Disturbance pushes plants forward! Have you ever seen the way an ecosystem comes back after a tree fall, fire, lava flow, volcanic emissions, hurricane, wind storm, landslide, river overflowing, or floods? The plants have a moment of shock then go into over drive to compensate for the change of ecosystem. This makes the plant vigorous and also pushes the system into the next level of succession. Putting all the material on the ground to decompose into rich soils and allowing shorter stature species to gain good sunlight. This is what we are emulating by working within Syntropic Agroforestry framework.

Donʻt be intimidated, be the windstorm, but be a kind one and leave the plants with clean cuts! They will reward you with their efforts after you put in yours! Yes, we cut down a forest to grow a forest. A more productive and diverse forest will be the outcome giving us our food, timber and medicine. If your looking for what it means to be a human, the answer lies within working with forest ecosystems!

Please start your agroforest this year!

Agroforestry management obviously comes down to managing large amounts of trees. Effective procedures allows us to take absurd amounts of biomass and process it to be digested by our target crops, in this row low bearing coconuts, sugarcane and pineapples. These types of management cycles allows our plants to be pushed into a disturbance cycle where large amounts of nutrients are cycling and sunlight makes it through to the shorter stature species creating a growth pulse.

If you do agroforestry your future is processing large amounts of biomass!

Management of sugarcane involves keeping good sunlight so the canes can continue to flourish. Here we are again playing with endangered genetics trying to keep them alive and growing strong! Keep them moving around and keep on sharing them! Each cane has different qualities and different flavor profiles. Did you know there are so many varieties of sugarcane? We grow somewhere around 25 varieties. KEEP THEM ALIVE!

Thanks to a friend (you know who you are) who recently came over for a tour for the suggestion that we demonstrate how we use tools in our management. A tool tutorial!

The sickle is an invaluable tool. Utilizing different tools allows us to have streamlined management of our agroforestry systems. Here is a description of how we work with a sickle. When I first started using these tools it changed my life and now itʻs one of the most important go to tools that I have. Itʻs ideal to have the right tool for the job and know that tools limits and when to pull out a different tool like a handsaw for bigger cuts.

If anyone knows of a better brand to work with, please let us know. High quality tools are extremely important.

Keep your systems managed with proper tools!