatically. By practicing a lower extraction rate, we end up receiving more from the garden or farm in a short amount of time. Within a few years the system is putting out much more food and medicine, and much more nutrient-rich food and medicine, than it possibly could if we practiced a high rate of extraction. 50% of 4 times as much is twice as much! By being wise and by sharing, we end up doing better for ourselves while doing better for all the other beings in and around the syntropic farm. This is our sacred role as a steward species and it heals us in the process of returning to a healthy relationship within our ecosystem. 

The Metaorganism is a concept in Syntropic Agroforestry that acknowledges how an ecosystem manages resources and makes decisions in its collective best interest. The mycorrhizal network of many individuals of many species of fungi in soil communicate and distribute resources between each other and between plants. This is the neural and vascular system of the Metaorganism. When we think in terms of individual plants we often don’t understand the complexity of what we’re seeing in an ecosystem. When we think in terms of the Metaorganism and think of individual plants as cells in its body, we begin to understand what we’re seeing, and we begin to understand what Syntropic Agroforestry teaches us. This is a revolutionary and invaluable contribution to western ecology and agronomy by Ernst Gotsch which helps us to remember what many of our Indigenous relatives around the world have never forgotten. 

The techno-industrial (or “westernized”) mind tends to see and think in snapshots, but ecosystems are movies. Applying the strategy of maximizing profit now at any future cost to an agroecosystem is as self-defeating as you would imagine it is. In fact, this is the ecological problem we see in modern agriculture in the US and around the techno-industrial world, which has caused global scale loss of topsoil and agricultural land fertility, and has triggered global climate destabilization. When we expand our vision to include years, and think about the long Life of the Metaorganism, we empower ourselves to make decisions which will benefit us and all beings, for generations to come. Syntropic Agroforestry trains us to think in years and decades instead of days and months, to think in generations instead of tax cycles.

• Ecosystem restoration - Syntropic Agroforestry works with natural systems to increase the fertility of an area and accelerate it through ecological succession. When done well, a syntropic farm left fallow will be a highly productive food forest and/or native species forest. Syntropic agriculture benefits the surrounding ecology greatly, and fuels the biotic pump, which benefits global climate.
• Nutrient dense foods and medicines - Syntropic systems use biodiversity and management strategies to build ecosystems into “systems of abundance”, creating extremely nutrient-dense foods.
• Highly productive systems - Syntropic farming uses biodiversity, planting density, canopy stratification, strategic pruning, and lower extraction (harvest) rates to increase agroecosystem productivity dramatically in a short amount of time.
• System resilience against drought, insect, disease, etc. - This system builds soil quickly and creates a strong Small Water Cycle, robust nutrient cycling, microbial and small animal biodiversity, and a complex mycorrhizal network, bringing resilience to individual plants and to the Metaorganism as a whole. 
• Zero input costs - Syntropic Agroforestry is a process-driven system, as opposed to an input-driven system. It creates a fertile, resilient, biodiverse ecosystem, so no inputs are necessary. This saves farmers and gardeners a lot of money. 
• Food and medicine security - Resilience, biodiversity, nutrient density, and productivity together increase food and medicine security for gardeners and farmers.
• Economic security - By costing less to operate, creating more and healthier produce, building the potential to produce a wider diversity of foods and medicines, and becoming more abundant each year, Syntropic Agroforestry helps ensure economic security for farmers with operations small and large. 
• Seed and strain preservation - A biodiversity of nutrient-dense crops which don’t require any toxic, expensive gimmicks means that heirloom and location-acclimatized varieties can be grown and maintained with the healthiest possible seeds produced in the process. Farmers own their own seeds and can plant them freely. 
• Cultural preservation - Syntropic Agroforestry creates fertile, later-successional ecosystems with microclimate gradients so a maximum amount of biodiversity is possible in the system. This allows people of any culture to include more of the plant species which are important in their people’s cosmology, allowing them to preserve their spiritual and cultural relationships with those plants. By providing food, medicine, and economic security, Syntropic Agroforestry brings more sovereignty to communities, as they become less reliant on outside inputs and economies. 
• Improving human health - Syntropic farming and gardening improves health in many ways. By increasing the nutrient densities of the foods we eat, we heal our bodies and allow our children to see more full epigenetic expression. By removing synthetic chemicals from these systems we remove stressors from the biological systems of all beings in our ecosystems, including human beings. By improving food/medicine and economic security we relieve psychological stresses, allowing our capacities to come more fully online, which allows even greater self-care and further autonomy of individuals and communities. By once again sharing and working with all of the beings that human beings are in society with, we heal ourselves on many levels, while beginning to restore those sacred, nourishing relationships. By allowing biodiversity to return, we increase the amounts and varieties of bird songs, plant and animal shapes and colors, natural terpenes, and many other vital psychologically, emotionally, and immunologically-regulating nutrients that we’ve evolved to receive from our environments. This begins to heal Nature deficit disorder. 

The combination of reducing chemical, biological, physical, emotional, social, political, and economic stressors; restoring our capacities; allowing fuller epigenetic expression of human beings; restoring the ecosystems that support us; and restoring our relations with the many clans of Divine Beings on this planet will bring benefit that we can pass on to future generations. As Syntropic Agroforestry continues to spread around the world, it becomes a powerful tool for protection, nourishment, mental and physical health care, autonomy, cultural preservation, and self-actualization for peoples everywhere. 

Syntropic Agroforestry uses processes - not inputs - to feed the Metaorganism; the ecosystem that we cultivate in the farm or garden. Plant biodiversity is used to feed a biodiversity of microbes and fungi, who then provide a diversity of available nutrients to the system. Planting density and canopy stratification are used to fill in all available space with photosynthesizing leaves, to maximize the amount of sugars entering the soil food web, and maximize the amount of organic matter falling onto the surface. This all becomes fertile soil and habitat for a wider biodiversity and biomass of microbes, fungi, worms, microarthropods, etc. who develop soil structure and help the system become even more fertile and resilient. 

Multiple forms of succession are used to the advantage of the Metaorganism in Syntropic Agroforestry. Ecological succession is an important consideration when planning our planting strategies. When a soil ecosystem resembles that of a desert, we plant earlier-successional species over the first season or two so they will produce more biomass and be more efficient at nutrient cycling while we begin to build soil. We then accelerate the system forward through ecological succession with syntropic management. When a soil ecosystem returns to a forest or forest clearing soil ecology (in which most of our annual crops have evolved to thrive), we have a lot more options of what plant species will do well there. 

Another form of succession that we consider in the syntropic farm or garden is the order of what will be harvested where and when. We fill all available 3-dimensional space with photosynthetic Life, in both our annual crop rows and our tree/shrub/woody vine rows. In the annual crop rows, we attempt to plant such that when one plant is harvested, there’s a young one there already established, ready to grow into that space. By keeping all space filled with leaves, we maximize the amount of sugars flowing into the soil food web, and maximize the garden’s productivity for all present beings, including the gardener. 

When we prune 30-50% of a plant (as in regenerative grazing events), we don’t kill the plant, we don’t destroy its photosynthetic capacity, and we don’t break into its store of sugars which it keeps for such a situation. We do create a lot of soil food with the mulch we just created, and that plant pumps its food stores into the ground to increase soil biological activity. The increased biological activity increases the rates at which the plant is receiving nutrients from the soil biota in exchange for those sugars, and from all of the pee and poop from tiny beings eating other tiny beings down there in the frenzy. The plant receives an increase in the amount of minerals coming in and is able to repair its lost foliage quickly, growing back to a size which is advantageous for seed production, and refills its food stores in the process. Many plant species will take longer to begin flower and seed production after this type of pruning event, and end up doing more photosynthesis in that growing season as a consequent. The extra carbon pumped into the soil food web in the form of sugars adds to the total amount of soil organic matter. The plant ends up creating more biomass, and putting more organic matter in and on top of the soil than it would have otherwise during that growing season. The organic matter entering the ground turns dirt into soil. The organic matter on top of the ground becomes topsoil.

When we prune trees in this way, the amount of organic matter added, nutrient cycling increased, and growth hormones flooded into the soil food web are all much greater per area than when pruning grasses and forbs, as long as those trees are planted close together. Trees do this powerful work in larger, deeper spaces in the ground because their roots extend a lot deeper and wider than those of smaller plants. Growing and syntropically pruning trees is a much more powerful method of building soil than regenerative grazing or growing and syntropically pruning grasses and/or forbs. However, it’s wise to remember that all of these methods provide unique ecosystem services, which is why syntropic agriculture mixes grass pruning and tree pruning. 

Syntropic Agroforestry plants rows of annual crops, rows of densely-planted, highly productive grasses (and/or forbs) strictly for pruning, and rows of trees, shrubs, and woody vines which include a large number of fast-growing trees for the purpose of this syntropic form of pruning. All of the pruned grasses, pruned tree/shrub branches and leaves, deciduous leaves falling during the dry or cold seasons, and the parts of the harvested plants that are not used for food/medicine/etc. are left to create soil and feed the Metaorganism. As a result, there is a significant fraction of the total calories produced and available nutrients which are not extracted from the system. This lower rate of extraction allows greater farm productivity.

We use S-curves as a graphical representation of the amount of growth of a plant or of a group of plants in a system in relation to time. We plot time on the x-axis (horizontal) and biomass produced on the y-axis (vertical), so the slope represents the rate of growth. For annuals, growth begins to level off when flower production begins. At some point early in an annual plant’s seed production, it has all the nutrients it will need inside its body already. It then has no need to continue trading sugars for nutrients with its soil partners, and it quits feeding sugars into the soil. It has transitioned away from building more biomass and is now redistributing nutrients and energy from its body to its seeds. This major shift in physiological state, where new growth comes to a stop as seed production becomes the focus, is called senescence. 

Some plants included in a syntropic agroforestry system are grown for biomass production, soil building, and feeding the system. We prune these plants after they’ve produced the majority of the biomass they would have produced, and before they go into this state of senescence. This triggers them to go back into a vegetative state of growth to rebuild the mass and resource reserves they need for an optimal flowering and seeding event. Instead of leveling off their growth curve, they return to a high rate of growth for another period. We call this “stacking s-curves”. We can see graphically that the plant creates more biomass (living tissue) in a season than it would otherwise, and all of that biomass eventually turns into more organic matter (dead tissue and what’s left of decomposition processes) than what it would have produced without the syntropic pruning event. We observe and develop experience and intuition around the physiology of individual species within the Metaorganism to know when and how much pruning is optimal. 

Syntropic Agroforestry can be adapted to meet the needs of the people running the system, to the local climate, and to the ecology it begins in. If a person or family’s subsistence is through money, a syntropic system can be designed to emphasize cash crops. If a cash crop is a certain tree species, we can build a system with much more tree area than annual crop area. If the system begins as a desert, we plant more mulching plant and tree row area to accelerate ecological succession, and then move to more annual crops and later successional tree species as the Metaorganism develops.

If you’re an herbalist or medicine person, you can focus on medicine plants. Some medicinal plants want forest clearing soil ecology and will thrive in the annual crop rows. Some may be strict forest species and will prefer the tree/shrub rows. Almost any plant that is important in your people’s cosmology has a place and a suitable soil ecology for it in the syntropic farm or garden. Cacti can thrive in healthy soil. Strawberries cannot grow in desert dirt. Syntropic Agroforestry helps to preserve cultures by restoring agroecosystems and preserving peoples’ relationships with the plants that are important to them. 

Q. What is the relationship of Syntropic Agroforestry to Permaculture?

1. Permaculture is a system which marries ancient Indigenous ecology wisdom (often referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK) to modern regenerative land management techniques with the goal of creating fertile, resilient agroecology systems that are as easy to manage as possible. In these ways it is similar to Syntropic Agroforestry. Permaculture takes a more holistic approach to land stewardship than does Syntropic Agroforestry and the soil ecological comprehension of the practitioner or of the school of permaculture varies a lot. You won’t necessarily find advanced soil, ecology, or plant physiology wisdom in any given school of thought in permaculture. Syntropic Agroforestry brings the advanced agroecology knowledge that Permaculture aims for, without the developed, holistic approach to land stewardship that Permaculture brings. Syntropic Agroforestry fits perfectly into Permaculture systems. 

In addition to Syntropic Agroforestry, Permaculture can incorporate Food Forestry, as taught well by Geoff Lawton (discoverpermaculture.com). Food Forestry creates perennial gardens, which help humans live our healthiest lives as the foraging species we are. Syntropic Agroforestry, Food Forestry, and native species reforestation (like the Miyawaki method) are the Life-affirming trinity that will help us stabilize global climate and mitigate this extinction event. 

Q. Do swales on an inclined plot have to be parallel to the rows? 

1. No. Swales are for water retention, so they should be on contour (level). The north-south rows in Syntropic Agroforestry are to allow Sun’s light into the annual crop rows, between the rows of trees once they’re tall. Swales and the north-south rows of annuals, mulching plants, and trees/shrubs don’t need to have any specific orientation in relation to each other. Swales can cut right across the rows in the syntropic farm.