Home \\ Our Work
Our Work
Why Forests4Farming?
Forests4Farming shows how farming can be done in a way that results in a positive balance! Conscious human action in harmony with nature is what drives us.
By embracing techniques that integrate health, vitality, and high productivity of our cultivated plants and livestock, we can simultaneously improve our soils and benefit the entire macro-organism “Pachamama”, our Planet Earth.
The key ingredient that makes this possible is KNOWLEDGE. We promote farming techniques that focus on healthy soils, integrate forests, and uplift farmers' livelihoods.
Inspired by nature’s strategies, we develop systems that create synergies between plants, animals, and soil life, which in turn increase diversity, life, and complexity over time.
Forests4Farming supports farmers in reshaping their practices to be both life-sustaining and economically attractive, creating the social and cultural conditions for peace, embedded in a conscious economy approach.
This is the only way to ensure our basic need to eat in the future, because after all ‘Mangiare é um atto agricolo’ (Eating is an agricultural act).
What we do
Our concept is based on and guided by the ‘TAO: 15 Principles for our comprehension of life’ written by Ernst Götsch as the culmination of more than 60 years of intensive study and application in his practice as a researcher and successful farmer. These principles draw from the rich heritage of ancestral strategies and are supplemented with essential new elements, techniques, and methods that have been meticulously tested across various ecosystems.
By utilizing these 15 principles in our farming practices, we achieve thriving health, vitality, and high yields of our plants.
By consistently applying these guidelines in our daily practices, the soil in our cultivated areas grows richer with each interaction. Our crops and trees yield exceptional health and productivity, resulting as a side effect in a growing stock of valuable wood. The pollarded material creates black soil and provides firewood while the tree trunks result in high-quality timber for construction and furniture. This approach creates an overall positive energetic balance.
Farming in this manner can become a powerful force in addressing many of today’s environmental challenges, which we have created through conventional ‘AGRICULTURE’. This term, derived from the Latin ‘Agros’, implies a monotonous landscape devoid of forests, which is the opposite of what nature offers. Such practices have dominated ecosystems for the past 12,000 years, ever since the last major ice age.
Therefore, let’s put it into action: FORESTS FOR FARMING!
Our agricultural model is based on trees, because trees are the most efficient, effective, and inexpensive way to combat climate change and to restore degraded soils. The more trees are planted and actively managed, the more water is pumped from the atmosphere into the soil. Water is virtually planted as Ernst Götsch always emphasizes.
While annual herbs and grasses send only 20% to 40% of their energy absorbed by photosynthesis to their roots, trees can send as much as 70%. Half of this is released as exudates, nourishing and stimulating beneficial soil microorganisms. This means that the above-ground biomass represents only 30% of the total picture. Carbon captured through photosynthesis and sent to the root systems accounts for more than two-thirds of total carbon storage. If we’re going to tackle climate change effectively, we must incorporate trees.
Deep-rooted, fast-growing trees that respond well to annual pollarding and are easy to manage are fundamental to our tree-based farming concept. They have become known as “Mother Trees”, according to the creator of this concept, Ernst Götsch. These trees provide a huge amount of organic matter and information for vigorous growth to our fruit trees and annual and perennial crops.
Our “Mother Trees” deliver numerous benefits, including:
- A boost in photosynthetic activity year-round acting like a high-performance athlete;
- Large-scale carbon sequestration in both living biomass and soil;
- Covered and enriched soils;
- Rejuvenation and stimulation for powerful new growth of all plants after pollarding;
- Improved microclimate conditions on the site of intervention;
- Enhanced humus formation, which in turn promotes
- increased water retention;
- reduction in plowing and weeding requirements;
- flourishing beneficial soil life;
- increased availability of nutrients.
Together, these factors contribute to:
- Productivity increase of the whole system;
- Food security, ensuring farmers healthy, nutrient-rich products;
- Prevention of rural migration, enabling farmers to become true guardians of biodiversity;
- Elimination of the need for external fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides;
- Creation of a strong ‘immune system’ in our crops through abundant organic material from pollarding, supporting vigorous health and productivity without disease or pest issues.
However, it is not enough to include a few trees. We need to plant them in high density, taking into consideration their different life cycles and the ideal light requirement for each tree species we include, also called stratification. These principles are part of a concept known as syntropic farming, which has been developed by the Swiss researcher and farmer, Ernst Götsch. Syntropic farming mimics nature, each time adding more life, complexity, and diversity to the system.
Strategic tree pruning and pollarding is the engine of the whole system, which keeps the soils covered year round, induces vigorous regrowth, feeds the soil fauna, and protects it from droughts, floods, wind, and erosion. Through syntropic farming, it is possible to produce truly sustainable fruits, nuts, vegetables, legumes, cereals, and raise livestock – not to mention the added benefits of timber, firewood, and fodder from the trees in the system.
We created Forests4Farming to spread this method around the world in a simple and educational way, bringing abundance to farmers, water to lost springs, and food forests to degraded lands.
Our work focuses on two primary areas:
- Supporting tree-based farming projects.
- Create a virtual learning platform that offers lessons and training focused on syntropic agroforestry, adapting it to the different ecosystems of each place,forming a dynamic farmer-to-farmer platform for sharing knowledge, experiences and techniques. This platform allows farmers and the wider public to contribute and understand the principles and techniques of this concept quickly and easily.
