Syntropic Agriculture: Putting It All Together a.k.a. A Planting Guide
Okay folks, here it is. The ultimate (and also the worst; it’s the only one) guide to building and planning a syntropic farm. I should note that this can always be scaled down or up to the space you have. Got a window box? That’s perfectly fine. Got 100 acres of beautiful farmland you just don’t know what to do with? This is for you too.
This process can largely be divided into two steps: designing a row, and physically building a row. Designing a row is a complex, four-dimensional puzzle, highly dependent on personal goals. Which makes it both fun, and sometimes challenging. Again, you have to think about your row in your mind, kind of like you are Beth Harmon in The Queens Gambit, except instead of playing chess on the ceiling you are growing different combinations of plants together and seeing what works best. Still, even the best ceiling-forest can get a bit lost in the weeds, so syntropic practice recommends that each row have a driving force behind it. The construction of each row must be planned around a central plant, crop, or idea, i.e. a “heart”. Thinking about your row having a heart seems to be a mere aesthetic choice for syntropic practice, but humans have a long history of associating the human heart with love.[1] And we tend to take of the things that we love. This unconventional practice may actually help motive a syntropic farmer to put in the hard work, even if they do not realize it.
This “heart” could be almost anything: a specific crop or plant, such as an avocado, a more complex idea such as a strawberry rhubarb pie, or even a concept such as pollination. It is really just a good way to focus your thoughts throughout the planning of a syntropic row. Once you decided what the heart of the row will be, the process of designing and physically building a row can start. For instance, if a farmer has decided that their “heart” crop is avocado they may plot out the conceptual plan for their row using a simple chart
The above chart is a great planning and conceptual tool for this. It also allows the farmer to prioritize different plants, and to see ahead of time where there may be conflicts. We have talked a lot about planning: this chart is the best planner I have found for syntropic rows. You can also adjust this chart to meet your own needs. For example, I know a syntropic farmer who adds another row for legumes because legumes tend to behave differently from other plants.[2][3] The center of the above row is avocados. Now, the farmer knows that for the best quality avocados, there can be no other plants that are emergent strata in the 5-to-20-year mark and take up the same space as an avocado tree. Developing a syntropic row can get overwhelming. Picking a heart allows you to work out from a center point. Many farmers do this by first ignoring strata (counterintuitive, I know) and filling in “support plants”, or plants that they know work well with avocado.
In the case of this row plan, I know that avocados need a lot of water in the soil. I also know that banana store a lot of water and release it gradually into the soil.[4] At this stage, you could also add a successional plant for avocado, such as red cedar. You would also want to add a ground cover plant to cover your bases early on (pun intended!).
After you add the main support plants, you can go ahead and start filling in the rest of the chart. It is always a good idea to add a mix of crops that you believe will be profitable, i.e., raspberries, and that you believe will serve as good biomass for the row, i.e., corn and mint. With that in mind, this is freestyle time! Add what plants fit that you enjoy. I would recommend avoiding very prickly plants like roses, but it is really up to you.
Despite all the potential gaps being filled, this row is actually not done yet. In order to ensure that the row will function optimally, we got to add a few redundancies. In this case, redundancies mean that more than one plant should exist at each stratum. At first, it may seem like the crops would compete with one another, but if they occupy different physical space, this competition shouldn’t take place. For example, potatoes and peppers will not compete because they have different growing patterns, despite being in the same stratum. As I keep saying, we don’t know that much about plant niches so adding redundancies helps us mimic nature, the overall goal of syntropy.
With the initial chart filled out, the next step in designing a row is to plan out where to plant the crops. There are many different considerations when planning the physical elements of a row, including ease of harvest, worker safety, and biomass placement. The most common syntrophic row design is two tree lines, and then three to four rows of plants in between them. But again, syntropy is designed to be unique to each farmer and situation. Syntropic rows could be grown in any number of ways. If you are just starting a small plot or home garden, I would encourage you to experiment! If you are trying to grow crops for profit, it is typically to use rows because it makes it easier to use farming equipment. In a typical syntropic row, the tree crops would be planted on the outside of the row. Among these tree crops would be the majority of the other profitable crops in the low and medium strata. This is because the shade from the tree crops will be instrumental later in providing shade for these strata. We want to take advantage of what is provided by the environment. The middle of the row would have emergent strata, to take advantage of the full sun, and biomass crops, because adding biomass from the middle of the system is easier than trying to add it from the outside.
I made this row plan thinking about a larger background garden that would have to be harvest by hand. This allows for a level of flexibility in designing the width and breadth of the row that would be unavailable otherwise, if the rows were designed for largescale harvests that use machinery. Where crops are planted in the row is based on the individual planting needs of the crop. For example, a low strata crop that can be planted every 30 centimeters would likely be planted in the tree line, because the trees would provide the shade necessary for a low strata plant, and there would be space between the trees to harvest the plant. If a crop with those characteristics had been planted in the middle of the row, it would likely have less shade, and be harder to harvest. Alternatively, the middle rows are good for planting emergent crops such as corn, and crops planted for biomass, such as panic grass.
Most of this placement is just common sense. For example, raspberries are only planted along the outside edge of one row. This is because raspberries produce spikes along the stems, and if they were to be planted throughout the system, it would unpleasant to harvest other crops, and to harvest biomass. Besides safety and harvest considerations such as that, much of the specific of the row comes from the plants themselves. Avocadoes, the main crop harvested out of this system, need to be planted six to eight meters apart. This is the measurement the row is based on, as a result, it is eight meters long and six meters wide. This allows the maximum number of avocado trees per row to be planted. All the other crops can be placed around the parameters. Again, this is determined by the main crop, idea, or concept decided upon at the beginning of the process of designing a row. Our redundances also help us out a bit when we are planting. The inclusion of these redundancies guarantees that something will come up in that space and allows the farmer to avoid bare ground and gaps within the system.
Once the plan for a row is done, the planting can begin. Planting a syntropic row can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. The steps, although not very fun, are laid out in full here:
- Gather enough biomass to cover the entire top of the row with biomass up to a depth of two feet. Lay this next to the row.
- Hoe up the row and rake the loose dirt into a loose pile in the middle of the row. At this point, go through and pull out the loose green matter in the dirt, such as small stems of grass that were uprooting during hoeing. These can be added to the biomass line next to the row.
- Line the outside of the row with some type of timber. This could be banana plants, or more traditional timber such as oak or cedar. The row should now be a mound of dirt lined with logs of some kind.
- Shape the dirt into a rough “M” shape, such that there is a shallow trough in the center of the row.
- Cover all exposed earth with the biomass that was put aside earlier.
- Plant all crops through biomass layer, making sure to cover all bare earth around the plant but leaving the crop itself uncovered to maximize photosynthesis. The only crop that needs to be planted later is red cedar, which requires higher quality soil to grow. Red cedar should be added to the system about two years after the system is established.
- Water everything well at least once a day for the first week, and then water based on plant and soil needs.
If set up properly, syntropic farms need substantially less water than a conventional agricultural setup because covering up any bare ground and the use of water-retaining plant stems such as banana help to keep the soil moist. However, some measures of irrigation will still be required in the early stages of a syntropic farm setup because young crops are still vulnerable to drying out. As the system grows, the amount of water it requires as impute decreases. A one- or two-year-old system will likely require no water.[5]
And ta-da! You now have your very own syntropic row! Or home garden, or window box, or a great way to get your children to rake the yard by telling them the leaves are great biomass for their new garden. Whatever you chose to do, I hope that this guide helps in some way. I encourage you to adapt this to your own situation, and as long as you follow the five tenets of syntropy it should go well.
With a sincere hope that you will choose to play in the vast sandbox of syntropy,
Ajah
[1] Yalom, Marilyn, “How Did the Human Heart Become Associated with Love? And How Did It Turn into the Shape We Know Today?” ideas.ted.com. Hachette Book Group, April 16, 2020. https://ideas.ted.com/how-did-the-human-heart-become-associated-with-love-and-how-did-it-turn-into-the-shape-we-know-today/.
[2] Peoples, M. B., J. Brockwell, D. F. Herridge, I. J. Rochester, B. J. R. Alves, S. Urquiaga, R. M. Boddey et al. “The contributions of nitrogen-fixing crop legumes to the productivity of agricultural systems.” Symbiosis 48, no. 1–3 (2009): 1–17.
[3] Olde Venterink, H. Legumes have a higher root phosphatase activity than other forbs, particularly under low inorganic P and N supply. Plant Soil 347, 137–146 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-011-0834-7
[4] Sampangi-Ramaiah, Megha H., Kundapura V. Ravishankar, Shivashankar K. Seetharamaiah, Tapas K. Roy, Laxman R. Hunashikatti, Ajitha Rekha, and Pandurangaiah Shilpa. “Barrier against water loss: relationship between epicuticular wax composition, gene expression and leaf water retention capacity in banana.” Functional Plant Biology 43, no. 6 (2016): 492–501.
[5] Pers. Comm. Neil Haws. October
