An introduction to Syntropic Agriculture - part 1
Updated: Oct 13
There has been lots of talk, in regenerative agriculture, about syntropic agroforestry. When I first wrote this post, there was very little written or video material in English for those who wanted a systematic description of the basic concepts and underlying principles of this method. I had spent a year researching syntropic agriculture as an external observer, in order to understand this method — inspired in part by the agroforestry of indigenous peoples of the Amazon, and formalised over several decades by Ernst Götsch in Brazil, and later brought to Europe through his work in Portugal.
This post and the ones that follow are an attempt to offer my personal perspective on the topic, with no intention of being authoritative or comprehensive. When I first wrote it, I hadn’t managed a syntropic system nor met Ernst personally. The information I gathered came from several conversations with colleagues and friends who have worked extensively on syntropic systems, as well as from interviews, books, notes and other material available in Portuguese and English. Now, after 4 years of agroforestry management and design, for several projects scattered around the world, I have updated, revised and enriched this attempt at introducing Syntropic techniques to our climate.
The syntropic or successional approach to agroforestry outlines a way of interacting with ecosystems which marks a step in the right direction: the ecological (not social/cultural) indigenisation of humans and agriculture. If we put aside cultural factors, what is the biological and ecological role of humans within the ecosystems they are part of? Is it possible to attune what we call agriculture to the processes that humans would engage with in the wild, as part of a complex and dynamic ecological mechanism? As I see it, the uniqueness of Syntropic agriculture lies in this ecological perspective, as opposed to the utilitarian and culturally anthropocentric one which is typical of modern agriculture. That such an approach should strike us as revolutionary gives us a measure of our deep separation not only from our ecosystemic role, but also from the integrated relationship that indigenous cultures have with the land.
1. Ecological succession
Before we can even start to talk about syntropic agroforestry, I believe it is necessary to have a clear understanding of one of the most fascinating and totally spontaneous processes that take place on our planet: ecological succession. What follows is the description that syntropic agriculture builds on. It is a simplified one, and I’ll come back to its limits at the end of this section.
Colonisation
In the wild, a degraded soil gets quickly colonised by a diverse series of plants, animals and microorganisms. On bare mineral ground, microbes come first: they start to make the minerals contained in rocks soluble and build the first traces of organic matter, preparing the ground for plants. The first plants are herbaceous (i.e., without woody tissues): ephemerals, annuals, biennials and finally perennials. They are able to adapt to extreme conditions, such as low fertility and scarce water. As pioneers, these plants fulfil their role by accumulating minerals from deep down the soil profile; they partner with bacteria, including nitrogen-fixing ones; they add organic matter to the soil both through root exudates and with their tissues when they die back for the winter or at the end of their life cycle. This phase can be named “colonisation”.
Accumulation
With their work, herbaceous plants prepare the soil for the arrival of more complex species, such as pioneer shrubs and trees, whose seeds are carried in by the wind or, very often, by birds. Shrubs and trees carry on accumulating and cycling minerals and organic matter on the surface of the soil, adding the lignin contained in their woody tissues — a compound that decomposes a lot more slowly than cellulose. Woody litter stays on the surface longer, protects the soil and feeds fungi, the great decomposers of lignin. Other fungi, the mycorrhizal ones, grow out from the roots and trade water and nutrients with plants in exchange for sugars; how far their networks also connect neighbouring trees is much less settled than popular accounts suggest (Karst et al. 2023). As for humus, soil science now sees stable organic matter largely as microbial products bound to minerals, much of it coming from roots, rather than as a product of lignin (Cotrufo et al. 2013; Lehmann & Kleber 2015).
Shrubs and trees are also more effective at improving soil, because of their deeper roots and their ability to provide shade during the hotter months, thus creating less extreme conditions for plants in the undergrowth. As a result, herbaceous pioneers start to be less abundant and are replaced by more demanding plants, more similar to our common vegetables and thus rich in carbohydrates and proteins.
This is the accumulation phase. What is being accumulated is natural capital, measured in terms of biodiversity, the complexity of the relationships among the organisms present in the system, and the forms in which energy is being stored (fertility, organic matter). Ecologists described this trend long before syntropic agriculture: as succession proceeds, biomass and diversity increase, the system becomes more organised and its nutrient cycles become tighter (Odum 1969). Götsch calls this increasing level of organisation syntropy — the opposite of entropy, the measure of disorder that, in an isolated system, can only grow. I’ll come back to the word in section 3.
The accumulation phase marks the arrival of the first fruiting plants; these represent a rich source of sugars that enriches the food dynamics within the ecosystem, and also attract larger animals into the system, birds and mammals in particular. Medium and large animals (wild boar, deer, etc.) fertilise the soil with their droppings and create ecological niches with their disturbance, thus allowing the system to further increase in complexity. Mammals and birds also bring the seeds of more demanding plants, such as fruit and nut trees, which indicate the approach to the abundance phase.
Abundance
The abundance phase is characterised by plants which populate all the layers or strata of three-dimensional space (low, medium, high, emergent), with a diverse range of life cycles. Above all, we see an increase in diversity, complexity and the accumulation of energy in the form of organic compounds: soil organic matter, protein, carbohydrates, sugars, fats, etc. — both above and below ground. Typical of this phase are fruit, nut and timber trees, productive climbers, starch-rich roots and a diverse fauna of mammals, reptiles, birds and insects that feed on plants and on one another.
Thus, the stability of the ecosystem has increased alongside three main factors: biodiversity (of microbes, plants, animals); complexity in the interactions between all the elements (symbioses such as mycorrhizae, food webs above and below ground, etc.); and finally soil fertility. The latter is the common thread throughout the entire ecological succession, because it is in the soil that all the efforts of the initial phases focus; and it is in the soil that minerals, organic matter, water and the main core of biodiversity are developed over time.
Systems and life cycles: two ways of reading succession
Syntropic agriculture reads this process along two axes, and it is worth keeping them apart.
The first is the one I’ve just described: colonisation, accumulation and abundance. Götsch calls these systems, and they describe the state of a site — how much life, organic matter and fertility it has accumulated. Compacted, eroded soil is in a colonisation system; an old orchard with deep, crumbly soil may be in an abundance system.
The second axis is the life cycle of the plants: placenta (short-lived annuals and biennials), secondary (short- and medium-lived plants, mostly shrubs and trees) and climax (long-lived trees). These successional groups exist within each system. Götsch’s own example is maize: a placenta species, but of abundance systems, because it demands a fertility that only an abundance soil can offer. The placenta of a colonisation system is made of tough pioneers instead.
As I understand it, planting “everything at once”, in Götsch’s sense, means planting every life-cycle group of the system the site is actually in — not the fruit trees of an abundance system into colonisation soil. When we do that, we have to supply from outside everything the soil can’t yet provide, and we end up running what Scott Hall calls a “plant hospital”. I discuss this, and Scott’s alternative, successional accumulation, in a separate post.
There is a third route, and many of us take it. No-till market gardens, food forests and hybrid systems like ours at OrtoForesta experiment with skipping the colonisation phase, by importing the natural capital needed to start from accumulation. In my own reading (mine, not Götsch’s), natural capital includes organic matter, biomass (the above-ground tissues of plants) and the biocenosis, the whole community of living species and not only the plants. Bringing in any of these, as seeds, compost, water or inoculants, can push a system faster towards the next phase, and lets us plant more demanding species from the start. It’s a controversial choice. Purist syntropic practitioners argue that a system built this way will slip back to colonisation as soon as we ease off the heavy management, while theirs, built with nothing but plants and pruning, stay stable in whatever phase they have reached. I’ll come back to this debate in Part 2.
Dynamical equilibrium and patch dynamics
This process can take place also in a mature ecosystem, whenever a gap is created by the disturbance caused by an animal or a geological or climatic event. In such gaps the soil gets disturbed and the level of light is typical of an earlier ecological phase compared to the surrounding areas. When this happens, the neighbouring patches and the existing soil act as an inoculant of biodiversity and fertility, thus stimulating a repopulation of the gap which is faster and adds additional complexity to the entire ecosystem. This process (called secondary succession by ecologists — not to be confused with Götsch’s secondary group) repeats itself at random intervals, thus creating a patch dynamics that makes the ecosystem resilient and characterised by a dynamical equilibrium, maintained by an alternation of disturbance and consequent accumulation of natural capital.
The picture I’ve painted so far, with each stage preparing the ground for the next all the way to a mature forest, has deep roots in ecology. At the end of the nineteenth century Henry Cowles read it in the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, where the further you walk from the shore, the older the vegetation (Cowles 1899). Frederic Clements later turned it into a theory: every climate has its own climax, and succession always heads towards it (Clements 1916).
Ecologists have since softened that picture. One stage doesn’t always pave the way for the next: sometimes the newcomers would have arrived anyway, and sometimes the plants already there hold them back, keeping a site in the same state for decades (Connell & Slatyer 1977). Anyone who has dealt with a bramble thicket, a slope of bracken or a stand of broom knows what that looks like. In Mediterranean shrublands, from the Californian chaparral to our own garrigue, the same species often simply grow back after a fire (Hanes 1971; Trabaud & Lepart 1980).
This doesn’t undermine syntropic agriculture, but it has changed how I read it. Succession doesn’t always move forward on its own. It’s a direction we choose to steer towards, and much of a syntropic farmer’s work, pruning above all, goes into moving on the stages that would otherwise stall.
2. The growth “pulse”
A mechanism, in particular, is worth highlighting within this process. Practitioners observe it consistently in the field, but the full chain of events hasn’t been tested directly; I’ve tried to piece it together from plant physiology and soil science in a dedicated post (in Italian). In short:
Plants respond to heavy pruning or grazing by stopping root growth and shedding part of their roots, to rebalance roots and shoots (Crider 1955; Troughton 1957), and, at least in grasses, by releasing more sugars and other carbon compounds into the soil through their roots (Hamilton & Frank 2001). This feeds the microbes of the rhizosphere and speeds up mineralisation: more active microbes make more soluble nutrients available. Some practitioners believe that a hormonal signal (gibberellic acid is the usual candidate) also reaches the neighbouring plants, possibly through mycorrhizal networks. This part is still speculative.
If the hypothesis holds, the surrounding vegetation finds more nutrients available, and is stimulated to grow more vigorously, photosynthesise more and set more flowers and fruits. Thus, when the canopy of a plant is pruned, not only is light introduced to the lower layers, but a “growth pulse” seems to propagate into the system, and to be felt by the neighbouring plants.
The plant that is pruned, harvested or mechanically damaged is also rejuvenated, and can live a lot longer than it would if it weren’t pruned: the ancient pollards of European wood pastures are the classic example. Things change when plants flower and start to ripen their seeds: their sugars stop flowing towards roots and soil and go to fruits and seeds instead, and the plant draws harder on water and nutrients. This is why, where possible, syntropic pruning is timed before flowering.
It is often reported that the first European settlers in North America, after clearing a patch of forest, enjoyed for a few years the best soil and growing conditions they had ever experienced. What they were doing was creating a gap in a well-established ecosystem. In the gap, soil is at its peak fertility, the extra light creates the perfect conditions for vegetable and fruit production, and the pulse generated by the felling and the pruning enhances this effect. The flush doesn’t last: without woody vegetation coming back, the organic matter built by the forest is gradually used up. If, instead, one plants young trees alongside the vegetables, as many Amazonian peoples still do in their swidden-fallow systems (Denevan & Padoch 1987), the patch gradually returns to forest conditions. Then a new patch can be cleared, thus growing light-, water- and fertility-demanding crops within a forest, without affecting the stability of the latter. This eye-opening realisation lays the basis for a way of growing vegetables that is in harmony with natural processes.
3. The principles of Syntropic agriculture
Syntropic agriculture is rooted in the careful observation of the ecological and physiological phenomena described above in various geoclimatic contexts. The syntropic approach is focussed on preserving these mechanisms and taking advantage of their spontaneous character to trigger and accelerate the process that leads from a degraded, disturbed or ordinary soil to an abundant ecosystem.
The theoretical framework of syntropic agriculture is founded on a series of principles that codify natural, ecological processes and make them usable in productive contexts.
It is indeed possible to mimic natural ecosystems closely. If we observe the successional dynamics discussed above, we notice that a living system develops its complexity, diversity and fertility over four dimensions: space and time. Energy is stored in the form of organic matter, and resilience is built upon complexity and functional redundancy. Throughout ecological succession, an ecosystem increases its level of organisation. This doesn’t break the second law of thermodynamics: living systems are open, and they build and maintain their internal order by capturing a flow of energy (sunlight, in the case of plants) while releasing into their surroundings more disorder than the order they build within. Schrödinger described this as organisms feeding on “negative entropy” (Schrödinger 1944). Living systems are not the only ones that self-organise in this way (so do convection cells and whirlpools), but they do it most persistently, and they store the energy they capture.
The word syntropy comes from one of the most talented mathematicians of his era, Luigi Fantappiè. In the 1940s he proposed a unified theory of physics and biology, based on the interaction of syntropy and entropy and on the existence of three levels of time (Fantappiè 1942); decades later, the biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi used the same word for the tendency of living matter to perfect itself (Szent-Györgyi 1974). Fantappiè’s theory was never accepted by physicists, and syntropy is not a quantity anyone can measure. In Götsch’s use, I read it as a useful organising idea rather than a physical law: the accumulation and organisation of energy through photosynthesis and biomass management. According to a recent overview, that’s also how most practitioners use it (Jacobi et al. 2025).
In practice, syntropic practitioners have developed a series of techniques that reproduce what would happen in the wild, but using design and observation to accelerate the ecological processes and make the resulting system highly productive.
In particular, by studying ecological succession, it is possible to become increasingly independent of external inputs: after all, the succession process described above only needs a few microbes, a mineral soil, water, solar energy, seeds from somewhere nearby, and time, to trigger a series of transformations that leads to mature forest. In syntropic approaches, then, external inputs, if necessary, are kept to a bare minimum, because the plants themselves are used to create fertility via photosynthesis and their microbial partnerships. The regeneration of agricultural ecosystems involves the accumulation of fertility in the form of biomass (which ideally gets converted into stable soil organic matter), and of microbial diversity and activity. This accumulation can be delegated to pioneer plants which get chosen, planted and pruned strategically, to mimic what would happen in the wild, accelerate the process of ecological succession and enhance the resulting abundance. Such a process would take place anyway, but on much slower time scales compared to what we aim to achieve in agricultural systems.
By engaging in this strategy, humans reclaim their role as large mammals, whose function is mobilising and cycling organic matter by interacting with a multitude of trophic levels within the ecosystem. This has two consequences. Firstly, the humble recognition that we are not the only intelligent component of a mechanical system, but we are part of a system that is itself intelligent. Secondly, the definition of principles and the development of techniques that leverage the spontaneous character of ecological processes.
The key principles of Syntropic agriculture are:
Mimicking the natural ecosystem of the site in structure, dynamics and function
Avoiding external inputs other than knowledge and planting material (seeds or plants)
Relying on plants’ ability to mobilise and recycle their own nutrients and water according to their needs
Designing and managing a system so that its natural capital (quantity and quality of consolidated life) increases and contributes to increasing the syntropy of the macro-organism Planet Earth.
These principles can be applied through a series of guidelines and techniques that can be grouped in four categories:
Four-dimensional stratification in time and space
Planting and selective/strategic pruning of pioneer plants that fulfil a service role (building soil organic matter, shading, accumulation and cycling of water, biomass creation, habitat for insects and microbes)
Application of the principles of regenerative agriculture: avoiding synthetic chemicals and soil disturbance, keeping the soil covered, encouraging biodiversity and maximising photosynthesis
High planting density, to concentrate photosynthesis and biomass production in the planting lines
What the evidence says so far
Since 2022, the scientific literature has started to catch up with practice. The overview I mentioned above (Jacobi et al. 2025) brought together 67 studies, and found that three quarters come from Brazil and Bolivia, and only three from Europe, all on systems younger than seven years. Most report positive effects on agrobiodiversity, soil fertility, carbon storage, water and plant health. Productivity is mixed: 11 of the 19 studies that measured it found syntropic systems more productive, mostly in total yield across all crops rather than in the main crop. The obstacles that come up most often are labour, knowledge, and the lack of suitable machinery and of supportive policies. On water cycling and climate resilience in temperate syntropic systems, the authors found no studies at all.
The longest-running comparison is a trial in the Alto Beni, Bolivia, which since 2008 has compared cacao in monoculture, agroforestry and successional agroforestry. After fifteen years, agroforestry cacao yielded 56% of the monocultures, but total system yields, counting bananas, plantains, fruit and tubers, were up to 6.9 times higher, and the successional system produced 22 different crops (Rüegg et al. 2025). That’s the trade-off: less of a single commodity, more food overall.
For those of us in temperate and Mediterranean climates, the principles are well grounded, but their translation is still largely in the hands of practitioners. If you’re keeping track of what happens in your own syntropic rows, let me know: it’s exactly the kind of data that’s missing.
So, how does a syntropic system work in practice, and how do we establish one from scratch? How do we apply syntropic methods to commercial operations? That’s the subject of Part 2, coming soon.
Photo credit: Finca Luna Nueva, Scott Gallant
References
Clements, F.E. (1916) — Plant Succession, Carnegie Institution of Washington
Connell, J.H. & Slatyer, R.O. (1977) — The American Naturalist
Cotrufo, M.F. et al. (2013) — Global Change Biology
Cowles, H.C. (1899) — Botanical Gazette
Crider, F.J. (1955) — USDA Technical Bulletin
Denevan, W.M. & Padoch, C., eds. (1987) — Swidden-Fallow Agroforestry in the Peruvian Amazon, Advances in Economic Botany
Fantappiè, L. (1942) — Principi di una teoria unitaria del mondo fisico e biologico
Hamilton, E.W. & Frank, D.A. (2001) — Ecology
Hanes, T.L. (1971) — Ecological Monographs
Jacobi, J. et al. (2025) — The Lancet Planetary Health
Karst, J., Jones, M.D. & Hoeksema, J.D. (2023) — Nature Ecology & Evolution
Lehmann, J. & Kleber, M. (2015) — Nature
Odum, E.P. (1969) — Science
Rüegg, J. et al. (2025) — Agronomy for Sustainable Development
Schrödinger, E. (1944) — What is Life?, Cambridge University Press
Szent-Györgyi, A. (1974) — Synthesis
Trabaud, L. & Lepart, J. (1980) — Vegetatio
Troughton, A. (1957) — The Underground Organs of Herbage Grasses, CAB Bulletin
Agenda Götsch — agendagotsch.com
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