How Syntropic Farming Yields High Profit by Restoring Nature

 [00:00:00] 

Eduardo: In today’s 

 

episode, we have Ursula Arztmann, AKA Uzzy the Founder and President, as well as Fu Muller Vice President of Recelio here with us. And they’re dedicated to accelerate socio environmental regeneration and transitioning farmers and communities to regenerative farming their approach is founded on accelerating the paradigm shift from extracted mechanistic system towards one that is conducive to life, and that is positively adding to planetary health. So welcome to the show. 

 

Ursula: Thank you.

 

Fu: Thank you for having us. 

 

Eduardo: One of the things that really caught my attention when I was first reading and learning about you is that your approach is really focused on the soil and the farmer. I wanted you to tell us a little bit about the journey that got you to this place.

 

How did you get started? How did you reach this conclusion? 

 

Fu: So both me and Uzzy, we had been into nature and into agriculture already for a while. And we [00:01:00] researched for new ways of doing agriculture and to produce food

 

and we came across things like natural farming, permaculture and these things, but we were both a little bit unsatisfied actually, because we are both system thinkers by heart. And these approaches were still pretty much in the old paradigm. We were looking for something that would be the answer.

 

And in 2015 there was a docu published by the name of Life in Syntropy that was reporting about the work of Mr. Ernst Götsch, who was a Swiss researcher and farmer, and who went to Brazil like nearly 50 years ago. And he started to develop a new type of farming that is called or was later than called syntropic farming.

 

And in 2016, he came to Europe to Spain. yeah, Uzzy and me, we met there for the first time, but we immediately thought, like [00:02:00] we know each other from somewhere, maybe from a past life or something. So that was the running joke then. It was a workshop with Ernst.

 

Until today we work with a lot of people from that group, you know, there’s a lot of influential people, a lot of doers, people that are very active, a lot of great minds, great people with great projects and Uzzy then went to Brazil for two years to work there and to learn from syntropic farmers, from experienced people.

 

And Uzzy has this gift. She’s a visual facilitator, so she can actually actually visualize talks and speeches and any type of content actually live while she listens to it. And that was one of the key things to actually unlock the knowledge that Ernst has on this, because she was really documenting everything.

 

Also during the two years in Brazil and she also backed everything by science, you know, she’s also a nerd that loves to read all the scientific studies and find scientific proof for these [00:03:00] things that Ernst says. Yeah. And then yeah, we started pretty soon to found a not for profit association back then by the name of Soulfood Forestfarms that was in 2018.

 

A lot of people came together. And one of the biggest projects that we co-created was a living lab in Milano Italy. From there, the real journey started because we learned a lot of things about how to actually help change to emerge. And we also learned a lot about local cultures, which came out to be very, very important for us.

 

We were a lot in boots, but also in suits. And since then, that has always been also a type of task for us to actually build bridges between those two worlds between the boots and the suits.

 

Ursula: Which us to the conclusion that the soil and the farmers and the land stewards in general are at the core of any kind of transformation. We cannot do without them. 

 

Currently there’s a lot of shaming of farmers going on as [00:04:00] being the ones that trade all these greenhouse gases and all this destruction. And we believe that that might be true to some extent, but it was caused by the markets and the whole system around it caused their decisions and their actions. And in the end, we can only work with them if we can free them from this system, they’re sort of caged in and help them to make this transition, to have room for innovation on a farm, for example, because currently they’re just producing. It’s about yield. It’s about more, more, more, which creates more and more destruction and degradation and deforestation and all these things.

 

And on one hand, we strongly believe we need to have the impact on the soil. Yet on the other hand, we cannot do it with the farmers alone. The farmers are central as the doers, the heroes of change, if we [00:05:00] can enable them and empower them, but it needs the markets around it, it needs the communities, it needs the consumers.

 

It needs companies that buy raw materials to come along on this huge transition that we actually in the midst of. So that would be like the point where yes, the farmers are key, but we cannot move the whole system if we do not include the systemic regional approach community approach. And also the, the global approach, the food system by itself needs healing needs complete change.

 

And not only the farmer or the farm or the soil.

 

Eduardo: What is your approach and how are you addressing this, this systemic issue?

 

Fu: This is a longer answer actually, because it includes a lot of different approaches and a lot of different tools that we have in our toolbox.

 

This is also one of the things where people often have [00:06:00] difficulties to understand. What are you actually doing? Because they are waiting for this one single thing that we deliver. Right. But we are actually very systemic. That means we are really taking an approach that does not only analyze and look at the smallest parts to understand it better.

 

We zoom out. We synthesize. That means we bring in more context to all these problems to understand it better. So there’s this old saying from system thinkers that is like, give me one problem and I cannot help you, but give me 10 and we can start solving them. This is because there is no single problem, usually. It’s always connected. Life is organized by networks and relationships. So this is where we focus on. So we have different approaches. We work with corporations, we work with foundations, we have also a technology approach to solve the underlying issues that we see. So it’s it’s complex.

 

 I just want to point out here that [00:07:00] syntropic farming is actually a systemic agriculture. It is the newest kid on the block. It is highly innovative. We call it revolutionary out of a lot of different reasons. That is where we base all our philosophy on. So often we bring highly complex problems down to earth and we bring analogies out of the garden, out of our syntropic systems to understand it better, to make it tangible for us.

 

Ursula: On one hand, it’s the newest kid on the block. On the other hand, it’s very ancient.

 

Fu: Oh yeah.

 

Ursula: Basically it’s biomimicry. It’s accepting the law of nature and incorporate it in your doing and creating productive ecosystems. So we have the functioning ecosystems as a model, and we basically derive the processes that happen in those ecosystems and the functions that are present in these ecosystems and translate that [00:08:00] in food production, but also in the production of timber and fibers and medicinals and raisins and essential oils.

 

So these highly diverse systems deliver way more on less land and do not require inputs. As nature does not require inputs. There’s nobody going and waters the forest or brings fertilizer into the forest. It does not happen. It is a system which nature has developed there with three and half billion years.

 

And it functions. We just have to learn from it and apply it. And the way syntropic farming was born, it was strongly influenced by the way, indigenous people, especially in south America were tending to the land, including also their holistic viewpoint. It’s not just producing food, it’s creating livelihood.

 

It’s creating wellbeing [00:09:00] beyond the communities and the humans. It was creating wellbeing for all life. And this is what we have lost in modern agriculture. It’s a story of separation. Agriculture is just one part in a value chain nowadays. And the people hardly ever know their farmers anymore.

 

They’re not part of the communities as they used to be just two or three generations back. So what we perceive today as the form of agriculture, especially in the Northern countries, this is really the new kid on the block. The modern intensified agriculture is the super new kid on the block.

 

And we already see very strongly the effects of that type of agriculture. And that’s where we have to gather the learnings and understand what is already there also from indigenous sources and learned from them and give it a chance to switch [00:10:00] to a form of agriculture, which is complex. Yes. But at the same time, highly resilient and we are entering in a time span.

 

We started to feel it, especially this summer where the extreme weather events become more and more frequent where farmers need to emergency harvesting their foods where there is droughts and floods. So we need a form of agriculture, which is not as fragile as the classic intensified monocultures, which come with a lot of side effects and actually start to bet on a new horse or on an old horse at that point that has proven to work over hundreds of years, especially in indigenous cultures.

 

Eduardo: A lot of the mental models that are driving our industrial agriculture today are founded on this belief that all this works really well. Being regenerative worked for thousands of years, but then communities were limited [00:11:00] in size and working in symbiosis in some way with the ecosystems.

 

And so the argument that I hear very often is, we need a lot of food to provide for all the people on the planet, and maybe these methods won’t provide the volume that we need to feed the planet. What do you have to say about that? 

 

Fu: We will not be able to provide these volumes of food anymore with the system. I don’t deny that the system brought us somewhere, right? The so-called green revolution, et cetera. Yes. We have seen that there is like intensive agriculture puts out a lot of food in terms of volume, not so much in nutrient density, unfortunately, but it is extractive and it is not conducive to life, meaning that it doesn’t close cycles and it just extracts value all the time.

 

And that is not infinite. And that we see it’s a finite system. I [00:12:00] mean, There’s calculation that we have around like 55 or 60 harvests left because we just use all the top soil and we just let it erode and, and deplete. So then there’s a second factor that is food waste. We see that like the distribution of food does not work and that is a huge issue.

 

And that has a lot of reasons and a lot of levers that we can actually pull. And so there is a lot of optimization that can be done. And then we have another issue and that is we ship food around the globe all the time. I mean, there is cattle raised in south America that is shipped to China to pack it.

 

And then it’s sold in the UK. I mean, it’s just insane. It cannot be like that. And our approach Is localized. That means it will not need so much transportation because it puts not only the soil first, but also the farmer and the farmer’s family or the land stewards, how we call them and then the community and then the bio region.

 

So it means that we also are more seasonal. Of [00:13:00] course we eat seasonal food. You can just not have strawberries every time of the year. And I think that consumers will learn and will shift also. And we have to diversify look how our food is organized nowadays. We all depend on grains. We depend on these staple foods and these staple foods are breaking away.

 

Pakistan lost 90% of the harvest. India has 50 to 60% loss of wheat production this year. And this is going to continue. It’s just the beginning. It’s just a glimpse on what’s going to happen. And in Pakistan, all the fields got washed away with the floods. What is not washed? Trees. And we have to look where we can produce our proteins.

 

And we have to see for us, for example, animals play a big role in also the systems, but at what time in the succession is important to understand and how much. In Spain, for example, a few hundred years [00:14:00] ago a pair of ox was put on each 1.8 hectares.

 

So this is two cows per 1.8 hectares. And this is probably sustainable. And I know people are working on especially the holistic grazers. They are working on a lot of methods, you know, rotational, grazing, et cetera, a lot of things to optimize. And we have technology, we have modern science.

 

We can get into that and optimize things, of course. And so for us, another thing that is very important is a syntropic system doesn’t put out less food it puts out a way higher diversity, so that makes it to be more complex to market for example. We have we have lower volumes per variety, for example, But, you can have like a type of apple orchard.

 

It doesn’t have apples, of course, just apples as a monoculture. But then inside of this orchard, you will have like 20 different varieties of apples. And one year you will see that some varieties will not do very well, but others [00:15:00] do. And this brings instability. So we are not looking only at efficiency.

 

And is it cheap to produce? We are looking at stability here, right? And then at the same time, and we have to emphasize, this has way more benefits than just food. Uzzy, before she did mention the cultural aspect, for example, there’s a huge community and cultural aspect.

 

And also a type of bringing people back to the land because our systems, yes, we can mechanize. We have people also working on machinery, which is great because we have bigger systems that need that, but it calls for more people on the land. And for us, it’s a good thing because we see that happening.

 

Also, we have a lot of countries where people come also already back to the land and there, we see that as a big change. So it’s not just about food and yes, we can put out as much as the industrial system but just way more diverse.

 

Eduardo: There’s a lot of terms being used. Can you maybe clarify [00:16:00] a little bit different terms being used around systems. I see regenerative as a full umbrella. And then you have syntropic I heard also of permaculture which is probably one of the first ones.

 

That got famous because of this institute in Australia. How is it different syntropic versus permaculture?

 

Fu: I would like to say one thing and then Uzzy can please expand a little bit better on syntropic because she’s an expert on that. One thing that frustrated us also on permaculture, we have nothing against permaculture, right.

 

But it is still in the old paradigm. It will still look at a problem and then at a solution. So it’s still inside of the cycle also of for example, disease treatment, disease treatment, disease treatment, and you don’t get out of that. And we felt that there has to be more than that. Than just treating of symptoms.

 

Why don’t we look at the root of problems. So that is a difference already. And Uzzy, please explain us a little bit about syntropic farming, what it means and what the difference is. 

 

Ursula: Yeah, I would like to dive [00:17:00] into the regenerative agriculture umbrella as you call it, because that’s definitely one of the tools. I don’t like that word too much, but one of the approaches within regenerative agriculture. I would also then branch it off into the family of agroforestry because we work mainly with trees or it is very typical that syntropic agriculture works with trees of high diversity.

 

And within agroforestry, there is like a bandwidth or a scale of how you actually work with trees. On the least natural side, I would say is for example the use of clones. So you use cloned trees, especially Poplar, for example and just make a monoculture of Poplar in a line, and then you have an area between, and then you have another line of Poplar, the area in between, you can still use for grain production, for example, or for your vegetables or whatever you choose that land to be used for.

 

They usually [00:18:00] have a great width between those three lines, so they can still use large scale machinery and do sort of business as usual. The only thing that has changed is the addition of those Poplar clones. Then we move over, in the middle of the scale is agroforestry, which works with a few species still quite big distances between trees and usually it’s only crop trees.

 

That’s what most people understand on the agroforestry. And again, the area in between can be used as is needed. We are sort of on the outer scale of that, where we have a huge variety of species and the trees are used in the system on one hand for their function as crop. There could be timber trees, not shrubs like berries.

 

And we basically orchestrate them in time and space. That’s different to the other agroforestry types. [00:19:00] So we choose species with short lifecycle, medium lifecycle and long lifecycle and orchestrate them in their space as well because not every plant needs the same amount of light. So we optimize the systems for the highest rate of photosynthesis as possible. Photosynthesis is basically the core process on planet earth to turn solar energy into life. So our core focus is on harvesting light in different layers and bring the carbohydrates that this produces within the plant into the soil to build up soil life and to build up healthy, fertile soils. So in this process, so when we design the systems, we really look into time and we look into space and we also look into functions because certain plants in these systems [00:20:00] fulfill a water pump function.

 

When you are in especially dry areas. We have the option to work with species that are adapted to this dry area and can pump water from deep layer into the system and make it available for all the plants or in very dry areas. We work for example, with cacti. So we use these ecophysiological functions of species that are adapted to drought, for example, or dry or hot climate, and use them in productive systems as they bring humidity and water into the system. We internally call this planting water, because that’s where syntropic farming has a super strength.

 

We are very strong when it’s about degraded soils and dryer climates and places where farmers usually leave. That’s where we can start regenerating. And [00:21:00] in the end, all these cycles, these life cycles that we go through and manage and steward, they increase the natural capital of the place. We have an abundance of life that we foster and we basically increase the quality and the quantity of life in the system.

 

We increased the relationships between species. And therefore these systems become very close to a natural system and also bring with it the resilience of natural systems. So how does that relate to permaculture? In my point of view, permaculture is a design system. It’s a human centered design system.

 

For example, have the zones, zone ones, zone two, zone three, which are optimized in terms of how a human spends energy in the system. And not necessarily if the plants that are grown there [00:22:00] fit that space. So we basically always seek to have the wellbeing of the plants in the center. How can we create conditions for the plants to thrive?

 

No matter if they’re close to a house or far away from a house. And syntropic farming is a real farming approach, a real farming system. While I recognize permaculture as bringing in a lot of tools and services to the whole picture, which are about landscape reading and optimizing access to a place and optimizing where your house should be standing.

 

That’s all important and very useful when you have your homestead when you build up a farm, but then you have to produce. And which approach do you use to actually produce food and timber and materials for that homestead? [00:23:00] So that to me is a big difference. We are really a productive system or a production system.

 

While in my point of view, permaculture is more inclusive, the whole design process, the community process, the fair share, all these things, which are very vital, but we are like in a different subset of it. And subset in my point of view, doesn’t mean lower or higher in priority. It’s just another function in the whole system, how we tend to land and how we steward land.

 

Eduardo: Is syntropic farming applicable to certain regions or is it something that we can apply globally, do you think?

 

Ursula: The great thing is, as it builds on specific principles that we learned from nature. When we follow the principles, we can apply it in each biome on the planet where naturally plants are growing.

 

So we have to change the species of [00:24:00] course, if you’re in the Amazon, you work with the local species and potentially enrich them with some other crops. If you’re in a dry area, you learn from the plants that exist there and add crop species, which fit that situation best. As in all regenerative agriculture, every place decides or defines what can be done.

 

It’s a specific design for the place and not a one size fits all solution. It’s a one size fits all in terms of the principles and practices, but not when it’s manifesting in a place that’s where it might look very different. If you are in the south of Spain or in South Africa or in Denmark, for example, 

 

Eduardo: and how does it manifest?

 

Paint us a picture of a syntropic farm.

 

Ursula: I’m a passionate entomologist. I love creepy crawl. I love insects and I have studied their [00:25:00] behavior in Brazil, in these systems. And honestly, even in my education where I was working with farmers with different types of approaches, those farms are quiet in comparison to a centropic farm.

 

You walk into these systems. So you have the tree lines on the side and you have an area in between the area in between might be vegetables. It might be grains. It might be your soybeans. It might be your cotton. But when you walk in there, you hear the buzz of the insides. It’s a place where life thrives.

 

It’s a place where you hear bird song everywhere, where things move. When you look at the soil, the soil is packed with all the workers that break down the mulch. So the soil is moving. It’s not a dead crumb of brown soil. It’s full of mulch and living beings and well in Brazil, sometimes [00:26:00] snakes and other things that you have to be careful with, but you become a part that has a function in these systems.

 

You’re not just driving tractors and bring out your seeds and harvest. You become a vivid observer of what’s going on in these systems. What makes them very wonderful to work in, especially in hot climates, is that the trees give you shade. In the beginning, of course, you start in a virgin system, everything is still at the bottom.

 

So it looks like a funny vegetable garden, but suddenly the banana trees come up and the papaya trees come up. And first of the tree species come up and working in hot climates is very straining for farmers. But as soon as we have a little shape by these first species that we specifically choose for their fast growth working, even in a tropical steaming hot climate, [00:27:00] or I also have worked in the dry tropics, it becomes so much more pleasant. It’s pleasurable to work in these systems and you need your intellect. You need your senses. You need your knowing when you’re in these systems, because it’s not just a mind driven agriculture. It’s also a heart driven agriculture where we as humans can be more fully engaged than when we follow just these goals of the market, where in the end, we end up with mono crops in order to have efficient systems and bring out as much yield as possible.

 

Fu: In a theater with an audience that was watching actually the movie of Life in Syntropy when the scene comes up where there’s a drone flight over the farm of Ernst who does this there for 40 years.

 

Over 40 years, it looks like rainforest. And then the narrator says, this is Ernst farm. You know, it’s not a forest it’s his farm. And [00:28:00] then you hear the audience always like, whoa, you know, like all the farmers and everybody’s there. Cause it’s unbelievable when you see that from the air. And then another thing that is very important to me.

 

Also because I love it. Since I am a child, is foraging. When people go into syntropic systems, they start foraging immediately because you say, oh, wow, is this strawberries, oh, wait, let me see. Oh! Have you seen these pears here? And this is like, people are eating and smelling all the time. The systems have a very calming and pleasuring effect on people.

 

When you see the system, you see that they’re mostly rows and they’re kind of linear and people who are in biomimicry and in permaculture, they say nature is not like that. It’s not straight lines. So this is something where we make a compromise often, because it’s easier to manage for machines and people if you have like lines. They don’t need to be straight, but it’s also the way in the north south direction, mostly to harvest the most sunlight. What the system actually does is like, it is not too dense for us to [00:29:00] feel safe as humans, because in a very thick forest where humans feel a little bit unsecure.

 

So it’s very, it often gives us a, a feeling of awe. To enter a type of system like that and to realize also everything is living and edible and it smells good. And you don’t have that on a GMO corn field. 

 

Eduardo: It must require a completely different mindset on the side of the farmer and then the entire set of stakeholders that play in the food production.

 

 I’m hearing about a system that goes from monoculture big production efficiency focus into one that has a lot of variety and is looking more for harmony. The role of the farmer is not one who exploits the land and then is the master and everything else is the slave at his service.

 

You’re talking about a system in harmony and the role of the farmer is different. But how do you even begin to approach this shift in mindset? 

 

Fu: Well, first we all have to learn and unlearn. We fall back into old [00:30:00] thinking all the time and that happens to everybody.

 

That’s normal. But what you need to understand is that life is not a machine. It has been seen like that for a long time now for over a hundred years. But the difference is that a machine can be controlled and a living system can only be disturbed. A living system will change structure because of meaningful disturbance.

 

And that is one of the things that we do in our systems. And then what you said was brilliant. We have seen the animals and the land as a type of commodity as a type of slave for us. And we step out of this view and we see ourselves as stewards. Our function as humans, our natural function, we are seeders, we are pruners, but we are also stewards.

 

We have such a high cognitive [00:31:00] capacity and we are blessed with that from nature. We have this for a reason. So we can actually look at things in a little bit of different way and help a little bit here and create the right conditions. And that is also a very, very important shift. First, you let loose of control.

 

I know economically you need certain types of control. I don’t deny that, but it is important to understand that we are not the intelligence of the system. We are part of an intelligent system. So we need to play along with the system we need to do as life would do. And in all the actions that we actually take, we have to, well, first step back, breathe, think,

 

is it needed is the action needed or can I just step even more back and get myself a little bit out of it and create a change. But then when we [00:32:00] ask for the actions, we actually ask for something that is conducive to life, and that is also being a good ancestor, being in the awareness of what is it going to create for my grand grand grandchildren for seven generations.

 

The native Americans, they speak about the contract that we have for seven generations to come. And it’s very important when I do something to not only look at fast profit, fast return and on the effects of one season or something, we need to look way further than that. And that is what we’re doing in syntropic agriculture.

 

Eduardo: You don’t even call pest pest, you call them partners. Is that right?

 

Ursula: Yes. As you already know, I, I really love them. So for me, they’re never pests, even if they eat my salad or if they eat my corn. Ernst even has an expression where he calls them the agents from the department of life process [00:33:00] optimization. So we have witnessed in fields that insects come very specifically.

 

They come on plants that show certain symptoms. They come on specific species and they’re never on a whole farm and they never eat everything at once. So there’s a pattern behind it. Why do they eat certain things and leave others out? And we see them more as ambassadors or communicators that something in the system is wrong.

 

So they come to tell us, Hey, take care of something, otherwise we will. So that changes the mindset completely from there’s a pests and we need to kill it, which brings us back to the cycle of disease and treatment, disease and treatment, but goes back to what needs adjustment in the system so that there is no need for them to come in.

 

The same thing is for the weeds. As we work in [00:34:00] time and space, we understand that weeds are plants that we have not chosen that grow in the niches that we have not occupied with chosen plants, which means where we leave soil open and don’t plant something there. Nature will fill this niche. The weed will fill the niche in order to optimize the photosynthetic rate of a field.

 

So once we understand that we will avoid any kind of bare soil and we will plant species there, which are of benefit for us or as mulch, instead of calling them weeds and spend millions of dollars with herbicides for example. With all the side effects that it has on nature and species and insects and everything.

 

And once you start to understand that their partners in crime with you and that they’re [00:35:00] amazing teacher. You learn to act differently in the system, which brings me back to that question that you had. How do we approach farmers to sort of become curious for this new system and new worldview? And the greatest thing that we can do and that we can offer is show them those systems.

 

And that doesn’t mean a PowerPoint slide. That means in reality. In my humble experience, farmers love to learn from other farmers. You have these discussions, why are your cucumbers bigger than mine and how I was growing. And do you have some seed of that? Especially in third world countries that is normal farmers learn from farmers.

 

And so they first learn from their ancestors, from their fathers and mothers that have been farming. And then they learn from their neighbors. And when we can build up small showcases [00:36:00] where farmers can come and have a look, it will change their mind because they can sense it. They can feel it. I Usually, when I work with farmers, I also invite them not to change their farm completely, but start somewhere, make one system somewhere and the rest do as you have done before, and then just compare.

 

Make the comparisons yourself. And then they realize why is there no pests in that field? And why do I have them? Why are your papaya trees bigger than mine?

 

So creating lighthouse projects, creating, learning places that then become catalysts for a ripple effect are absolutely central. It doesn’t matter where on the planet we do that. We need places where people can come and visit and see and smell and even talk with the farmers that stewarded.

 

Eduardo: In terms of driving adoption of [00:37:00] syntropic farming, evidently given the current state of things, something that ideally we want to accelerate adoption of. And so living labs being a, a key component of evangelizing and implementing this system what can you tell us about bottlenecks for driving this mass adoption?

 

Fu: First it would be great to have a lobby. It would really be great to have some industry backing. Cause if you look, how is the old system working and who’s putting the gas into the tank of that system.

 

We don’t have that in syntropic farming yet. And then yeah, it takes more planning. It also takes more effort in the beginning to set it up than a mono crop, for example. What’s also very important is to center really not only the soil, as I said, but also the human on that soil, the steward.

 

So generally when you plant trees and especially how we like to plant them by [00:38:00] seed, that’s the most optimal way of doing it. It’ll take a while until you will harvest the first fruit normally. And that means that you have a type of hunger gap. In syntropic farming we close that by incorporating also short lifecycle crops, vegetables, et cetera.

 

So that is very important to make the design together with the farmers, to listen to the farmers what’s working, what do you need? What is the food that you like to eat here? What can you sell on the local market to bring some income for your family, et cetera. And also stuff like firewood, for example, most people in the global north, in cities, they forget about that, but it’s very important to a lot of people on this planet.

 

And so these are things where we really. Have a type of higher entry level than monoculture. And then in terms of scale, we know it can be done in large scale, but it [00:39:00] has to be done gradually to do it right. Because again, remember we are not the intelligence of the system. We cannot just think as if it would be a machine, and I put the parts together of the machine and it’s going to work and it’s going to give me that output. And I know it, I can calculate, I can take the credit I need for seeds, et cetera. It’s not like that. We need to work together with nature. And that means also to do it gradually. What Uzzy was saying is go to the farmer and say what’s the place you hate here on your farm, where nothing is growing, and where you always have pests eating everything or where it’s too dry? And then start there in that corner and then gradually do it.

 

We have basically a planting season that is when the trees are dormant. At the end of the winter or during the winter when we can actually plant. We need to plan that really well and then set it up. And then we have a year of time until the next plantings are done.

 

And financing is a huge issue for the farmer, for example. Because it needs more money in the beginning to set the system up, we have a higher amount of money needed there. 

 

Eduardo: What [00:40:00] needs to happen first trigger this revolution?

 

Fu: There I come back to system thinking, and that is how do feedback loops work and how do systems incorporate new information? So a system will always try to incorporate new information and to adapt to that. But that only works until a certain point. And then the system itself cannot implement it into its existing structure anymore. And that is where new systems emerge.

 

That’s where the music plays and the real task for us is to see that that creates F.U.D. That creates fear, uncertainty, doubt, and confusion and anxiety. And that is what we see globally right now, what happens everywhere. But that is actually the last step before we see the real emergence of a new system.

 

And that is our goal and our hope. And we are working towards that. You can call us optimistic [00:41:00] doomsayers or something because we bring bad news all the time because we get it all the time. But at the same time, we know if we all join forces, all humans on this planet and we hold each other by the hands and go together.

 

That is an energy that nobody of us can imagine yet. And that is what we, what we’re looking forward to. And I see it coming and I’m hoping for it. 

 

Eduardo: One of the approaches traditionally to drive change in organizations, you have the top down approach when there’s a jurisdiction that is friendly to the changes and then it dictates the change down.

 

And then the other approach is grassroots, bottom up where you still really work with the farmers one by one, perhaps selling the living lab and then moving into the mass movement. What do you think is more appropriate right now, given the state of things? You have very critical, very critical geographies right now. You have crops collapsing and people may be more sensitive to a top [00:42:00] down massive adoption approach.

 

Fu: I would say both. It needs both. Let me elaborate a little bit on that. So especially when you talk about leadership and organizations, it’s very, very interesting. Because in organizations, we see formal networks that are driven by top down waterfall movements.

 

And then we have informal networks that are emerging and that are creating themselves. They’re not made by anybody. And I would like to bring this little story. In my old agency, we had a big kickoff meeting and then the plan was explained and everybody was talking about it and everything was clear.

 

And then our chief developer, he raised his hand at the end of the meeting and he said to back then my boss, Marc, he said Marc, just one question, do we do it by plan or do we do it as we always do? You need to understand that an organism can only be living if it can incorporate feedback loops that come from the informal network.

 

So if it’s [00:43:00] static and if it’s just built in steel and it cannot change, it will break at a certain point. We need to give impulses instead of instructions, and we need to build the right conditions for things to emerge. And frankly, as a good leader, you will do the same.

 

And you will then also facilitate change and you will facilitate the emergence of new solutions instead of dictating it and to tell people, because anyways, you don’t know better. You think, you know, better of course, but you have experts in the team, et cetera, and you need to really be flexible.

 

And that is a more lifelike organization. We have just one obstacle here and that is our economic system because as long as all these entities, all business leaders, all of them have to operate in this economical system, [00:44:00] it’s never truly like life is right. It can’t because the framework around it is not like that.

 

So that also needs to change. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but I’m sure it will change. 

 

Ursula: I would like to add to that, that we need a collaborative way forward with corporations. When you look at the authority and power they hold. Just look at it 200, 300 years ago, compared to now they have about a hundred institution globally that hold more power than all of our states.

 

So corporations, they are not committed to, for example, human rights. They’re probably not even paying a proper wage. They have another way of forming and standing in the place. So we need to infuse leadership with regenerative thoughts. I was recently [00:45:00] watching a documentation of an indigenous leader in front of more than a hundred CEOs.

 

This leader basically asked the CEOs to step into that type of leadership, where you, as a moral question, you think into seven generations, whatever you do now, can you make sure your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, these seven generations profit from your actions, from your decisions.

 

And the room went quiet. And then one of the leaders said, I can’t do that because I have to deliver profit. Without delivering profit I will lose my job. As long as leaders are caught in that cage of endless growth, we will have a huge problem on this planet and nothing will happen. We strongly believe nature is cooperative.

 

And we have to learn from that. We should [00:46:00] embrace corporates. We should embrace the states. We should embrace the actors around it, but it’s a huge task. We need people or these networks forming that come together with this cause of preparing the conditions for this change to happen and really work on different fronts because we cannot just change an agricultural system and hope that this massive paradigm shift automatically happens.

 

It won’t. We need really a top and bottom and left and right. The 360 degree approach. And we as humans, as a matter of fact, it’s a moral question. We have the technologies, we have the money, we have the people, we have the skills, we have the census, we have indigenous wisdom. We have everything.

 

We just need to make the decision to make this [00:47:00] work. Not only for us as a species, but for this living, being of life on this planet. And that’s a moral question and it’s not easy to answer. And the way to get there is not easy to answer, but the more people that start to realize that and come together and co-create together.

 

And in my point of view, we don’t have to wait. We don’t have to wait on a leader. We don’t have to wait on a solution or two or three solutions. We have to take everything in account that has already proven that it works and go for it and simply go for it. Potentially fail, brush up, stand up, move on, harvest all the learning.

 

So share it with everybody and your neighbor might have done the same thing and it worked on his land and we harvested and we share. So we have as a good friend of mine [00:48:00] once framed it. We have to build the ship while we are sailing. Time is super precious right now. So we can’t wait for 30 years of research until we are a hundred percent sure that this one is the only solution working.

 

We really have to get going and take science along. Take research along. We can do that. We are, as human species are equipped to do exactly that. Move forward, fail, learn, share. We’re interconnected. We have the internet. It’s so easy nowadays to do that. So we have everything. It’s a moral question what we do in the future.

 

Eduardo: We have the system structures already crumbling and showing signs of the lack of resilience and the fragility of the current system. This could be the perfect time to intervene with perhaps seeking allies of who’s getting the most impacted today due to these massive crop failures.

 

And first one comes to mind is insurance companies. They’re the ones [00:49:00] that are ensuring the fragility of the system. And here’s an alternative to make the system a lot more robust. Once it succeeds, it cannot fail just as nature has not failed over millennia and millions of years.