by Scott Gallant
Sorting Syntropic Systems
In the tropics, the challenge isn’t usually a lack of growth; it’s the sheer, overwhelming abundance of it. When you step onto a degraded pasture with the purpose of regeneration the immediate question is not "Will things grow?" but rather, "How do I organize what grows?"
What I usually see planted when folks don’t have a plan is an unmanaged food forest, mostly growing grass, full of exotic fruit trees, many of which won’t put much calories on their plate. In order to move beyond what eventually becomes an unmanageable jungled tangled in vines, we need structure.
In Syntropic agriculture, that structure comes down to understanding two non-negotiable factors: Stratification (the light requirements of a plant) and Succession (how long a plant lives for and when it reaches maturity).
But here is the practical reality I’ve faced: staring at a blank piece of land and trying to mentally sort hundreds of potential species into their correct Strata and Life Cycle group is paralyzing. You know you need high biomass species, emergent timber trees, medium strata fruit crops, and fast growing secondary 2 support species all planted at once. But which ones work together?
The Need for Better Data
Over the last decade of designing and implementing regenerative systems at Porvenir Design, we realized we couldn't just keep all this data in our heads. We needed a repository of our fieldwork, our observations, all the books we had scoured for plant data.
We have spent years compiling, refining, and field-testing a master database of tropical species specifically tailored for Syntropic applications.
It is a distillation of our work. It was messy, full of too much information, more than was reasonable. Now it is not.
A FREE Tool
We believe that for regenerative agriculture to scale, we need open-source tools that lower the barrier to entry. We want to get this database into the hands of people who are actually putting plants in the ground.
We have cleaned up our internal database and turned it into a downloadable Tropical Master Plant List. It categorizes hundreds of species by their strata (Low, Medium, High, Emergent), lifecycle groups, and primary function in a Syntropic system.
If you are actively designing or managing a tropical system, this list will save you dozens of hours of research. It is yours, free, by entering your email below.
The Ingredients vs. The Recipe
Remember, knowing that Jackfruit is a high-strata species is different than knowing how to prune it at month 18 to ensure light reaches the cacao beneath it, or how to arrange its spacing relative to a pioneering eucalyptus.
This list is the "what." The "how" is where the real work of Syntropic Farming lies.
We recently launched our next cohort for our upcoming Online Syntropic Farming Primer in order to help you understand the how. Follow the form link here for all the course information!
Online Syntropic Farming Primer
This course is designed to take tools like this plant list and teach you the management, pruning, and design principles necessary to turn a list of species into a beautiful, life giving ecosystem.
In the meantime, I hope this list helps you bring a little more order to the beautiful chaos of the tropics.
