We came from Wallonia in Belgium, where the soil is heavy from the clay and the sky is grey, a region where everything is green all year round. We were surrounded by forests, with the exception of urbanisation, which stretches and stretches its concrete flow.
Travelling through Portugal, we fell in love with this quiet rural area, made up of large granite stones, olive and cork trees, sheep, cows and farmers, and we stayed.
We started the vegetable garden and did our first tree planting, as we did in Wallonia: rows of trees orientated north-south, to get as much sun as possible, a certain spacing so that the vegetables ‘air well’ and don’t get those damp diseases… You can imagine that we didn’t eat many of our vegetables that year and that our trees, if they survived, didn’t have the chance to grow much.
So we understood from experience what we had already been told: you have to think first about planting conditions and support for your cultivated species.
In other words, you have to recreate soil, water cycles, shade and biomass.
All this exists in the forest model
That’s how we started our research about how to change from a sandy soil, draining in summer, flooded in winter, and exposed to winds and sun, to a semi-forest area that can accommodate plantations and food crops.
‘Syntropic farming, on the other hand, enables the farmer to replicate and accelerate the natural processes of ecological succession and stratification, giving plants ideal conditions for their development, each occupying its natural position in space (stratification) and time (succession). It’s agriculture based on processes, not inputs. The agricultural harvest is seen as a side effect of the regeneration of ecosystems, or vice versa.’ (source : https://agendagotsch.com/pt/what-is-syntropic-farming/)
During this research, we discovered the work of Ernst Götsch and his model of syntropic agroforestry in Brazil. But Brazil is not Extremadura’s Portugal. We’re therefore looking to adapt these concepts, and we got inspired from the teachings of Annaëlle Théry, a French woman who has been doing this research work for several years, adapting Brazilian syntropy to her context in Bordeaux, and sharing with us her great creativity, her sense of research and her pragmatism.
Practically: we plant dozens of trees and support plants for the ‘cultivation’ trees, these plantations are reflected according to their development in time and space. Some of them will be used for ‘disturbance’, i.e. pruned several times during the spring to provide biomass and give the other plants a sign of growth. Others will be kept to provide shade tomorrow or in five years’ time… According to Annaëlle, today we are planting a film for the next 50 years. In this system, man is seen as a participant in a system that regenerates more quickly, and who benefits from abundant and qualitative harvests, the plants having grown in their perfect context.
The aim of the Miyawaki mini-forests is different. It is a pure project of reforestation accelerated by man, with the sole purpose of recreating the forest and all its benefits. It was designed primarily to reverberate urban spaces, but is definitely applicable in other, more rural contexts. See the article on Miyawaki mini-forest planting for more details.
Our aim in implementing a tiny forest on our land is to recover that relationship with the forest that is so precious to us, to recreate better conditions on our land so that it can host a resilient nursery and, in time, if the experiment is conclusive, to be able to offer, through the nursery, the opportunity to plant other tiny forests, perhaps on your land ?!
In 2025, we plan to test an edible mini-forest.
To find out more : https://agendagotsch.com/pt/what-is-syntropic-farming/ ; https://joala.fr/ ; https://vida.org.pt/guia-miniflorestas/