Syntropic agriculture reads ecological succession along two axes: systems (colonisation, accumulation, abundance) describe how much natural capital a site has built up, and within each system, life-cycle groups (placenta, secondary, climax) describe what grows there over time. Pruning is the main tool to steer the process. If you read Part 1 a long time ago, I’ve recently revised it. This post is about design; the next one will be about pruning. 1. Syntropic systems and for

Friends, Here we are again, a few days late. September went by with a few downpours followed by a long dry spell. The high daytime temperatures are giving way to a pleasant autumn warmth, with nights here dropping to 8°C. After weeks of constant, aggressive attacks from the wood pigeons, the cooler weather has finally brought some long-awaited peace, and we have taken most of the netting off the vegetable beds. The pruning of the agroforestry rows is finished, with hundre

Friends, We meet again on the far side of August, when in theory the air should be cooler and the soil damper. I hope that’s how it is where you are. Here in Florence the rain finally gave us the relief we had been waiting for after a scorching, drought-ridden summer that somehow still managed to feel more humid than ever. Then the heat came straight back. This, which seems to be the new normal, puts real pressure on the traditional timings for summer transplanting. Normall

On 17 June 2026 the European Parliament gave final approval, at second reading (431 to 201, with 29 abstentions), to the regulation on New Genomic Techniques — NGTs, or in Italy TEA, tecniche di evoluzione assistita, “assisted evolution”. It splits NGT plants in two: NGT-1, judged equivalent to what ordinary breeding could have produced and now treated more or less like any other crop; and NGT-2, which stays inside the existing GMO framework. The shift is one of philosophy —

When syntropic agriculture arrived in Europe, it took on a very specific form, codified around a course that Ernst Götsch taught in São Paulo, Brazil, about a decade ago. Speaking to an audience of non-specialists, Ernst showed how one could plant all the stages of ecological succession from the very start, in a single row holding plants meant to populate the system's various layers (emergent, high, medium, and so on) over the short, medium and long term. Lately I've been pay