This is an excellent essay, outlining the Biotic Pump Theory, and then adding in the role of syntropy - "the intelligence that builds upward."
It seems to me that the work of pioneering systems ecologist Howard T. Odum would also fit in here, with his Maximum Power Principle (a proposed 4th law of thermodynamics), where syntropy runs counter to entropy: "During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."
Thank you, David, for bringing Howard T. Odum into the conversation. Maximum Power Principle offers a very fertile bridge for thinking about syntropy, especially because both perspectives look at living systems as open, self-organizing systems that capture, transform, and circulate energy in ways that reinforce their own continuity. But I think Odum's principle is more about efficiency and throughput, while syntropy, as Fantappiè first described it and as Götsch applied it to agriculture, points more towards increasing complexity and coherence, or the accumulation and organization of energy into more differentiated, more interconnected forms. Entropy and syntropy, in that sense, are not opposed but complementary (as Götsch puts it, "like inspiration and expiration"). In practice, this distinction shows up in how we think about the role of the pruning, for example. A deliberated (and well-timed) pruning in a syntropic system induces an entropic event that creates the conditions for a more complex, more differentiated reorganization afterward. So, it is not primarily about maximizing energy capture in that moment but it is about creating the conditions for a syntropic surge, by redirecting dispersed energy toward the next successional stage. But, yes, Odum offers an importnt analytical principle for reading self-organization across systems. Thanks again!
Firstly, Is there anyone following Anastassia, Alpha Lo, Regenesis or even from the Biotic Pump Greening Group who will be attending the UN Water Conference in the UAE later this year? I only became aware of it because the World Farmer (ing?) Organization requested our Zambian National Farmers Union for comments on the WFO's submission to that UN Water Conference. I didn't comment so much on the submission (which addressed the issue of water regulation) but proposed that Humanity's only chance was to strengthen and enhance the Terrestrial Water Cycle - the Biotic Pump. (You mentioned both the need for complex forest (or at least tree cover) and the need to repair the soil. I believe you omitted the need to raise the water table, which will be the hardest sell. But, just as they have proven with fisheries, when we set aside 30% as a breeding reserve, we all catch more fish. So, if we raise the water table (by restricting our pumping of ground water) we will all have more water to use - through enhanced rainfall.)
Secondly, I think a mistake that is often made when environmentalists point to Nature as a role model, is that the Amazon, or the Serengeti are not actually productive in the sense that us humans (with 4 billion of us living in towns and cities) require. More or less everything that lives in the Amazon, dies in the Amazon (ditto the Serengeti). Syntropic farming is great for feeding small local communities, but I believe it needs modification in order to make it productive (or extractive) enough to feed 4 billion people in cities - and rising. My own thoughts on a compromise can be found in Farming as a System, on the Farmers Handbook page of www.Radio4pasa.com
On the UN Water Conference, I don't know of anyone from our circle confirmed to attend. But the fact that the water cycle argument reached a WFO submission through your prompting is exactly the kind of capillary path these ideas need.
On the terrestrial water cycle, I think you're pulling on the right thread, and the fisheries-reserve analogy is a nice way to make "restraint produces abundance" legible to people who think in yields. My one caution is that strengthening the water cycle only delivers what we need if we mean the full mechanism: condensation-driven circulation pulling moisture inland, the whole physics, not the softer, more marketable "let's recycle a bit more local moisture" version that tends to circulate in some spaces). The difference matters enormously for what we can honestly promise policymakers.
A small clarification on what I argue: it's never "tree cover." Green cover alone can even make things worse. Simplified reforestation has repeatedly produced low tree survival, poor ecological function, and sometimes more disrupted local water cycles. What does the work is functional complexity: stratification and succession, many species across many layers and time. And yes, the water table belongs in the picture.
Where I'll gently push back is on the idea that syntropic farming only feeds small communities, and on the framing beneath it. Every ecosystem is productive in the sense that it sustains the life appropriate to its successional stage. Abundant systems (those that can support large animals) are in fact managed by those animals, which steer the system toward producing what sustains them. A syntropic system isn't extraction laid over wild nature; it's a farming system that reproduces the productive logic of a forest, with us guiding it toward our needs and preferences. So the Amazon isn't "unproductive". It produces precisely what its community requires. And that community has included thriving human populations who managed and even planted more forest, as recent archaeological records increasingly show. The evidence that this guidance is scalable is solid. A recent review synthesizing 67 studies of syntropic systems (spanning small plots to large mechanised operations) found total-system yields frequently higher than monocultures (43–200% in several cases), land-equivalent ratios of 2.8–4.1, and one case estimate matching conventional soy–maize–milk income on a tenth of the land. The obstacles it identifies are labour, knowledge, suitable machinery, and policy, which means economic and technical problems, not a productivity ceiling. The "feeding the world" argument (historically used for postponing ecological responsibility) must come together with other debates such as distribution, economics, and politics... but that's another conversation.
I'd genuinely like to read your "Farming as a System". Thanks for sharing it!
I haven't got you to understand the difference between the farming systems that we need to develop to feed cities, and the Amazon. Indeed the Amazon supported (and still supports) a considerable human population of Amazonians. But, they are effectively Subsistence Farmers, and, like all the other Life in the Amazon, live and die there. It is the EXPORT of nutrients (and energy) from our crop lands to the cities that is the challenge, to which we need to find a solution. I am satisfied that Syntropic Farming goes some way to meeting this challenge, but I do not think it is sufficient.
I do follow that the net export across distance is the real challenge. The Amazon's near-closed loop doesn't directly model it, you're right. A forest returns in place what it takes up and a city doesn't.
What I'd reframe is that the difficulty isn't whether the land can produce enough to export. Per hectare, well-managed systems tend to over-produce, not fall short. The difficulty is that the export is currently one-way and uncaptured. Most of what leaves a farm for the city doesn't even arrive as nutrition that feeds someone, and even the genuinely rock-derived minerals that leave in the harvested mass can be returned if we organize that flow too. This leads me to believe that what's insufficient is the loop, not the farming. So I'd say a production system becomes sufficient when it's paired with closing the loop, returning urban organic residues and recovered nutrients back to the land that fed the city. I suspect we're closer than the thread suggests. Thanks, Bruce.
Exactly, we HAVE to close the loop, and, until we do, nothing we do (while feeding our urban brethren) can be considered truly sustainable. Closing the mineral (nutrient) loop is perhaps close, but (from what I understand) most sewage sludge contains unwanted hormones and heavy metals, so the challenge is to purify it economically, and to get the sludge concentrated enough that it can be transported back the significant distances to the crop land that produced the food in the first place. Closing the Energy loop, is more challenging - very little energy gets returned in any sewage sludge. That is why I believe Syntropic Agriculture and Alley cropping systems are better, because they can be organized to photosynthesize for most of the year, which annual crops don't.
This is an excellent essay, outlining the Biotic Pump Theory, and then adding in the role of syntropy - "the intelligence that builds upward."
It seems to me that the work of pioneering systems ecologist Howard T. Odum would also fit in here, with his Maximum Power Principle (a proposed 4th law of thermodynamics), where syntropy runs counter to entropy: "During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."
Thank you, David, for bringing Howard T. Odum into the conversation. Maximum Power Principle offers a very fertile bridge for thinking about syntropy, especially because both perspectives look at living systems as open, self-organizing systems that capture, transform, and circulate energy in ways that reinforce their own continuity. But I think Odum's principle is more about efficiency and throughput, while syntropy, as Fantappiè first described it and as Götsch applied it to agriculture, points more towards increasing complexity and coherence, or the accumulation and organization of energy into more differentiated, more interconnected forms. Entropy and syntropy, in that sense, are not opposed but complementary (as Götsch puts it, "like inspiration and expiration"). In practice, this distinction shows up in how we think about the role of the pruning, for example. A deliberated (and well-timed) pruning in a syntropic system induces an entropic event that creates the conditions for a more complex, more differentiated reorganization afterward. So, it is not primarily about maximizing energy capture in that moment but it is about creating the conditions for a syntropic surge, by redirecting dispersed energy toward the next successional stage. But, yes, Odum offers an importnt analytical principle for reading self-organization across systems. Thanks again!
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Lovely, LOVELY article Dayana.
I'll limit myself to two points - for now.
Firstly, Is there anyone following Anastassia, Alpha Lo, Regenesis or even from the Biotic Pump Greening Group who will be attending the UN Water Conference in the UAE later this year? I only became aware of it because the World Farmer (ing?) Organization requested our Zambian National Farmers Union for comments on the WFO's submission to that UN Water Conference. I didn't comment so much on the submission (which addressed the issue of water regulation) but proposed that Humanity's only chance was to strengthen and enhance the Terrestrial Water Cycle - the Biotic Pump. (You mentioned both the need for complex forest (or at least tree cover) and the need to repair the soil. I believe you omitted the need to raise the water table, which will be the hardest sell. But, just as they have proven with fisheries, when we set aside 30% as a breeding reserve, we all catch more fish. So, if we raise the water table (by restricting our pumping of ground water) we will all have more water to use - through enhanced rainfall.)
Secondly, I think a mistake that is often made when environmentalists point to Nature as a role model, is that the Amazon, or the Serengeti are not actually productive in the sense that us humans (with 4 billion of us living in towns and cities) require. More or less everything that lives in the Amazon, dies in the Amazon (ditto the Serengeti). Syntropic farming is great for feeding small local communities, but I believe it needs modification in order to make it productive (or extractive) enough to feed 4 billion people in cities - and rising. My own thoughts on a compromise can be found in Farming as a System, on the Farmers Handbook page of www.Radio4pasa.com
Bruce Danckwerts, CHOMA, Zambia
Thank you, Bruce, for your comment.
On the UN Water Conference, I don't know of anyone from our circle confirmed to attend. But the fact that the water cycle argument reached a WFO submission through your prompting is exactly the kind of capillary path these ideas need.
On the terrestrial water cycle, I think you're pulling on the right thread, and the fisheries-reserve analogy is a nice way to make "restraint produces abundance" legible to people who think in yields. My one caution is that strengthening the water cycle only delivers what we need if we mean the full mechanism: condensation-driven circulation pulling moisture inland, the whole physics, not the softer, more marketable "let's recycle a bit more local moisture" version that tends to circulate in some spaces). The difference matters enormously for what we can honestly promise policymakers.
A small clarification on what I argue: it's never "tree cover." Green cover alone can even make things worse. Simplified reforestation has repeatedly produced low tree survival, poor ecological function, and sometimes more disrupted local water cycles. What does the work is functional complexity: stratification and succession, many species across many layers and time. And yes, the water table belongs in the picture.
Where I'll gently push back is on the idea that syntropic farming only feeds small communities, and on the framing beneath it. Every ecosystem is productive in the sense that it sustains the life appropriate to its successional stage. Abundant systems (those that can support large animals) are in fact managed by those animals, which steer the system toward producing what sustains them. A syntropic system isn't extraction laid over wild nature; it's a farming system that reproduces the productive logic of a forest, with us guiding it toward our needs and preferences. So the Amazon isn't "unproductive". It produces precisely what its community requires. And that community has included thriving human populations who managed and even planted more forest, as recent archaeological records increasingly show. The evidence that this guidance is scalable is solid. A recent review synthesizing 67 studies of syntropic systems (spanning small plots to large mechanised operations) found total-system yields frequently higher than monocultures (43–200% in several cases), land-equivalent ratios of 2.8–4.1, and one case estimate matching conventional soy–maize–milk income on a tenth of the land. The obstacles it identifies are labour, knowledge, suitable machinery, and policy, which means economic and technical problems, not a productivity ceiling. The "feeding the world" argument (historically used for postponing ecological responsibility) must come together with other debates such as distribution, economics, and politics... but that's another conversation.
I'd genuinely like to read your "Farming as a System". Thanks for sharing it!
Thanks Dayana,
I haven't got you to understand the difference between the farming systems that we need to develop to feed cities, and the Amazon. Indeed the Amazon supported (and still supports) a considerable human population of Amazonians. But, they are effectively Subsistence Farmers, and, like all the other Life in the Amazon, live and die there. It is the EXPORT of nutrients (and energy) from our crop lands to the cities that is the challenge, to which we need to find a solution. I am satisfied that Syntropic Farming goes some way to meeting this challenge, but I do not think it is sufficient.
I do follow that the net export across distance is the real challenge. The Amazon's near-closed loop doesn't directly model it, you're right. A forest returns in place what it takes up and a city doesn't.
What I'd reframe is that the difficulty isn't whether the land can produce enough to export. Per hectare, well-managed systems tend to over-produce, not fall short. The difficulty is that the export is currently one-way and uncaptured. Most of what leaves a farm for the city doesn't even arrive as nutrition that feeds someone, and even the genuinely rock-derived minerals that leave in the harvested mass can be returned if we organize that flow too. This leads me to believe that what's insufficient is the loop, not the farming. So I'd say a production system becomes sufficient when it's paired with closing the loop, returning urban organic residues and recovered nutrients back to the land that fed the city. I suspect we're closer than the thread suggests. Thanks, Bruce.
Exactly, we HAVE to close the loop, and, until we do, nothing we do (while feeding our urban brethren) can be considered truly sustainable. Closing the mineral (nutrient) loop is perhaps close, but (from what I understand) most sewage sludge contains unwanted hormones and heavy metals, so the challenge is to purify it economically, and to get the sludge concentrated enough that it can be transported back the significant distances to the crop land that produced the food in the first place. Closing the Energy loop, is more challenging - very little energy gets returned in any sewage sludge. That is why I believe Syntropic Agriculture and Alley cropping systems are better, because they can be organized to photosynthesize for most of the year, which annual crops don't.