What is Syntropic Agriculture?

In brief

A regenerative farming method that grows food by accelerating natural forest succession, developed by the Swiss farmer Ernst Götsch in Brazil.

Learning path: From soil to forest

Station 6 of 7

Syntropic agriculture, also called syntropic farming, is a regenerative growing method that produces food and timber by imitating, and deliberately speeding up, the way a natural forest develops. The name comes from syntropy, a term set against entropy: where entropy describes systems tending toward disorder and dispersal, syntropy describes living systems that concentrate energy and grow in complexity, fertility and order over time.

The approach was developed from the 1980s onward by Ernst Götsch, a Swiss farmer and researcher who restored severely degraded land in Bahia, Brazil, turning it back into productive forest with running streams. Rather than treating a farm as rows of single crops to be defended against nature, syntropic agriculture plants many species together (vegetables, shrubs, fruit trees and canopy trees) arranged in two dimensions at once: in vertical layers (from ground cover to emergent trees) and in time (from fast pioneers to long-lived climax species).

Two practices are central. Plants are grouped by their place in succession and their light needs, so that each stage prepares the way for the next. And the system is managed through strong, regular pruning: cut material is laid on the ground as mulch, feeding soil life and triggering renewed growth. Done well, the system needs no external fertiliser or pesticide and becomes more fertile each year.

How Terra Humana understands syntropic agriculture

For Terra Humana, syntropic agriculture is the clearest practical demonstration of a principle at the heart of our mission: that human activity can increase the life and fertility of a place rather than diminish it. It reframes farming from extraction to regeneration: the farmer as a gardener of succession, working with the forest's own tendencies instead of against them.

We are drawn to its rigour. Syntropic farming is not a romantic idea but a disciplined system with clear rules about spacing, layering, timing and pruning. We treat Götsch's work as a foundation to learn from and adapt, not a fixed recipe, testing which of its tropical-forest methods hold in the very different climate of the Mediterranean.

Syntropic agriculture in practice

At Sa Medada, near Jerzu in Sardinia, syntropic principles guide how Project Eden's growing areas are designed. Plantings are conceived as layered communities in which fast-growing pioneer plants first provide shade, biomass and soil protection, making conditions tolerable for the fruit and timber trees that will succeed them. Pruned material is returned to the ground as mulch rather than removed.

The hard question we are working on is water: Götsch's methods were proven in humid Bahia, while Ogliastra faces long summer droughts. Adapting syntropic succession to Sardinian dryland conditions is an open, ongoing experiment, and we present it honestly as such. What we learn, including what fails, is part of the knowledge this site exists to record and pass on.

Sa Medada

What this looks like at Sa Medada

At Sa Medada we follow a rule that comes from the principle rather than from someone else's practice: pruning happens when rainfall exceeds evaporation, which here means winter and spring. In the Mediterranean summer every bit of shade stays, because there it protects more than any mulch layer. Anyone who simply copies subtropical pruning practice cuts exactly when the plants need the shade most.