Syntropic farming: growing a food forest the way nature builds one
Syntropic farming, developed by Ernst Gotsch, farms with natural succession and stratification, using heavy pruning instead of fertilizer. Here is how it works.
Tag
Chop and Drop
Techniques for cutting support species — dynamic accumulators, nitrogen fixers, fast-growing shrubs — and leaving the cuttings in place as surface mulch. Covers timing cuts to maximise biomass, choosing species for continuous chop-and-drop cycles, and how repeated applications build organic matter and feed soil biology without removing material from the system.
3 articles in this tag on agripure.
Pruning leucaena for biomass — Götsch’s chop-and-drop, applied
Leucaena is not a crop you harvest. It is a pump you operate. Leucaena leucocephala — ipil-ipil , river tamarind — exists in a syntropic system to convert sunlight and atmospheric nitrogen into bio…
The understorey question during the secondary stage
The secondary stage is where most syntropic plantings either compound or stall, and the understorey is the reason. By years two to five the pioneers have done their work, the climax trees are in bu…