Agenda Gotsch
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2017–2023
15:29 · 931K views · Dec 2, 2015
A short film from Agenda Gotsch introducing syntropic agriculture and Ernst Gotsch's agroforestry methods, made for COP21. It shows degraded land regenerated into productive forest farms.
HN users repeatedly offer it as the best introduction to agroforestry as a climate and food solution.
12 comments from Hacker News
Ever since watching the video on syntropic agriculture which I bumped into by reading a comment here in HN [1], I've been doing some research on the matter. The practice seems promising. It seems to work at both small and large scales, so it enables small farms, which are very hard to defend as a business in the US. It also has a component of improving the value of land, by making marginal (sandy) terrain into productive agricultural land. The other interesting fact is that the productivity per acre for the individual cultivars when planted together is higher than if they were the only thing being planted. I can see those things combining to drastically increase products. The part of the video that was the most interesting was the farmer saying "this works. If I don't sell, I don't live, and I do sell" (not an exact quote). Intriguing indeed. [1] [LINK] / this video
I think for agriculture the way to go is syntropic agriculture: this video I've seen people implementing this very successfully, I've been doing it myself for around 4 years now, and its very impressive how much carbon the soil stores after a few years on this practice.
Sure! When I started learning about agroforestry I looked for english books on the subject but didn't find good ones, Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway have really good info you could use. But in portuguese I've so a few good PDFs here, I guess that's because of the work of Ernst Gotsch here in Brazil, here's a good video that summarize his work: this video An agroforestry look like this: [LINK] Take very special attention to the ground on the video I linked above. So the main thing is the soil, the work will basically be always improving it by pilling up organic matter, from regular pruning and your organic waste too, the school must have good source of organic waste, also the city gardens/grass pruning are a good place to look for organic matter you could use on this project. Also, the more you plant together and at the same time the better. On the video you can see Bananas and Eucalyptus side by side, people think that Eucalyptus doesnt let anything grows near it, etc... but then I saw a lot of things fruiting just a few centimeters from Eucalyptus, because of the regular pruning. I'll send you an email so we can continue to talk about this.
Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning. This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes instead of inputs. There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because right now most machines are very focused on monocultures: this video
Very good movie. I'd also recommend Syntropic Agriculture, an agroforestry method pioneered by Ernst Gotsch. He personally reforested 500 hectares of degraded pastures and doesn't use any external resources such as pesticides and fertilizers. Instead, he employs methods like maximizing photosynthesis and selective pruning. As a result, his land now stands as one of the most fertile and biodiverse regions within the Atlantic rainforest, achieving even higher yields than traditional farms. As syntropic farmers often say, they grow the soil to grow the food. [LINK] this video [LINK] Another example would be the Natural Farming method pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka. He also practices farming without the use of pesticides and herbicides, and his yields also surpass those of traditional farms. [LINK]