Active Management: How Does This Make Money?
By: Ajah Eills
Tags: Sustainability, Syntropic Agriculture, Farming, Management, Sustainable Agriculture

Active management

Here we are. The last tenet of syntropy. Active Management is, in a way, the most intuitive tenet of syntropy. It is also one of the hardest. After all, wanting to make a profit in a business is a very intuitive thought — learning how to make that happen can take substantially longer. Active management is a big part of what separates syntropic agriculture from more conventional restoration practices. Unlike most restoration practices, a syntropic farm has to both restore the land and profit off the land. So how do they do this? What does it look like? The answer, as always, is more complex than one might think.

A lot of it, as always, comes down to careful planning. Syntropic farmers must develop a 3-D syntropic plan that covers all of the strata for more than 50 years. Of course, this chart, like the one we discussed “here” is only 2-D. In order to make a farm real, you need to add a dimension or two.

Farmers, when building their syntropic farms, have to think in a 3-D model of what that farm will look like in 20, or 50, or 100 years. They need to take into account harvesting plants and the safety and health of workers. Planting a pricker-filled raspberry bush right beneath an apple tree for an example? No good. Workers would get hurt picking apples, and also all of the raspberries would be crushed. That’s not good business practice. It’s also just not good morally — we are all trying to be good people here, are we not?

Practice considerations such as these are very important when farmers plan out their farms. Long-term timber crops, such as Australia red cedar, should be planned not right at the beginning, but around two years into the life of a syntropic farm. These trees are very fragile as seeds, as they typically need a better quality soil, making it a better plan to plant them late, when you can be assured of the health of the soil. But because of that, a farmer would need to reserve space for the Australian red cedar, and not allow other plants to creep in. This means that a farmer must be aware of all the growing properties of their plants, and know which ones are “creepers” and like to spread out into space.

As you can imagine, this is a huge roadblock to farmers entering the syntropic field. It is hard to plan out a farm when so much of the planning is based on specific, inaccessible knowledge. Most syntropic farmers I have spoken with (and it’s only four, so I am not claiming that this is a representative sample by any means) have only gotten into syntroptics after years of conventional farming. As with any job, experience and knowledge builds up over time, and the experience and knowledge of conventional farming made it much easier for them to transition? to syntropic farming. As one syntropic farmer said to me last year, it would be a “hell of a job” for someone new to growing to begin syntopically.

That is why active management can be so difficult. It is not the most conceptually difficult task (again, it is fairly intuitive to say that a business should make money) but it requires a huge base of knowledge that is not quickly acquired.

I want to emphasize this point: It is extremely hard to plan a syntropic farm. I also want to emphasize this point: We can make it much easier. Information can be easily and quickly sent and received in this day and age. I can easily picture a database of plant information specifically geared towards syntropic growers. I am going to discuss this possibility more later in the year when I talk specifically about ways to overcome barriers to syntropic growing in the United States, but I wanted to include it here because planning the syntropic farm is a large part of active management.

But let us say that we have successfully planned and planted our syntropic farm, a big part of actively managing the space. How do syntropic farmers tackle problems, such as pests, without the use of pesticides or other additional material? If all the plants are designed to grow and then die after harvest to support the other crops, how do syntropic farmers make enough money?

Let’s start with a typical farm problem that one may deal with: pests. The key to understanding a syntropic response to all of these things is to change the viewpoint in which we see them. Although animals and bugs are often viewed as unwanted on conventional farms, there can be no healthy ecosystem without bugs and animals, and so, in line with our view of growing a forest, not a farm, syntropic farmers expect the infestations. Instead of looking at the pests as though they are completely unwelcome, syntropic farmers instead think about what the pest is telling them. Is this a natural pest? Is it due to a deficiency in the plant? Are these pests targeting a whole crop or just a few select individual plants? Do pest problems happen at a certain time of year? These are just some of the many questions that syntropic farmers may ask when they see a pest infestation. The answers to all of these questions inform the level of management required by the farmer. If the pest is a natural predator of the plant, it may actually be a blessing in disguise. Some syntropic farmers chose to do nothing about this type of natural infestation, believing that a natural predator will soon also come into the system, and eat the pest causing the problem.

It is true that most ecologists agree that the population dynamics of predators and prey are connected in some way. The most common explanation for how these populations are connected is a series of equations called the Lotka–Volterra equations. Essentially, this is a pair of complicated math equations that just end up saying that the population size of predators and prey track each other, and the predator’s population is just a little bit behind the prey population. It kind of looks like this (please excuse my awful diagram (I’m not even going to be so bold as to call it a graph):

The red is the predator and the black is the prey. As you can see, the two populations track each other. The predator, however, lags behind the prey, changing just half a step behind them. This makes sense, as predators eat prey, so let’s say that, at point A on the graph, the prey population has peaked, but the predator population hasn’t, it is still experiencing growth. As the prey population began to decline, the predator population peaked, and then declined after the prey population.

If you are a syntropic farmer who chooses to do nothing when pests come knocking, this curve means good news for you. Soon after the explosion of pests you should, according to Lotka and Volterra, have some new visitors all too happy to eat up the annoying pests.

But of course, it’s not that easy. Population dynamics are always in flux and can change based on the density of the population, or it can change based on other factors, such as the presence of alternative prey sources nearby. Many ecologists are still trying to find a perfect way to map population dynamics, and as they get more specific, they get more intense.

The truth is that we still don’t know exactly how population dynamics work, and there has been recent evidence that structured spaces, such as a farm, develop different community dynamics than an unstructured space, such as a natural forest. This could mean that predator and prey dynamics are very different on a syntropic farm. It could also mean that they don’t functionally change at all. So if you are a farmer, and you choose to wait for predators to come and eat your pests, know that it might work really well! It also may not work so well.

Luckily, there are other ways to control pests, other than the “wait and see” method. A recent development in pest control has been the development of Integrated Pest Management or IPM. IPM is a practice designed with the overall health of the surrounding ecosystem in mind, and it ends up employing many of the principles of syntropic already. It places a heavy emphasis on the health and quality of soil, as well as planning and planting your crops properly to help minimize pests.

A common use of IPM involves the deployment of biological pest controls, aka, things that eat the pests. Biological pest control is the release of predators into the environment to eat the pests. It is essentially like the “wait and see” method, but instead of wait-and-seeing, you are cutting out the wait and just seeing if the predators work. Spoiler alert! They generally do. In fact, the use of biological pest controls is actually much more effective on organic crops than conventional crops. Organic crops, just like syntropic crops, never have pesticides sprayed upon them, making them a great resource for pest predators. Now, organic crops aren’t exactly the same thing as syntropic crops, as organic crops are still planted in a monoculture. The use of monocropping does not encourage organic pest control, so it is relatively safe to assume that syntropic farms would have the same benefits of IPM. In addition, the use of intercropping has been shown to reduce pest levels overall, so syntropic farms should have fewer pests to manage anyway.

It can be extremely difficult to decide which biological control species to let into an area. There are countless examples throughout history of an exotic animal being released into an area and then devastating the local wildlife. Obviously, farmers would like to avoid that if possible. The choice of the right biological pest control is going to depend on the environment of the farm, the type of pest, and the time of year that the pest occurs. It would do no good to have a predator that preys upon the eggs of a pest if the pest is currently an adult. Luckily, there have been advancements in studying the movement of pests in order to help farmers out with the timing of their biological pest control. In fact, we can now predict when migrating pests will arrive with a high degree of accuracy using weather radars, which is incredibly cool. Basically, these huge radars track atmospheric dispersion, which is the movement of tiny particles throughout the atmosphere. They can use these data, along with “echos” to determine where pests are. An echo in atmospheric data is a specific type of pattern that indicates something in the atmosphere. There are rain echos, clear-air echos, bow echos…basically, there are shapes in data from the atmosphere, and these shapes tell us something about what is happening with the weather. Or in this case, with bugs!

Biological pest control is a good tool for a syntropic farmer to have in their toolbox, although there is much more to learn about the effectiveness of this strategy in syntropic farms. Part of the challenge of active management is that, like all of syntropy, it is still being developed. Running a farm is hard, and requires a lot of day to day minutiae. Hopefully, a syntropic farm minimizes some of this; no weeding needs to be done, because there shouldn’t be any weeds, and the amount of time spent on irrigation should also be lessened as the soil quality will be able to retain more water than a conventional farm. The construction of a new row is normally the most labor-intensive part, aside from harvesting, and the development of ground cover and biomass fosters good independent plant growth.

But there is no syntropic farm if it doesn’t make money. It doesn’t matter how good you are at planning, pest management, irrigation strategies, or the cultivation of biomass if your business doesn’t support itself. Syntropic farmers are in an interesting position when it comes to making money. On one hand, they are very well protected from crop failures and market fluctuations. The sheer amount and variety of crops mean that syntropic farmers will usually have at least one crop to sell, unlike mono-crop farmers who have a chance of oversaturating the market and then undervaluing their crop. However, syntropic farmers are also at a disadvantage. Once one crop in the system is harvested, it’s gone. The farm moves forward, and new strata emerge. This may be great for the overall ecosystem, but it is kind of a bummer for farmers who were hoping to replant high-value crops year after year. The good news? They can!

Syntropic farmers embrace a component of active management called retrofitting, which is when an existing row is altered, or “retrofitted” to house a repeat or high-value crop. It is still recommended for farmers to avoid growing the exact same crop in the exact same space, but because these farmers are adding to a row, and not ripping up the ground, it is still within the realm of syntropy. Simply put, a retrofit would look something like this: A farmer harvests their emergent corn crop and sells it for a good profit — perhaps better than expected. Looking at the amount of time left in the season, Farmer (an everyman character — or should I say an everyfarmer character?) decides that they can get one more corn crop in. The row plans have been set for a long time, but Farmer notices that the next crop in the emergent strata are very good at seed banking (staying in the soil until the conditions are optimal for growth). This means that if Farmer plants right now, the corn plants will outcompete the next crop in the strata, so the corn will grow instead, and the next crop seed will remain dormant in the soil. Farmer ends up with two rounds of corn harvest instead of one, and they have not compromised the health of the syntropic system.

In some cases, this type of retrofitting can be done to specialize in a certain crop. Let’s stick with the example of corn for now. If Farmer decides to specialize in corn, they can plan a corn retrofit around every 90 days. If Farmer wants to be more extreme about it, they can not even plant any other emergent species, and just retrofit corn repeatedly as the only emergent. This practice is not recommended because repeatedly planting the same crop causes problems with soil health, but the robustness of a syntropic system allows syntropic farmers to get away with it a little more than conventional farmers. Some syntropic farmers are experimenting with the development of grain crops as a specialized retrofit. Grain crops naturally grow in monocrop-like systems, so integrating them into a syntropic farm can be difficult. Again, this is a developing field of syntropy, so it may take some time to perfect.

In the end, actively managing a syntropic farm is a lot like running any other business. You have to make sure that you are checking in on your product regularly while supporting the essential aspects of your business (i.e soil health), and reducing unexpected costs (i.e. pests eating all your corn). It is slightly more complicated than a conventional business because of the intense focus put upon restoring the environment and natural resources for sustainability, but as more and more products and ideas come into play, the easier it will become. A few years of challenge for a lifetime of sustainable food production. I don’t think I’m being too harsh when I say that it seems like a pretty good trade-off to me.

With the hope that you were critically thinking about your food sources this Thanksgiving, but also with an acknowledgment that you were probably not,

Ajah