Super Productive Farm Heals the Land! - The Regenerative Revolution of Syntropic Agroforestry

So my name's Bunya and we're at one of our projects which is at the farm in Byron where we've been leasing a few allotments now over the last, we started about seven or eight years ago, started doing some perennial tree based systems integrating them into annual market gardens which was being run at the time by my friend Evan who was an amazing market gardener cranking a lot of annual vegetables and we slowly brought in perennial crops into that system and yeah it's one of many projects which we're evolving I guess you'd say medium scale you know tree based perennial based agroforestry systems and as we're now in a lot of this area about five to six years along the track of succession we're now well out of the annual vegetable cycle and into a perennial system which is really exciting and having ridden those changes from a really high rotation high input high output vegetable system which is what it was based on this isn't this isn't a system based on a slow just a simply slow regeneration process it involved intensive inputs and intensive production in the early days and yeah we're now at a point where we're at a stage of succession where really most of the earlier perennials are coming out of the system or bananas are coming out of the system we're moving into our primary tree crops which are largely fruit and nut trees and a few timber trees as well succession is the you know the evolution of a ecosystem over time really and it involves a sense of like you know accumulation of energy in life that involves disturbances that interrupt that and those disturbances are part of that cycle that evolves a succession so we're now at a stage of succession five to six years later where our dominant trees some of that earlier succession eucalypts are still there but they're about to come out many of them already have come out to make way for our long-term production trees which is this avocado is an example of one of those so that's been flowering and fruiting the last couple of years just a small amount once these guys here come out and we feed them to the fungi this guy here becomes the the dominant sort of the dominant tree that will be our production focus for this line so we're really in an amazing space of transition now where these long-term fruit trees are really are really kicking in and everything else the bananas and the eucalypts are starting to get fed back into the system so yeah a big part of succession is as succession evolves we evolve towards a more resilient diverse productive ecosystem as the succession develops our primary focus for this this project is resilient food production in an ecological regenerative manner so that as we go further in succession our resilience is increasing yeah I guess sort of four main goals from a business sense the whole systems built on primary production and that primary production has shifted a lot as succession changes we're now a big basis of what we do now is is crops like ginger turmeric taro galangal banana and some of the early fruit trees carambola acerola cherry quite a bit of citrus happening and the beginnings of avocados a lot of Panama berries a lot of atherton raspberries so lots of lots of small fruits at this stage slowly evolving towards a tropical fruit based system really our primary driver has been production how can we learn to to be to be doing food production in a way that from my perspective is like as close as possible to best practice land regeneration but producing food from it so I think you know whenever we're doing regenerative food systems there's always a mix between how much of the focus is on producing food and how much the focus is on regenerating the land and how much of it is on you know land regeneration creating a little bit of food and I feel like our primary driver has been mega diverse food systems that moving quickly with forest succession towards a really dense stacked food forest system in that process it's this site was set up by all of us as a business to grow food but to learn to learn for ourselves and within a couple of years of that we felt like we had a system that was really valuable for other people to learn in as well that's where we met on our first training living agroecology training I'm going back five or six years or something like that now we're just working out having people working and learning in the systems that we're in to try and show the wins and losses we've been having in that system and and to be a part of that journey has been a big part of what we do and another huge part of what we've been doing with this big experimentation is bringing lots of different plant varieties and and trialing them seeing what works best in our systems and and in our region on our soils and our local climate conditions and out of that building up propagation stock for other projects so that's been another big and important arm of what we do is that this project is a space to learn but it's a project that through both the experiences people have and the ideas they take away and all the material we grow that it seeds projects and it's seeded many many many projects in the time we've been here in so many ways which has been a really gratifying part of the work avocado is paired next to it with a beautiful medium strata West Indian lime and this is a really beautiful lime tree which it's quite spiky it's one of the it's one of the citrus you can grow true to type from seed so those ones are probably probably still a month or two off fully filling and ripening up I've just come through here and cut this a few weeks back similarly to what I just did with the avocado there and yeah we're now at a point again once once these these pioneer trees and the bananas come out this is really ready to fill up and and reach its peak production it's really close to to doing that in the next year or two so we've gone from a high strata to a medium strata through to a sort of higher emergent strata here this is a direct seeded jackfruit and just right underneath it is a medium low strata coffee so and at the moment here's another medium low strata the galangal which is our biomass plant it's been acting as a really good weed barrier because we're on an edge of a plot here it's really important we have our edges planted out really nice and tight so we're not fighting grasses on that edge and now with that galangal cut out you can see more clearly our coffee in early stages of production and that is right at the foot of a jackfruit tree here and I reckon I think that jackfruit has got its first fruit this year. It doesn't look like that one has yet we've got a number of them we planted at the same time that have started fruiting this has probably been slowed down a little bit by sharing this space with the with the coffee as well which was an experiment I did I kind of before I planted some of these plants out I actually started some plants in pots together and I just thought I'd put a few strata in the one pot plant them out together to see how they've evolved so that's been a little experiment we've had a few years of coffee I haven't really done my best to harvest it all we sort of munched on some berries we don't have this sort of scale of production to be doing any major processing with them at this stage it's just a few ones early ones kicking in but these two these now really again there we're ready for the removal of the pioneer trees and the bananas to make sure these can really can really shine together and I'm way more interested in this jackfruit than the coffee at this stage the coffee is not really my main focus it's just there as part of that experiment of stacking strata together I guess the fourth main aspect that's come out of this this business work which is something I did prior to this project and something that's um that's grown in different lines since this project is is doing consultation work based around these food systems whether people are doing this on a market-based commercial system whether we're doing this a part of a sort of subsistence resilient food system in their own home the learnings we've had here and and my my work throughout my life as a as a landscape designer and someone who's passionate about inspiring spaces to be in yeah we work a lot with supporting other people to create their own their own food forest and food based production systems we're just entering in the back of an area that we call the spiral and it's a sun trap this this very much comes from my my kind of permaculture design work and I really love this space this space here this this sort of wall of trees and bamboo and bananas that we've planted this was planted close to five years ago now it was Good Friday first COVID lockdown where we stopped serving restaurants and cafes and we went great we've got a couple of days to just jump in here and actually plant this area we want to get planning so I'll take you into that space at the moment now coming from the south end from the shady side and we've planted that wall of trees and bamboo to create a windbreak we predominantly have cold southeasterly winds on this site and our goal on this north-facing site here is to do this Sun trap to prevent that colder wind from blowing into the system so that we can actually explore as succession develops particularly growing more tropical plants than we could ever imagine in the open field so we're using the microclimate of the forest and very specific design with solar orientation and wind protection to increase the heat and humidity of this microclimate to allow us to grow a lot of tropical plants so as we move in through here we're moving into the Sun trap area so I'm now in an area facing north-northwest there's the late afternoon sun's about to be going down to the for the west down behind us most of this area has sort of been through a cycle of cassava, taro, papaya, banana and most of that stuff's coming out now and we've got a sort of a second round of trees after the initial pioneers which is starting to kick in now so this is the big spiral ice cream bean very tropical Inga from Amazon Basin and one of the best eating ice cream beans we've got in the area I just now manage a lot of self-seeding crops this one here which looks a bit grasshopper eating at this time of the year it's outside of its prime but that's shiso again another amazing Japanese herb so many Japanese herbs grow so well in our systems they're really really happy here in our kind of humid environment this one here is had most of its cropping already cut from it it's now in the stage of going to seed they drop seed they come up anywhere where we have too many of them we thin them as seedlings and use them as young bunches so like micro green style and where we leave them we let them hold that space and drop seed when they're ready to come up another spot so as the food forest develops the food crops that self-seed and wild within that space become our important crops and and we work with them cinnamon also growing back in there we've got a bunch of soursops flowering for their first year hopefully fruit in this year and this Sun trap plantains this is a really awesome spot for plantain when we grow them out in the open field they're constantly blowing over in the wind we're not getting good bunches now that they're in here in this wind-protected Sun trap in this microclimate we're getting great bunches out of them they're growing big and strong and yeah they're one of our favorite bananas to cook with and work with and we have a lot of demand for them because they're not a mainstream growing banana so people that love plantains don't often find them so we grow them get next to that another jackfruit that that jackfruit only about two two years in the ground it's beautiful red ibica slippery cabbage island cabbage lots of names for that but staple crop of the tropical Pacific and all the Pacific Islanders that come here love it and we work with it a lot great summer grower great great wet season summer grower a lot of the European crops that are growing more as annual vegetables in our area they're just they just don't happen this time of year this is the this is the greens of the summer it's drying out and that's when this stage of succession is really starting to shine you know this is like I said there's not getting irrigated at all and it's looking lush you won't find a annual salad crop looking like that anywhere in this part of the world if it's not being watered and tended like a baby and this guy's just sitting there sitting in the ground I oh I I hacked this back about a month ago because it was growing out where I was mowing I was sort of getting in the way of the mower I hacked the top off and it's just bushed out all these beautiful leaves growing on it. Why syntropics? What attracted you to the syntropic system? My kind of foundational inspiration with food forest work comes from the traditional Melanesian systems so from Papua New Guinea and surrounding areas and a lot of the really epic tropical crops of tropical food systems evolved in our neighbors just to the north in shifting forest systems so I was really curious to check into syntropics and see what that perspective was about and and from what I understood and from what I've learned in the process of kind of learning a bit from some of the practitioners some of the Brazilian practitioners and learning from our own exploration here and other people in Australia exploring is that yeah the process of succession is very aligned to to the traditional food production systems of of Melanesia and many parts of the world that work in forest fallow systems. The key thing really I got out of syntropics if I was just to just nail one simple thing it's just like a really strategic approach to life cycle strata planning and you know if anyone's worked with a life cycle strata planning table it's just a really great simple concise way to plan and envisage the evolution of a food forest and you know the the effectiveness of it is limited by the experience of the practitioner that's feeding information into it the understanding you actually have of your land and the capability of it to grow things but that one tool is sort of like for me having worked for many years prior to getting that tool that was the same process that was always going on in my head anyone else I was working with but we just never sat down to kind of have a really simple way to describe that and to to be able to create a language around the functions of different parts of the system this made it really easy to to assess the planning and management of a system and to start to communicate with other people around how systems work. That simple concise life cycle strata management planning from syntropics has been a wonderful gift to to really accelerate my learning and work in in food forest field. We've now got this space where we've got all these amazing cultural crops from all around the world and this space in here in the middle of this area is our gathering space where we come together learn about them share them cook them eat them and celebrate while we're doing it often have it share a bit of music this is kind of like the the heart of the forest this is like our little forest clearing where we gather come together bring all the firewood have fires together have cook-ups have gatherings do a lot of our harvest and prep and so we can sort of store our these are our hot rocks that around is the really valuable part of it for me so I'm looking forward to in a few weeks time having the Vanuatu mob over here again and doing some more of this actually it's it's um one of my favorite things to do here and it's really great to have a space where so many cultures that come through this area southeast Asian Indian cultures Pacific Islanders South Americans come see the crops of their homeland often see and feel guilds of plants and planting patterns that they're familiar with and just drop in and feel right at home here and in that space tend to get to meet people and and learn a lot that supports our work and and it's a big reason why we do what we do here is is for the people and sharing the stories of culture and resilience that comes so having this space in the middle of a lot of a lot of agroforestry systems are very linear and very production focused which is how most of our systems been built and designed this space began like that but we worked out after a while we need to open this up we need to create a space for people to gather because it's not all just about being in tight little rows managing systems you know we need spaces to explore and have fun and and play so yeah this is a this is a special place for me in the garden you just piled up a bunch of prunings here from about a month ago I chopped up lay down actually this is really cool look at this I'm getting my first fruit as well so I've inoculated this with an edible fungi and that's actually the first one we've had offered but basically what I tend to do and I just broke that but that's an elm oyster I inoculated a small amount of spawn into this pile of chopped up banana some light woody material some pioneer plants and just covered with a little layer wood chip probably one bucket of wood chip inoculated the spawn in there and it's hot and dry at the moment this had a little bit of irrigation the other day and that might have been just enough to get that little guy to pop fruit for the first time but this is actually a this is actually like a nursery for this fungi I'm getting this fungal spawn going and then when we get into sort of peak wet season usually by March we're into a sort of really great season for fungal growth it's usually wet and it's cooling down just a little bit and from here I'm gonna get this mycelium and bury it into more beds and spread this guy here the elm oyster but I'm glad to see that because it shows me that it's taken I'm not going to disturb it too much but I know that there's active mycelium in there because that's just thrown a fruit so a lot of our material and a lot of the learnings that I've had from many different you know traditional food forest cultures of the world is once the forest develops this sort of linear form a lot of people are familiar with with earlier successional stuff in St. Tropics it's all great to get things started it gives you tractor access and even solar access if you've got north south roads etc etc but ultimately that that linear cycle for me needs to break down for lots of reasons firstly I hate walking up and down lines I feel like I'm at the supermarket you know I like to be able to find my own way through things and after a while you tend to find certain trees get cut out leaves you a little gap to move but ultimately the way we then feed this forest is by just starting to combine material together into piles and the fungal system actually feeds the whole forest so there's a very small one but we're increasingly more and more now rather than laying out biomass any kind of linear rows we just make piles in between things and areas where we make a clearing often where a branch comes down which is what happened here originally it stimulates me to go well let's turn this into a half-decent pulse and prune this back and lay it down and make enough area to have a little fungal inoculation which is what we've done here at this stage of the system you can see here look I've left two clumps of bananas out of about six in there yeah so I'm just thinning them out bit by bit this row again has about two to three clumps of bananas out of about six I'm thinning them out to leave space for the fruit trees which is our currant boulders and our Indian tamarins our mulberries and underneath here there's still a beautiful space for these all these edible ferns and taros to continue that's just become a bit of a pathway to you can see in here once we open up a little as we did a big pulse on this line here just coming into springtime even late winter once we open it up taro is just the crop for us it's just incredible in the early years cassava in the early succession was a fantastic staple crop at this stage of succession taro is just epic for us taro is a staple root crop starts producing root crop we often leave it down to just like one or two main mothers but that base there we haven't really started the wet season yet these have been growing okay once it gets warm I get a bit of leaf on there when the wet season comes they really start to fatten up and usually once we come into winter we've got a big starchy tuber off each of those that we harvest and yeah it's a staple crop of pretty much all the Pacific Islands in along with coconut it's the foundation of Pacific Island food production really it's an amazing crop and for us this grows throughout all the warm months of the year usually by May June it's sort of scaled back in production it's usually a good time to harvest and then it's usually fairly dormant through till August September it starts kicking in again it's nine months of the year it's a really good good grower I've done quite enough climbing up ladders dropping down branches cutting these logs I'll show you how we do it later cutting these logs stacking them up to inoculate fungi that's awesome and look it's been well worth the effort doing that but I get to a point there's only so much of that left I really want to do so what we're doing now is inoculating these with fungi in situ killing them in situ and they slowly drop their branches and here we've cut a big wedge of bark out of here so we've hammered a wedge of bark out this is slowly dehydrating the tree on the south edge we've ripped a whole blaze of bark out and that's been inoculated with edible medicinal fungis this is really simple work and we turn into food on the spot that we're going to have they fruit straight out of these plugs we put them in the mycelium goes right through the tree right through the roots and directs the fruit right here when we can harvest them this is a grape arbor we've got a couple of varieties of grapes that are working pretty well in the humid subtropics and believe it or not this like we're in peak summer now but you can look at the light levels in here and the shade levels believe it or not once we prune back the mulberries on the outside prune back the grapes which are both of them are deciduous anyway we actually get enough Sun in here in winter to grow a crop of climbing peas here every year so this really transforms this space by using deciduous plants and pruning them hard coming into winter as opposed to the Sun trout this does quite the reverse this is actually drawing cool drying air into the grapes that need that microclimate so we've designed to support their microclimate this is not a plant for the Sun trap this is a plant for the the cool air-conditioned tunnel that we've got here this system of mulberries and grapes going together thousands of years history in Europe of great mulberry systems co-evolved together they work really nicely I'm exploring a few different mulberry varieties and grape varieties as hosts with one another this is the only one we've got with the trellis the rest of my growing on the tree and so that kind of work of collaborating vines and trees together is a really beautiful kind of continued learning of our space here on the biggest scale of land management outside of our agroforestry plots some the rotation of cattle and chicken tractors through this land it's just been absolutely remarkable and at times we do actually integrate them in our widely spaced agroforestry systems as more of a silver pasture kind of a story so yeah Oliver's got a whole bunch of 500 laya hen caravans that move around this space to get moved every week they might have been here not sure how long ago six or eight weeks ago or something now knocked all this back the pastures regrown including this was a cropping area this is growing garlic about a year or so ago Josh from greens of the farm was growing garlic there it's growing back with a lot of weeds so we use the chickens and the cattle to manage that knock it down it adds diversity into the cattle's diet they're otherwise mostly eating coquille and white clover but all the different weeds that come up after the chickens after the cropping give them a whole diversity of yeah more more plant material into their diet and then coming and knocking that down and this cycle between them and the chickens just phenomenal how it's building the soil in the pastures and so big part of my vision in the longer run with all these systems is these will get to a point where bigger animals come and move back through them again too and as I say up here where we've got 12 meter intervals between tree lines that's a really good spacing for a silver pasture style system so not an intensive horticulture based kind of syntropic system but a silver pasture based agroforestry system and to be honest in large areas of land it's probably a easier way to create food and manage land with less labor and greater productivity than an intensive horticultural model so if you've got big areas that wider space plantings and integrating chickens cattle animal in the systems it's just phenomenal that the work that does. I love Bunya's approach to farming as it's deeply rooted in the principles of permaculture and successional agroforestry by working with natural succession he's actively regenerating the land as well as being super productive in the process by building soil and fostering self-sufficiency in nutrient cycling in return he and his team are yielding an abundance of food fuel and fiber at the heart of the system he's created is his commitment to providing high-quality food resilient plant propagation materials and transformative educational experiences his action orientated hands-on approach is inspirational and a fusion of deep ecological understanding video please share and subscribe to our channel so we can spread the love of syntropics regenerative farming and off-grid living