Syntropic Agriculture as a philosophy, respect as a categorical imperative. Conversation with Ernst Götsch

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«Each of nature’s works has an essence of its own; each
of her phenomena, a special characterisation: and yet,
their diversity is in unity»
– J.W. Goethe, Maximen und reflexionen

 

Ernst Götsch (b. Raperswilen, Switzerland, 1948) did it for everyone: he figured out how to bring back the forest and feed us all. He called this intuition Syntropic Agriculture – a circular model in which the concept of waste does not exist, because everything is transformed into nourishment, for every organism. While traditional agriculture only works with the two dimensions of length and width, Syntropic Agriculture also introduces the dimensions of height, conceived as the stratification of herbaceous species, and time, that is, the ecological succession through which an ecosystem naturally and generously evolves.

Ernst Götsch devoted himself to Syntropic Agriculture in a life of passionate physical and intellectual work. You can see it imprinted in every line of his face. He speaks to me from his fazenda Olhos D’Água, water eyes, a 480 hectares agroforest in the south of Bahia where the resurrected nature of a soil considered poor and irrecoverable until the early 1980s today generates products of excellence without the help of external fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation. In just five years of applying its principles, the biodiversity of Olhos D’Água has become comparable to that of the pristine rainforest. Today, the Götsch Agenda – a compendium of agrarianism and philosophy – is taught in schools and universities, in the press, on social media, even on television, and is gaining more and more adherents.

My historical matrix involves starting the discourse from the genesis of Syntropic Agriculture, when I virtually meet Ernest Götsch, at that moment in his day between waking up and immersing himself in the green of the fazenda. I go back to the roots and meet the beginning of his journey towards the definition of Syntropic Agriculture, when he was doing research on the genetic improvement of plants at the FAP Zürich Reckenholz (now Agroscope, research centre for agriculture, food and the environment), in Switzerland. In this time place, I would like him to tell me about the catalyst that led him to change his approach: from trying to make the plant more resistant to the environment, to trying to make the environment ideal for the plant’s development. «It was observation,» he first replies. «Together with some friends and colleagues, I participated in the improvement of weeds, cereals like corn, and other things. And it was always the same: if you test them in a small area, they do well. Every day they did well, but their tolerance or their resistance was only a small trick. We tried to convince nature that it’s all okay».
«For me,» he proceeds, «diseases are not something bad, but rather agents of the department of optimization of life processes. They manifest themselves, they intervene when there is an error, when life processes are not optimized. In the forest, as long as we don’t intervene in an inconvenient way, pests and diseases are not dominant features. They all are present in order to remove the plants that have fulfilled their function, or that are no longer in the right position. There’s no function for them, and so they are taken out. But life continues and other plants, their substitutes, do well as long they will be able to fulfill their function and realize their tasks, in the sense that nature is a macro-organism. Nature, for me, is part of the instrumentarium of planet Earth. Planet Earth has created its strategy of being, but we don’t see it. If we would see it in this way, we would act in a completely different way. And then we too – we are not the only intelligent species, but we are part of an intelligent system. And this makes a huge difference. About fifty years ago I had in my mind, and later wrote about, the 15 principles – a Tao of our comprehension of life[1]».

I point out to him that this was in the 1970’s, when the ecological crisis was already being discussed, but not as much as it is today: «It is true» he argues, «the ecological crisis was present, it was visible, but it was not yet so urgent as it is nowadays, so my contribution was not yet in response to a feeling of urgency. Truth is, I’ve always thought of myself as a farmer, even when I was doing research in genetics I always acted as a farmer. If plants feel unwell, they will not produce – it will become expensive to cultivate them, because you need allies from outside, and that’s economically not intelligent, so to say. This is like working as a slave for others and not working together with nature; it’s against nature. And so for me, at that time, it was not so clear in my mind as it is nowadays. It’s not about ecology. Look, it’s not upon us to save life on this planet, but we have to figure out how to develop strategies, how to be able to survive, to let us live on this planet. Because, in a way, we act suicidal – in all ways suicidal. We have to change our strategies, and so for me it’s not about ecology, it’s about intelligence. About eighteen years ago, I began to read ancient Roman philosophers. Well, for them it was out of question to use fertilizers from an external source. If you read Pliny the Elder, who lived more than two thousand years ago, you’ll find him telling us in a very beautiful language that the olive tree is growing in the shade of the purple tree, and the f ig tree in the shade of the olive tree, and then the peach tree in the shade of the fig tree. In the wintertime, the herbs and vegetables, they grow in the shade of all of them. They cultivated cereals, wheat, legumes, and vegetables – most of the vegetables we eat are Mediterranean, and they adopted and transformed them in cultivated plants. Look, the Roman Empire survived for about a thousand years, our civilization will not survive that long, I say. In a very short time, we depleted the ecosystem and brought it to a collapse».

The voices of ancient philosophers often echoed his own, in his public speeches disseminating the principles of Syntropic Agriculture; in fact, Ernst Götsch often claimed that Syntropic Agriculture is a way of thinking, a philosophy. A statement whose meaning I ask him about: «Syntropic Agriculture is more a system of applied philosophy, rather than a technique. I use certain techniques and the dynamics of natural species succession, which we can describe as copying what nature does in its s trategy, to move in space. For me, natural species succession means that life has developed to move in space and time. We are part of an intelligent system and part of a macro-organism. And so we are not the commanders-in-chief, we own nothing. We are only part of a macro-organism. A disharmonic behavior of parts that constitute a macro-organism induces modifications in that very macro-organism. As a result of that, the presence of the non-harmonious part may be redundant. This is what happened to the human species in the last twelve thousand years, starting from the very Roman Empire – first removing forests to plant crops locally; later on, believing that he’s more intelligent, he did it regionally, causing a more powerful collapse. And finally, he did this continentally. In the Roman Empire, agriculture was dominated by huge enterprises with a lot of slaves working on huge fields. What we do now is we use machines. They did it by the employment of slaves, it was the same thing. But that is considered extremely sustainable».
For this reason, Götsch invites me to read what Cicero wrote in his De Vita Rustica. «Cicero spent a lot of time on his piece of land, whenever he had some spare time, and not only to have peace. He loved to work, and he said that agriculture, in his opinion, was the most sophisticated art human being ever developed. And what do we think now? In the last sixty or seventy years, those who don’t get to study medicine or law, well… the last thing they still can study is agriculture. And they don’t really study agriculture, they are taught to apply a little stupid recipe, one they don’t even understand. We do not know anything about what we are doing, and we consider the soil like something you just can give some liquid fertilizers. Then you have an attack of something we call pests and diseases, you fight with some poison against the nature of fungi and bacteria, which have their spores everywhere in the atmosphere and the stratosphere. It’s completely ridiculous if you look at that, because to get rid of them we should poison the whole atmosphere, and the whole stratosphere, because they are there, and they come from there. So, for me, agriculture in the way we are doing it comes from a very limited, and s traight, and poor vision of our environment, its life, and our function on this planet, because I am convinced that humankind didn’t become, two hundred thousand years ago and up to now, the dominant animal species. All species that appeared, they occur in a context completely contrary, quite the opposite of what we are doing. Let’s say they are life creating more life. We are doing the contrary, and we are not able to be in some way useful – let’s say serviceable to life, which would be the first strategy to survive on this planet».

It strikes me, when Götsch talks about us not being commanders-in-chief. And so I ask him whether removing the human being from the center of the scene – in other words, rejecting Anthropocentrism – is a fundamental part of Syntropic Agriculture (and, in my innermost self, I hope that this might be enough to save us from ourselves). «It is part of it,» he clarifies, emphasizing the complexity of the discourse. «It’s not the central part, it is part. In fact, if you read the beginning cited 15 Principles, you will figure out that we are part of a macro-organism, and we are not commanders-in-chief. And for this, I intentionally cite a man who in the last five hundred years has been considered just a teller of fairy tales: Aesop. In one of his parables (mind you, they are not fables, all of them are parables) he let Chronos, who created the beings on this planet including the man, say: “Man, I brought you to this place, this is your paradise, multiply yourself and occupy the place. You can do whatever you want, be creative. There is only one exception, the laws according to which the macro-organism, part of which you are, are given. Not even to us, gods of Olympus, is it incumbent to make these laws by our own.” The man was happy, he was proud, but one day he came to the conclusion that if he could have created the laws by himself, he would have been more powerful than the gods of Olympus. This is what we learn at school today – that we are more powerful than the gods of Olympus, who are in fact characters. And so he began to do it, and by doing this, he ended up in conflict, in war, with those characters. Then Chronos, scratching his head, decided “I will kill him.” He stepped down from Olympus, but when it came to man, he decided differently. As a punishment for his disobedience and bad behavior, “I will split him in two halves.” He did it, and so, as a result, “You will be looking for that missing other half without being able to find it, and at the same time, you will have to cultivate your food, and this could be lethal for you, for your species.” There is nothing more, no bigger punishment than being lethal, because all species act in a way to fulfill their function, to move by inner pleasure, and then they do it; by doing it, they create and co-create their actual conditions, and prepare the place for the next generation to come. When your task is done you can retire yourself, because you did your job, it’s not going into nothingness. As Socrates also said in one of Plato’s Dialogues, dying is not going into nothingness. He fulfilled his function, so he was neither worried, nor angry. He could go away with confidence, it’s all done. Instead, nowadays, the modern man acts in the sense of After me, the flood. That is very sad, and will bring us to the black hole, to disappear».

I therefore invite Götsch to have a turn with me and look carefully back into history, and point my finger at how the invention and evolution of what is considered in Western countries to be traditional agriculture has changed human society. I would like him to scale, the way our society works today. He answers me like this, painting a Platonic scene with the colors of Aristotelianism: «Well, I would like to first cite an ancient Roman proverb, later echoed by Feuerbach, that says You are what you eat. If you change the way of cultivating what we eat, of raising animals, this will have an influence. Also, I do my work driven mostly by inner pleasure, and in fact all species, all individuals of all generations are driven to realize their task by inner pleasure. And so, agriculture done in the way I am thinking of, could turn into an extremely attractive activity. This way, many people would begin to do agriculture, even people living in cities. They would begin to plant, and they would begin to graft trees, and they would begin to plant at least in front of their houses, or on their windows, or terraces. They would replant the forests, they would plant olive trees, and they would work and thrive. That would make them work together, sharing knowledge at one point and say “I did that, but it didn’t work well. Perhaps you will do it better!”. And so, once again, it would transform itself in a very attractive activity and everybody would like to do it, and would indeed do it. And it would change completely our society, and it would make redundant and useless toxic chemicals. Even medicine, most of the medicines we use, they wouldn’t be necessary anymore. It would result in that. And then the whole pharmaceutical and medicine industry would enter into collapse, because all diseases have their psychophysiological reason behind them. Then if you would work together with nature, enter in harmony, everybody would feel good. You would have health and you would act in a completely different way, and then it also would change our society completely because doing things together, working together, in cooperation, would no more result in outcasts, and no more result in prisons».
«So,» he goes on, «no more necessity of other worlds, we would come back to the paradise. Not to mention that it would make us completely food independent, for me it’s clear. Let’s just say, if we did that, the climate would be completely different. Try once to go to the forest, to a beautiful forest: the temperature outside might be 40 °C, but if you’re entering a forest it’s 32 °C and it’s very pleasant, not dry, it’s very, very pleasant. And then the sounds it makes are all different. This is how my farm is. Some years ago, our ornithologist, in one and a half days of work spent here, found 32 different species of hummingbirds and about 120 species of other birds. It’s a lot of birds. Every hour of the day there are some birds around. And we know from scientific research that the song of the birds harmonizes life, and it improves the growth and health of the plants. People think I’m joking when I say I’m living in paradise, but it’s true».

I look at Götsch on the screen as he speaks to me, with the light filtered through the canopies of the trees he himself planted more than thirty years ago, and I cannot help but ask him if, after a lifetime of work and research, he feels he has reached some f inal conclusions, or rather whether he sees it as a constant work in progress: «I came to some final conclusions. I said to people, some forty or forty-five years ago when I began, that one day, when I will no longer be able to climb trees and do what I’m doing, then I will begin to teach. Nowadays I’m still climbing trees, but I’m also teaching. I came to a conclusion that could be significant: that the learning process never ends – on the contrary, the more you have learned the wider the horizon, and the more you see, the more there is to see. Every day I find new things and new questions. I believe we got our capacity for abstract thinking, and for creating complex tools or instruments, not by accident – this is part of our human nature, and we should use it in order to create synergetic situations between different species. If we use it in a more adequate way, then every day will be more beautiful. There will be so many things we can pass to the next generations. And once again, at the very end, you can retire and say “All done, now.” And it will be a retirement like what you perhaps experience when you have a good day and say “I did good work,” so you go to bed and sleep well. And so for me, for my last day, I would expect to be able to say “All done, now”».

After all, I tell him – and he agrees wholeheartedly – that a farmer never retires. It is here that I tell him the story of my father, ninety-one years old, a farmer all his life: «He is fifteen years older than me. Maybe he’s too good to quit,» Götsch remarks with a smile. He actually is, I think to myself. I tell him that he was born in Sicily in the 1930s, when Sicily was a very different place compared to today. He s tarted farming as a child by seeding the soil barefoot, learning farming the way my grandfather taught him, but then, growing up, he converted to the new post-WWII way of farming. He ended up growing flowers on a big scale, using artificial fertilizers and pesticides. When he retired, he started growing vegetables for the family on a small piece of land. My siblings introduced him to the teaching of Rudolf Steiner and convinced him to change his approach. And it’s peculiar, to think that he is ninety-one years old and he is now partially relearning something he already knew, and lost. The father of Syntropic Agriculture listens to me attentively, and with a touch of empathy confesses: «I had similar experiences with my father. I can understand your father because he had been submitted to a very intensive brainwashing in the beginning of the 1950s. Even in our small Swiss village of about sixty inhabitants, two Americans – this was in 1952 or 1953 – came to explain that Switzerland no longer needed to do this or that. They showed people films they had never have seen before, with all of these war machines along with agricultural machines used in the United States, and the toxic chemicals they called sterilizers and pesticides. They told us “All you have done up to now is obsolete.” And nobody would like to be obsolete. No, no. That was so wrong. Farmers had to somehow forget what they were doing. And many, very many of them have actually forgotten it».
And continues with the story: «In the beginning of the 1950s, my father cultivated potatoes without the use of any pesticides, covering the soil with more than twenty centimeters of straw, mixed with a little bit of cow dung, no plastic over it. He planted at the end of March. And in mid-June the potatoes were at the point to be harvested. No diseases. Beautiful potatoes. One day, he sold his farm and bought a small piece of land about 100 by 60 meters, cultivated what he needed for himself, and bred a few sheep. This time he did all what was done in modern agriculture. He was one of the f irst who bought at that time, because he could afford it, some herbicides to clean the borders of his place. And so one day I was visiting him and said “Father, why do we do that? We could cultivate the potatoes in the way you cultivated in the past,” “Oh, in that way. No, but that is not normal to do,” he told me. “Why not? Could you give me a small piece of your land to cultivate?” He said yes, and so I asked him, “Father, don’t apply any toxic chemicals, any fungicides, no insecticides to my potatoes.” He said, “If you believe that it’s necessary to grow them without those medicines, then fine, I will give them nothing.” Then I came back in June, when he had harvested both his and my potatoes. He said to me: “Honestly, your potatoes are more beautiful than mine! And now I remember what you said, that’s what it meant when you asked me that.” Since the end of last World War, the same language and philosophy were used systematically to brainwash. No longer teaching people useful things, but turning humankind into something like slaves by the ones who consider themselves as the owners of this planet. And everybody learns it at school, at university, and repeats it. In order to get your degree, you have to swallow what you learned, and repeat it afterwards; only if you do that in a convincing way, you can get your degree».

It is even clearer to me, through his answers, how Syntropic Agriculture is not merely a set of techniques to be applied to the soil, but a conceptual and critical apparatus that moves from the realization of the inadequacy of a certain system of teaching, and a certain pattern of language. We do not start from the soil; we do start from the mind. Thinking of Kantian philosophy, then, I ask him to reveal to me his personal categorical imperative, and it is here that it comes full circle for me, because Götsch speaks to me precisely of respect: «Mine? Well, look, this fits from day to day in all situations: “Act in a way that the principle submitted to your interactions can also be applied to yourself,” which is, as you said, a categorical imperative. And I really act in this way. And if you do that, it gives you a completely different sensation and different relation to all, to all your environment, to plants, to animals, to other human beings. You will act in a different way. And in fact, this categorical imperative, the so called Golden Rule, is indirectly part of many old religions, Buddhism, Taoism, also the Muslims have it as part of their own creed. It’s part of the most authentic human behavior, to allow us as human species to remain on this planet. It’s not something complicated, it doesn’t require you to have a sophisticated education. It’s only about feeling».

[1] Ed.’s Note: the 15 Principles of the Götsch Agenda are available in full @ www.agendagotsch.com/en/syntropic-farming-principles-by-ernst-gotsch

 

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[1] NdR: i 15 Principi dell’Agenda Götsch sono integralmente consultabili @ www.agendagotsch.com/en/syntropic-farming-principles-by-ernst-gotsch