Incredible 1.5-Acre Syntropic Food Forest with Over 250 Plant Species | The Food Forest Farmers

(gentle music) - You could leave a hillside to naturally turn into a food forest, or a forest, but that would take hundred or so years to do naturally. With syntropic agroforestry, we can accelerate that, in a natural way, by engaging our capability for knowledge, our capability to gain the skills, to transform and work with that natural drive of nature, to actually bring it into its highest state, into its fullest expression of potential that it has, much faster, when we see ourselves as a positive member of this ecosystem. (gentle music) Our business PermaDynamics is currently made of myself, my father, Klaus, my mother, Nessy, Josh my brother, and his partner, Mathy.

PermaDynamics is our family business name, and it's derived from our practice, which is a mergence of permaculture and succession dynamics, which is one of the core, founding principles of syntropic agroforestry. (gentle music) - Syntropic farming started in the early 80s, by a man called Ernst Götsch, in Brazil, in Bahia. And I had the fortune that I was able to work with him when he started his farm.

I've never come across anything as effective as syntropy, to revitalize depleted soils and to produce food, at the same time as increasing wildlife and soil fertility. (gentle music) - Syntropic agroforestry, for me, is as much a new way of working the land, as it is an ancient one. At the heart of it, it's really about slowing down, it's about observing before interacting.

It's about following the fundamental principles of nature. (birds chirping) - In syntropy, we are always striving to optimize life processes. That's what syntropy is largely about.

We copy what is happening in a forest, high density of plants, a high diversity, and what we want is a functional diversity. So, we could have a density of plants, but if they're all the same, then they just compete with each other. The more diversity we have, the more likely each species can find a niche, and the overall production of biomass and food produced will be much higher than if we have a reduced diversity or monoculture.

So, the overall production is always higher. The production of the individual crops will go down slightly. So, when we have a mix of crops, each banana plant will produce, say 5, 10% less than a banana monoculture.

But when you combine the different yields of banana, cherimoya, tamarillo, sapote, lucuma, inga bean, taro, pie melon, all of those things that we have in the system, and you put them all together, then we probably double the overall production of food in the system. - The principles of syntropic agroforestry, are understanding the strata of a forest, the succession of the soil development through time, and the life cycles of the plants there. So, how long they live for, when they thrive, when they're ready to harvest, when they're at the most abundant biomass-wise, and what they're doing below ground as much as above ground, so, the different networks and relationships they have with different minerals and nutrients and mycorrhiza within the ground.

Once you understand those principles, they can translate to any climate, or any soil, any region. - We work on three, four acres, intensively. Maybe a third of that is flat, arable land, and the rest is steep hillside that would normally not be used for agriculture.

Now on this slope here, after it was taken out of sheep farming 30 years ago where it was just bare kikuyu, the previous owners here planted windbreaks of cypresses and eucalyptus and wattles. So we felled most of those and brought in other species of pioneer plants, natives, and crops, working together to regenerate that line to its full potential. (birds chirping) So, the support species we select, they can be a mix of native plants and exotic plants, whatever plant thrives here and does exceptionally well and handles heavy pruning, frequent pruning, several prunings per year, those are the plants we're looking for.

Our crop plants, some of them can handle it too, but then we lose the crop. So, these helper plants, they provide the organic matter that we need as a carpet, to stop the soil from drying out and also to feed the microorganisms in the soil. But also, as we prune these plants, they want to grow back strongly.

And when the plant is strongly growing back, it releases hormones into the soil that drive other plants to a higher production as well. So the whole system starts humming, when you have these helper plants, releasing these regrowth hormones into the soil, where they get distributed by a fungal network, and all the neighboring plants join in on that, including your crops. They do better, they become healthier.

Also, the pruning activates defenses in the plants against pests and diseases and feeds the soil life with all the sugars that they can pump in because their photosynthesis is stronger. We have increased the amount of organic matter, or carbon in the soil tremendously since we are using the technique here. We can support 50, 100 other families with bananas, cherimoyas, mushrooms, tamarillo, all these sort of products that come out of here, and at the same time, also have surplus, to easily share with all the wildlife that joins in.

(leaves rustling) So here, some possum got a bit of it already, so we're gonna eat some banana-finished possum soon. And, yeah, so that's a medium-sized bunch. (gentle music) This one here, probably has a street value of 40, $50.

(gentle music) - This is a syntropic agroforestry row. Basically, the method of growing that we're using here is trying to stack as many yields from one area as possible. So, designing through time and space.

For this row here, we had our initial intervention of the soil, where we put in the compost, the scoria, the biochar, as soil amendments, just in that first initial phase. And then we come in with all the plants that we'll have from the first few months of harvest, our annuals of potatoes, beans, tomatoes, to what we'll harvest in 40-plus years. Our raisin trees, our Shahtoot mulberries, and our Chinese plums, all within the yields that we'll get between those two times.

So, our blackberries, our perennial walking stick kale, our taro, all these things will be yielding from this place, in that time. So, we're not resetting this bed, year after year, back into annuals, and we're not stagnating it at any level of its growth. We're not only having an orchard.

We're not only having an annual vegetable garden. We're combining all the different plants, so that throughout time and space, they grow and evolve, and we're working with that dynamic of nature. (birds chirping) And so, in this particular site, it's an alluvial flat land, and it's temperate climate.

So we do get frost here in winter. So the plants that we choose are very much aligned with what can grow here, and also because we're integrating it within a market garden, we want to allow the distances between the syntropic food forest rows to accommodate these vegetable rows within. So, having these perennial syntropic beds within the market garden allows the soil in those beds to rest and really develop in a really complex form, that resetting annual beds, even in a no-dig situation, resetting nature to be just in annuals is setting nature back, holding it back.

Nature wants to evolve, it wants to become a forest. It wants to then, from a forest, a tree falls over and it has annuals again, it wants to constantly evolve. So, having these rows within our market garden creates that dynamic.

A lot of the work comes in that initial phase. That's when you really wanna put in all your resources, all your labor, to really make sure you kickstart it, in a really thriving way. So, that's the highest point of labor is in the establishing phase.

A year on, as it is now, one year old, the only management really is harvesting and sickling down different grasses that we've got in the area now. So, the more you cut back grass, the more it grows back. The more you prune certain supporting species, the longer they live for.

So, the more they're able to actually produce that biomass, the more sunlight they're able to capture, the more sugars you're actually pumping into that soil that's feeding the mycorrhizal networks, that's then feeding your plants, whether it's the supporting species or your crop species along. We don't spray. We don't put any chemical or natural fertilizers or chemicals on.

We don't even spray with organic things like neem oil or pyrethrum. We just don't need to. We don't want to, and we don't need to.

Because of the high diversity that we have growing here, it forms its own ecosystem that we're then a part of, just helping manage and orchestrating, as part of the system. (gentle music) - Our food forest here is on marginal land. So usually it would be only used for sheep, pine plantations, or conservation projects.

But it can produce food and we supply our own family with all the food we need. We supply hundred other families with food on the market. And, at the same time, we are growing a native forest in amongst here.

(gentle music) We are here in one of our nicest parts of the food forest. It's on a north-facing slope. The sun is beaming down, but it is just fresh and relaxing in here.

It's just perfect working environment. And I'm sitting here under bunch of bananas ready to harvest. There are other crops that are developing, and will be producing soon, or this macadamia that is already producing underneath a cherimoya.

Some tamarillos here and there. And at the same time, we also have other plants joining in. And native trees that the birds are dropping from this old banksia that's above us.

So, we have a karo, we got kawakawa. We got multiple kohekohe. (birds chirping) Our role in this one here is mainly being a partner, just joining in on that succession development, on that dynamic, being part of that dynamic.

So, I don't like to see myself as a steward of the land, more like a partner in the development of the highest expression of life that we can see in this particular spot. It is, of course, a fairly labor-intense system, and a great part of the labor consists of sitting around in the food forest and observing and listening to the birds and having a good time, that takes up a lot of our work time. So, it is just a very enjoyable work life.

(birds chirping) - I enjoy the variety. I enjoy that there's never a boring moment on the farm. It's always different and that's much due to, it not only being a syntropic agroforestry farm, it's, that's where the other element of our farm, which is the permaculture side, comes through.

We have goats, we make sauerkraut, we have a market garden. We ride horses, we do earth building. We have such a variety of occupations within our business that in the end, it's not a job.

It's a livelihood, it's a lifestyle. And that's really important to bring that spark of life back into our soul. - This area here was already a food forest that had a few mistakes.

We always make mistakes, but we try to make better and better mistakes. And, in some ways it was so bad that we wanted to reset and restart it, including more diversity and density than we had before in terms of trees. So, we are resetting the system here, or we did that half a year ago in winter, and as we opened up the eucalypt canopy, and we cut back the Tithonia, there was a lot of light, and we came in planting some potatoes as an experiment.

So, now we're going to see what happened to them, yeah? And at the same time, as we do in syntropy, the weeding is the harvesting. So, now we do the weeding, or the pruning.

And at the same time, we see what we can get as a harvest, as a bonus, right? So, Frida, let's go in and cut some back and see what the potatoes are doing. (machete thudding) Okay, let's see what's for dinner.

Look at that, one plant. There're some crops, it's not about how much you produce but with how much input you produce it. So, these are two plants of potatoes, and no other work than, what we did was take a potato, use a machete, put the potato down and put mulch down, and it was all we did.

(gentle music) The question always is, can you mechanize it? Can you scale it up? And, as if the bigger the better sort of thing, and yes, you can do it.

And it has been done. In Brazil, they have developed certain machinery that can do that on big scale, faster. It can actually compete with modern agriculture, on the same price level and so on.

So it ticks all of those boxes. However, I don't think one has to every time scale up things just because one can. It's probably more important to have more small-scale farmers doing that, rather than some few big ones doing it.

The downside of scaling up and mechanizing is that you end up streamlining things and reduce diversity. It's just part of the game. And personally, I would miss the diversity.

I love the crazy diversity that we have here. (gentle music) - So, we're here in our greenhouse, hothouse. It's our tropical environment.

We're creating a microclimate environment that mimics that of a tropical region. So the species we have in here are tropical papaya, moringa, cacao, guavas, tropical guavas, Thai guavas, as well as ginger, turmeric, things that can grow outside in our region, but just do so much better in this small tropical environment where they're from. Syntropic agroforestry is a philosophy that incorporates specific practices and techniques that can be applied in any region, in any climate.

The details in which, what species and what plants and what soil you have, they're all details that determine the different plants that you work with. But the principles and practices of syntropic agroforestry is limitless in climate and region. - The name syntropy doesn't have anything to do with subtropical.

(Klaus laughs) It works in any climate zone. It's using the natural laws of succession, plant communities following each other, building up microbial communities below soil surface. It happens all around us.

We need to actually understand it, and we need to do that for every climate zone. - You never copy what a food forest is in one location to another. You're always there observing what the existing vegetation is, what the soil's like, what the climate's like, and also quite important, what the people are like that will be there to manage it, to live with it.

- [Sean] Amazing how much those bananas have popped up. - [Frida] Each one of them has like really shot up. - [Sean] Yeah.

- So this is a syntropic food forest, out at Ngāraratunua on Māori land that are occupied by whānau here. My family and my partner, Sean, and I implemented this system with the whānau, with the family, about three months ago. So, this is a three-month-old food forest that was established from previously being waist-high stagnant kikuyu.

So, with just that initial intervention of a digger, we incorporated the soil amendments and dug up the soil and planted everything from our annuals, our cabbages, our tomatoes, our potatoes, amongst all the fruit trees that we'll gain a harvest from, from year one to 40-plus years, as well as 200-plus native trees that are integrated in there, each to their own strata, from the low-loving, shade-loving plants to the high canopy trees like the kohekohe that could eventually be timber trees, or just amazing pollinators and creating that ecosystem for our native fauna and flora. When we implemented this system, we had 20-plus people here, friends, family, uncles, aunties, kuia, kids, we did it all together. And that's what was really special about translating what we've done at PermaDynamics to a different context.

Not only were we navigating different soils and different climates, but also different peoples' perspectives and relationships to the land. - This here syntropic food forest that's recently been installed three months ago was called Te Kōhanga, Te Kōhanga meaning the nursery, the nursery in which our people come to feed from, nourish from, learn from. When we got given the opportunity to embrace the syntropic food forest concept on Māori whenua, it was an opportunity that we were very excited about, because it very much aligns with our Māori philosophy and values.

(birds chirping) - So it is really dense. It doesn't have to be this complicated or dense, but for us we chose to put in as much as we could, to offer as much food and abundance as possible. So, you'll see little consortiums, little community of plants together, that you wouldn't think to plant, so, so closely.

So, for example, we've got a cabbage, we've got a potato, and a cucumber, that's sort of our first harvest, right at the foot of a banana tree and a tamarillo, which will be our next sort of two- to seven-year harvest, and amidst that we also have a kohekohe tree, which is our sort of climax native canopy tree that eventually could be just the forest itself. (gentle music) - [Sean] Yummy. Nice little harvest.

- [Frida] Yeah. - So we need to actually train people up fast in that technique, and do it on all scales possible, in all sorts of variations, with livestock, without livestock. And you can turn degraded wasteland around in very short time.

And we have produced huge amounts of wastelands all over the world. That's what we have been really good at. And our responsibility now is to turn exactly those wastelands back into thriving food forest, and syntropy is just the best technique for doing that, and what we need for that is people, and we have lot of people.

And it's a great way to get connected to an ecosystem and feel part of it. (gentle music) - We really see syntropy as a way of creating a positive story around humans' role in our ecosystem. And I think that can do a lot, to how we then relate to nature as one with nature, and not separate to nature.

We can create human-inclusive ecosystems that we can be a part of. (gentle music) - Hey everyone, thanks for watching the film. Over the three days we were shooting with PermaDynamics we filmed so much great footage that we really struggled to edit this film down to 25 minutes.

So instead of leaving all that footage to just sit on a hard drive, we decided to put all the extended interviews, as well as the interviews that didn't make it into the film, up on our Patreon page. PermaDynamics themselves also have a bunch of great videos up on their Patreon. So if you're keen to dig deeper into syntropic farming, links to both of our pages are in the description.

So thanks again for watching, and we'll see you in the next film.