Putting My Money Where My Mouth is: Introducing Syntropy

For the last two weeks, I have been working through some of the problems with conventional agriculture. Perhaps you have been thinking:

“This girl said that she would offer me a way to enjoy my salad guilt-free, and she not only failed to live up to that, but she’s also actually made me more stressed out by listing a bunch of problems I can’t solve. This blog is dumb. Where’s the syntropy part??”

I hear you, good people yelling at me through the screen, and have no fear: today’s the day we put the “syntropy” in “a year in syntropy.” Based on your intense fist-pumping celebration (which I can only assume everyone is doing), you probably couldn’t be more stoked to dive right in and start discussing microbial plant root interactions, but before we get too far into it, allow me to explain the basics.

The Basics:

Syntropic agriculture is a type of sustainable agriculture based on five main tenets.

1. Ground cover

Syntropic agriculture promotes the idea that no bare soil should exist anywhere on a farm. This includes the spaces between rows, as well as the rows themselves. It entails planting “cover crops” or “ground crops” to support healthy seed and soil development. Basically, every syntropic grower's fervent hope is that the average passerby would look at the farm, see a forest, complete with leaf litter, different grass types, and greenness not restricted to rows. Remember that plants also need certain nutrients to grow, so the implementation and use of nitrogen-fixing plants, and plants that provide other nutrients, would also fall underground cover in the syntropic method.

2. Maximize photosynthesis

To maximize photosynthesis, crops must be selected carefully to avoid competition. Light is a valuable commodity, and plants must be carefully planned out to optimize growth patterns.

3. Stratification:

This is, in my opinion, the most confusing tenet. Stratification deals with the basic principle that limited space=limited plant growth. When planting crops together, farmers have to understand the amount of space taken up by each plant. Stratification divides all plants into 5 main categories, or “strata”: emergent, high, medium, low, and ground cover. Emergent plants require the most sunlight and need to be in constant sun to thrive. They are also typically tall plants, such as corn or eucalyptus, but there are always exceptions. Currently, syntropic farmers think that emergent plants should take up about 20% of the space available to them, resulting in them getting enough sun without competition from other emergent plants and allowing the sun to nourish the other plants. Plants under the designation “high” need a lot of sunlight to survive, but less sunlight than emergent plants. Plants with the designation high should take up about 40% of their available space. Plants with the designation medium require a medium amount of light and take up around 60% of their available space.

Guess what amount of light plants with the designation low need.

Ding-Ding-Ding! Yep, it’s a low level of light! A million dollars to you. “Low” plants need low levels of light and should take up about 80% of their available space. Ground cover plants should take up 100% of the space available, as alluded to in the ground cover principle. The designation of a plant as emergent, high, medium, or low is fairly subjective and often occurs based on a farmer’s personal experience. Plant designation can change based on average climate, and plant designation is determined largely by trial and error. However, one helpful way to determine a plant’s strata is to observe under what conditions it grows in nature. Currently, this principle is still in development and happens in flux. The basic principle is to avoid competition between crops while providing each crop with the optimal environment for it to grow. These percentages are the current “best guess” for a general guideline in how to plant syntropically.

4. Developing Natural Succession:

In nature, forests grow on their own. This occurs because of natural succession-the idea that as one plant dies, another is ready to replace it. In agriculture, this tenet involves planting everything one patch of land would need to produce crops for 100 years. That sounds like wayyy too many plants, but practically, this often looks like simple crop rotation. For example, if a farmer is interested in harvesting both corn and sunflowers, seeds of both species would be planted simultaneously, but the corn would naturally germinate and grow before the sunflowers. Once the corn was harvested, the sunflowers would germinate and grow. That’s the basic method. Take that idea, multiple it by about 100 times, and you have developed natural succession.

5. Active Management

Management is perhaps the most important tenet. This is how syntropic agriculture can be used as a successful business plan and provide ample food resources to the community. If done correctly, syntropic farms can exist and thrive for years without human intervention. However, these farms will not be able to produce the same annual crops twice. In an unmanaged syntropic farm, once an annual crop is either harvested or cut down, it will likely not return. It will provide the springboard for the new crop instead. By retrofitting the farms for certain crops, i.e., planting new crops of annuals each year, but allowing the rest of the crops to grow as planted, a farmer who chooses to sell annual crops would have increased economic security and increased environmental health.

Over the next few months, I will explain each tenet in detail, elucidating both why it works scientifically and how it works practically. Once each tenet is addressed, I will also explain how to plan a syntropic row from the ground up (does that count as a pun? If so, pun intended!). I want to take you from here:

“I have no idea what “syntropic” is, but I guess learning about new ways to grow food is kinda cool.”

To here:

“I would survive in an apocalyptic wasteland because I fully understand how to grow and manage my own food.”

And guess what? That process has already started! Moving forward, please expect lots of diagrams. Well, a fair number of diagrams. They won’t be overwhelming or anything.

Next week: ground cover!

With plant-driven enthusiasm,

Ajah