Ernst Götsch

Who is Ernst Götsch?

Ernst Götsch is a farmer who thinks like a forest. Born in 1948 in Raperswilen, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, the son of a farming family, he has spent more than four decades in southern Bahia, Brazil, showing that farming can leave land richer than it found it. From his work came syntropic agriculture: a way of growing food by imitating, and deliberately speeding up, the way a forest develops on its own.

He calls himself both a farmer and a philosopher, and both belong together. His method is precise, almost strict, in its rules for spacing, layers and pruning. Behind it lies a simple conviction: life tends to build up, to concentrate energy and to grow more complex, and a good farmer works with that tendency instead of fighting it.

His path

Götsch began in research. At the state agricultural research station FAP Zürich-Reckenholz, today part of Agroscope, he worked on plant breeding. He came to ask whether more could be achieved by seeking ways of cultivation that favour the development of plants, and he became convinced that the answers would not come from the laboratory. He left the post and, from 1974, leased land in Switzerland and Germany to experiment in the field, combining vegetables, roots and grains in search of combinations that help one another.

Offers to work abroad followed. In 1982 he moved with his family to Brazil, to a piece of land in Piraí do Norte in southern Bahia. According to Brazilian reports, the farm then bore the telling name Fugidos da Terra Seca, roughly "those who fled the dry land". It had been logged and abandoned, and its soils were considered exhausted.

The idea

What Götsch did there is described in the article on syntropic agriculture. In brief: he plants many species at once, grouped by their place in succession and by their need for light. Fast-growing pioneer plants cover and shade the ground and produce biomass, while slower fruit and timber trees grow up beneath them and later take over. Everything is planted densely, in lines, in layers from ground cover to the tallest trees.

The second pillar is pruning. Götsch cuts strongly and regularly. The cut branches and leaves stay on the ground as mulch, feed the soil life and protect the soil from sun and rain. Pruning also renews growth, because a cut plant sends a signal of rejuvenation through the whole system. In this way fertility is not brought in from outside, but grows from within.

His view of so-called pests and weeds follows from this. He reads them as messages: a sign that a plant is standing in the wrong place or that the system lacks something. The answer is not to fight them but to improve the conditions. And he links all of this to water. In Brazil his work is often summed up with the phrase "plantar água", to plant water: a living, layered vegetation holds moisture in the soil, shades the ground and helps springs to flow.

The work

His main work is the farm itself. In the early 1990s he took over his partner's share and renamed the land Fazenda Olhos d'Água; the Brazilian magazine Believe.Earth relates the name to the 14 springs found on the property. Over the years the degraded ground turned back into a forest in which cocoa grows among many other species. The farm has since become a training field, where students from many countries learn how the principles work on the ground.

Götsch has written little. His most important text is the booklet Homem e Natureza: Cultura na Agricultura, published in 1995 by Centro Sabiá in Recife after a visit to small farmers in Pernambuco; in 1996 AS-PTA in Rio de Janeiro brought out a further short text of his in French, La renaissance de l'agriculture. At the time he still called his approach successional agroforestry. Most of his teaching has always been oral: courses, lectures, consultations and days spent together in the field.

What became of it

Over the past two decades the method has spread far beyond Bahia. An academic thesis cited by Swissinfo in 2023 counted, for the years 1993 to 2018, more than 4,000 farmers, about 3,500 families and almost 2,000 other people who had taken up his method; Götsch himself estimates more than 10,000. Agenda Götsch carries the knowledge further through films, among them the short film Life in Syntropy, made for the climate conference in Paris in 2015. Practitioners work in Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Hawaii and Suriname, and in the Salento in southern Italy a syntropic farm of nine hectares has been built up. Syntropy has thus arrived in the Mediterranean, in a climate very different from the one in which it was developed.

What we learn from Ernst Götsch

Terra Humana owes Ernst Götsch the most important change of perspective in our planting: we do not plant individual trees, we plant a succession. On the slopes of Sa Medada, robust pioneers and nurse trees are to go in first, with the more demanding fruit and timber trees following in their protection. The idea of the food forest, in layers and in time, rests on the same foundation.

We also take from him the habit of reading the land instead of correcting it: a weed shows what the soil lacks, bare ground shows where cover is needed. And we take his attitude towards rules: precise, but never a recipe. Götsch developed his method in humid Bahia; in Ogliastra the summer is long and dry. That is why we mean to prune when rainfall exceeds evaporation, in winter and spring, and to leave every bit of shade in the summer. This is not a departure from his teaching but its application: start from the principle, then observe what this particular place needs.