How I Found Out About Syntropic Agroforestry

Preface: How I Found Out About Syntropic Agroforestry

Naturally I read about what I'm interested in, so with tree-based agriculture I started out reading J. Russell Smith's Tree Crops - A Permanent Agriculture, then continuing on to Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture, Robert Hart's Forest Gardening, Martin Crawford's Creating a Forest Garden, and Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmier's Edible Forest Gardens. Then I did some deep dives into the annals of The Northern Nut Growers Association, and NAFEX (North American Fruit Explorers). All this time I was watching videos and listening to podcasts with other tree crops growers who have read all that stuff and put it into practice - Stefan Sobkowiak, Sean Dembrowski, Akiva Silver, Eliza Greenman, Steven Edholm. Lucky for me I've been able to learn from the many lifetimes of information put out by caring, passionate, and dedicated people for whom eating food off of trees that they've grown is totally their jam.

At some point during this journey I overheard the word that ties it all together - Agroforestry. With this term in hand, I spent the covid years of 2020 through 2023 researching everything I could about agroforestry, in all its different forms and combinations. Turns out there's a lot of tree crop adjacent stuff going on you'd never think of unless you saw someone else doing it, like being a moss farmer or raising basket willows or raising flowering trees and selling the blossoms to flower shops. Agroforestry is a big tent, everyone's welcome, and I like the simple description of it put forth by The Savannah Institute: "Agroforestry is planting trees on farms on purpose."

Throughout my study of agroforestry I kept seeing thumbnails of videos with titles like "Syntropic Agroforestry Brazil" that almost always featured jungle scenes with banana leaves or palm fronds. For some reason I didn't click on them, probably because I live in a very cold climate and thought they were irrelevant to my situation, like "well it's tropical plants and 'tropic' is in the name, so it's probably just about farming in the tropics." And also from all my years doing permaculture stuff, the term syntropic sounded just like another hippiesque neologism. 

The Eureka Moment

So after several years of learning everything I could find on agroforestry and more or less becoming an expert on the topic, one day in late winter or early spring of 2023 I was bored and was just like, "ok, I keep seeing these videos come up in my feed, what the hell is syntropic agroforestry?" So I started watching some videos and it became very obvious very quickly that syntropic agroforestry was the most sophisticated and advanced approach to implementing agroforestry systems, both in terms of theoretical understanding and practical on-farm reality. In so many ways it "put it all together," from forest succession dynamics, to species selection, to tree establishment and long term management, tree-to-tree interactions, food system design, forest regeneration, etc. And it wasn't just a next level to agroforestry, but rather something deeper and more fundamental that applies to all the many faces of agroforestry. Syntropic agroforestry reveals a deeper understanding of how it all goes together, and once you see it you can't unsee it and you're just like, "OMG this is so obvious and it makes so much sense, I can't believe someone didn't put this all together sooner."