Ernst Götsch
Syntropic agriculture — planting and pruning by successional stage so that a system accumulates fertility instead of spending it.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Years
- born 1948
- Based
- Fazenda Olhos d’Água · Southern Bahia, Brazil
- Born
- Raperswilen, Switzerland, 1948; migrated to Brazil in the early 1980s.
- Before brazil
- Left a genetic-enhancement research post at FAP Zürich-Reckenholz, now Agroscope, having concluded the answers to his questions would not come out of a laboratory.
- Home ground
- Fazenda Olhos d’Água in southern Bahia, which he took full ownership of in the early 1990s. Almost 500 hectares of Atlantic Forest at the site have been recovered across four decades.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Götsch trained as a plant breeder in Switzerland and walked away from the laboratory, on the view that the questions he cared about could only be answered in a field. What he built in Bahia is now taught worldwide as syntropic agriculture.
The organising idea is that a planting should be designed by successional stage and by stratum — where each species sits in the light profile, and how long it lives — so that the fast, short-lived species pay for the slow, long-lived ones. Pruning, not fertiliser, is the main input: cutting is the signal that drives the next flush of growth, and the cut material is the mulch.
The claim the system makes is unusual and testable: that agriculture can be net-accumulating, adding biomass, water-holding capacity and soil where conventional cropping subtracts them.
Where to read them
- Agenda Gotsch — the official syntropic farming archive Articles, video, and the record of the Olhos d’Água work.
- Pruning instead of fertilizers and irrigation — Agenda Gotsch
Sources for this record
Corrections
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