syntropic agroforestry – Prof Jem Bendell

Earth Day is coming soon and is an important day for us at Bekandze Farm, as it marks the end of our crowdfund to support Balienze small holders to switch to organic methodz. Already, we are helping them to do that as a basis for re-localising and regenerating the rural economy. But to establish ourselves as a viable training centre, with a lasting impact locally, and to communicate that globally, we would greatly benefit from your help.

You can learn more about the daily activities at Bekandze Farm by visiting our Instagram account. That is where we are posting pictures of trees planted as thanks to our supporters. We also produced a couple of short videos to tell you more about the project. The first one below is a summary of why and what we are doing.

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After a two year research project, with an interdisciplinary team, the conclusions I came to on the state of the world, and our near future, are not that relaxing. They will be available in the book Breaking Together, out in May. One of the chapters is already available, preprint, as the matter of food security seems so urgent. [subscribe to this blog to get a link to the full book when it’s out]

That context means I am especially happy to have launched a demonstration organic farm, using an approach called syntropic agroforestry. It does not mean I will definitely escape the impacts of agricultural disruptions and the socio-political ramifications. But it means that at least I am doing something about it that will benefit both people and planet.

As I’ve been writing so much for the forthcoming book, I’d rather garden than write about it, so I asked chatGPT to tell you all about the approach we are taking. The prompt was “Write a summary of many reasons (environmental and social) why syntropic agroforestry is a good idea. Explain why it is helpful to educate and support farmers in Indonesia to do syntropic agroforestry.” ChatGPT responded:

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