Life in Syntropy

What Hacker News said

Strong rec alisson · 2020-01 · on “Deep Decarbonization: A Realistic Way Forward on Climate Change”

I think for agriculture the way to go is syntropic agriculture: [this video] I've seen people implementing this very successfully, I've been doing it myself for around 4 years now, and its very impressive how much carbon the soil stores after a few years on this practice.

Strong rec reginaldo · 2020-07 · on “Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable”

Ever since watching the video on syntropic agriculture which I bumped into by reading a comment here in HN [1], I've been doing some research on the matter. The practice seems promising. It seems to work at both small and large scales, so it enables small farms, which are very hard to defend as a business in the US. It also has a component of improving the value of land, by making marginal (sandy) terrain into productive agricultural land. The other interesting fact is that the productivity per acre for the individual cultivars when planted together is higher than if they were the only thing being planted. I can see those things combining to drastically increase products. The part of the vid

Recommends alisson · 2017-03 · on “UN experts denounce ‘myth’ that pesticides are necessary to feed the world”

Sure! When I started learning about agroforestry I looked for english books on the subject but didn't find good ones, Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway have really good info you could use. But in portuguese I've so a few good PDFs here, I guess that's because of the work of Ernst Gotsch here in Brazil, here's a good video that summarize his work: [this video] An agroforestry look like this: [LINK] Take very special attention to the ground on the video I linked above. So the main thing is the soil, the work will basically be always improving it by pilling up organic matter, from regular pruning and your organic waste too, the school must have good source of organic waste, also the city gardens/grass

Recommends alisson · 2018-03 · on “Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?”

We should be focusing into building soil and edible forest to harvest multiple floors instead of just that usual monoculture one: [this video] If we look closely forest's soil usually gets better and better, I see some people replicate this and seen some 'agroforest' with more then 5 years old and its stunning how productive there lands are, how diverse and how the soil just get better without adding external stuff like fertilizer, its a process type of agriculture instead of an input one.

Recommends alisson · 2018-12 · on “Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?”

There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food: Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: [LINK] he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now. Big producers joining to make it more scalable: [this video]

Recommends alisson · 2020-06 · on “What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture”

Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything "weedy" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning. This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed ev

Recommends beckman466 · 2022-01 · on “Healthy soil is key to feeding the world”

wish i could upvote this a hundred times. i love the work of Million Belay with The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) ( [LINK] ) as well as with the Stockholm Resilience Agency. this video of his and others like it really drove home the important core reasons to focus on soil health: [LINK] ( [LINK] ) also i think this video about Ernst Götsch and his 'syntropic' agroforestry is very exciting: [this video]

Recommends myshpa · 2023-09 · on “Farms that create habitat key to food security and biodiversity”

Very good movie. I'd also recommend Syntropic Agriculture, an agroforestry method pioneered by Ernst Gotsch. He personally reforested 500 hectares of degraded pastures and doesn't use any external resources such as pesticides and fertilizers. Instead, he employs methods like maximizing photosynthesis and selective pruning. As a result, his land now stands as one of the most fertile and biodiverse regions within the Atlantic rainforest, achieving even higher yields than traditional farms. As syntropic farmers often say, they grow the soil to grow the food. [LINK] [this video] [LINK] Another example would be the Natural Farming method pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka. He also practices farming without