International workshop in Alto Beni

 In early May 2012, a mixed group of  farmers, students, researchers, development workers and other with an interest in agroforestry from Brazil, Bolivia, Switzerland and Germany came together for 4 days to exchange experiences about successional agroforestry systems (SAFS).


Joachim Milz has reason to be happy: standing between his orange trees, he shows a foto of the same citrus plantation before he started to turn it into a SAFS. Now, he doesn't only get better citrus yields but can also harvest a great variety of other products in of his system.

 Other farmers in the region also told us about their experineces with agroforestry elements. Don Carlos, for example, stated that since he integrated shade trees in his cocoa plantation, he received "fertilizer from above" in the shape of falling leaves for his cacao.

Very impressive was a visit to a plantation of Cacao National Boliviano, a variety of cacao which has only recently been rediscovered for its special quality. The trees seemed to be more or less left to themselves and were by far the highest cacao trees I'd ever seen: 10-15 metres (in most plantations, they are about 2-4 metres high).

 Ernst's contributions to the workshop were theoretical...

 ... as well as practical

Besides visits to farms, we also had interesting presentations, for example about SAFS being successfully applied on larger scales (hundreds of hectares) in Western Brazil.