Ernst Gotsch is a Swiss engineer and cocoa farmer in Brazil, since 1984.
In the last 42 years he has been developing and applying, in the most diverse ecosystems, ranging from sub-desert to per-humid rainforest in the Americas, Europe and Africa, a concept for agriculture which follows strategies like what nature does by itself. We see that food is provided, in huge quantities, to a great number of big and small animals in inhabited forests. It is a natural process that we can mimic.
In Ernst’s approach, the human external input is the applied wisdom of the system that men has learned observing the ‘macro-organism Planet Earth’. We are part of it and we should cooperate and cherish this system and not act against it.
The fulfillment of functions and realization of tasks, by all the species involved in nature processes, being that ‘fulfillment’ and ‘realization’ are moved by inner pleasure of each of the intervenients.
Ernst method is based on principles “chosen by Life itself”, in its 4 billion years of existence. Together with an active employment of natural laws, applied in the day-to-day interventions in the plantations, resulting in agro-ecosystems similar, in their way of functioning, their organization and their dynamics, to the natural and original ecosystems at each location. And in the same way, as in those ‘natural’ and ‘original’ ecosystems, the dynamics of natural species succession, are to be used as one of the main tools in the management of these systems.
