What Is Syntropic Farming?

Syntropic farming is a way of growing food that treats a plot of land as a developing forest rather than as a field with crops in it. It was developed by the Swiss farmer and researcher Ernst Götsch, largely on degraded land in Bahia, Brazil, from the 1980s onwards, and it has since spread well beyond the tropics.

A note on terminology first, because the internet has made this more confusing than it needs to be. Agroforestry is the broad agricultural category: any system that deliberately combines trees with crops or livestock. Syntropic farming, syntropic agriculture, syntropic agroforestry and successional agroforestry are not different systems — they are different names commonly used for the same specific approach associated with Götsch. If you read two articles using two of those terms, you are reading about the same thing.

The core idea: succession, on purpose

Left alone, cleared land does not stay cleared. First come fast, short-lived pioneer species that cover the ground quickly. They are followed by longer-lived shrubs and trees that grow up through them, and eventually by the slow, large species that define a mature system. Ecologists call this succession. Conventional agriculture spends most of its energy fighting it — weeding, spraying, mowing, keeping the plot permanently at stage one.

Syntropic farming does the opposite. It plants all the stages at once, deliberately, and then manages the transition between them. The pioneers are not weeds to be removed; they are part of the design, there to cover soil, produce biomass and create the conditions the slower species need. As the system matures, the early species are progressively cut back and replaced by the later ones. The plot moves through succession faster than it would alone, and produces food the whole way.

Succession is going to happen anyway. Syntropic farming simply plants for it in advance and harvests along the way.

Stratification: everyone gets their own light

The second organising principle is vertical. Plants differ in how much light they want, and a syntropic planting assigns each species a stratum accordingly — usually described as emergent, high, medium and low. A banana or papaya occupies one layer, a citrus another, a coffee or shrub crop below that, and vegetables, herbs or ground cover at soil level.

• Emergent: the tallest, longest-lived trees that eventually define the system.
• High: productive trees that carry the middle decades.
• Medium: shrubs and smaller trees, often the main harvest in early years.
• Low: vegetables, herbs and ground cover that keep the soil shaded and working.

Placed well, these layers do not compete so much as divide the available light between them. That is the mechanism behind the density: a syntropic line can be planted far more tightly than a conventional orchard because the plants are not all asking for the same thing at the same height.

Dense planting and photosynthesis

The working assumption is that the productive engine of the system is total photosynthesis, and that bare ground is therefore wasted capacity. Every square metre of open soil is light landing on dirt rather than on a leaf, and in a Mediterranean summer it is also moisture leaving. Dense, layered planting keeps as much leaf area in the light as the site can support.

This is where syntropic systems look most unfamiliar to conventional growers. The plantings appear crowded and, for the first couple of years, somewhat chaotic. That is expected. The density is temporary in the sense that thinning and pruning are built into the management from the start.

Biomass, pruning and chop and drop

If there is one practice that distinguishes syntropic farming in daily life, it is pruning. Plants are cut back hard and regularly, and everything cut is laid down on the soil in the same place. This is often called chop and drop, and it does several things simultaneously.

• It puts organic matter on the surface, where it decomposes into the soil rather than being tilled in.
• It keeps the ground covered, reducing evaporation and surface temperature.
• It removes shade at the moment a lower layer needs light, so pruning becomes a light-management tool as well as a fertility one.
• It stimulates fresh growth, and vigorous regrowth means more biomass in the next cycle.

The consequence is a system that produces its own fertility. Rather than importing compost or fertiliser, the plot grows biomass on site — often via fast species planted for precisely that purpose — and returns it to the soil. This is what practitioners mean by internal nutrient cycling: the nutrients stay in the system and are repeatedly made available rather than being extracted and replaced.

Soil, water and what changes underground

Continuous mulch and continuous root activity tend to increase organic matter in the topsoil over time, and soil with more organic matter both absorbs and holds more water. In a climate where rain arrives in a few heavy winter events and then disappears for months, that storage capacity matters more than almost anything else. Covered soil also stays cooler, and cooler soil loses less moisture and supports more biological activity.

It is worth being measured here. These are well-observed tendencies in well-managed systems, not guaranteed outcomes, and results depend heavily on climate, starting soil, species choice and how disciplined the pruning regime is. Syntropic farming is not magic; it is a lot of thoughtful cutting.

Biodiversity and the role of pioneers

A syntropic planting is diverse by construction, because succession and stratification both require different species doing different jobs. Pioneers — fast, short-lived, often unremarkable plants — are the ones people find hardest to accept. They are not there for their yield. They are there to cover ground quickly, produce cuttable biomass, shelter slower seedlings from sun and wind, and then get cut down as the long-lived species take over.

The relationship between short-lived and long-lived plants is essentially a handover. Short-lived species pay the early costs and provide the early returns; long-lived species inherit an improved site. A well-designed system has something being harvested at every stage of that handover, from vegetables in the first months to fruit in the first years to timber or mature tree crops decades later.

How the system changes over time

1. Year one: mostly ground cover, vegetables and fast biomass species. It looks like a garden that has got away from someone.
2. Years two to four: shrubs and fast fruiting species take over the visual space; pioneers are cut repeatedly and dropped.
3. Years five to ten: the medium and high strata close in, harvests shift to tree crops, pruning frequency falls.
4. Beyond: the emergent layer defines the system, and management becomes selective rather than constant.

Why it is interesting for Mediterranean agriculture

Southern Spain has the conditions that make the underlying logic attractive: strong sun, long dry summers, thin and often degraded soils, and a farming tradition that has historically kept ground bare between trees. Anything that increases shade, ground cover and soil organic matter addresses several of those problems at once.

The honest caveat is that Götsch's systems were developed where biomass grows fast and rain is reliable. Here, biomass production is the limiting factor. Prunings that would regrow in three months in Bahia take a year on our hillside, which means lower densities, more careful species selection, wider spacing and considerably more patience. Mediterranean practitioners tend to lean harder on drought-tolerant support species and on winter growth, when the water actually arrives.

What we are doing with it at Monte Valeo

We describe our work as exploring syntropic principles rather than running a syntropic farm, because that is accurate. Our first lines are two seasons old. In practice this means: planting into the existing avocado and citrus terraces rather than clearing anything; underplanting with shrubs, vegetables and ground cover instead of keeping soil bare; establishing fast support species purely for cutting; and dropping every single thing we prune back onto the ground where it grew.

Early observations are encouraging and modest: darker soil under the mulched lines, better summer moisture retention, noticeably more insect and bird life, and vegetables that tolerate July far better with tree shade above them than without. Whether the full system delivers what it does in the tropics is something we will only be able to say in ten years, and we would rather report it then than promise it now.

If you want the broader picture of the farm, read Building a Regenerative Farm in Andalusia. For what ends up on the table, Why We Grow Our Own Food. And for the place as a whole, Monte Valeo, A Regenerative Farm and Longevity Retreat in Andalusia.