49 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 ZürichReckenholz (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 life²». ² 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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