renkedevries@gmail.com (english, german)
Renke de Vries studied International Forest Ecosystem Management in Eberswalde, Germany. Besides that he holds a permaculture design certificate, works as a professional arborist with rope climbing technique and does agroforestry consultancy all over Europe.
In 2019 he went to Brazil for a three-month internship on the farm of Ernst Götsch, the founder of synthropic agriculture. In the same year Renke de Vries established the first three hectares of syntropic plantings on the farm“Gut & Boesel” in the region Brandenburg (east Germany).
In continual contact with Ernst Götsch he started to apply the syntropic principles to the European temperate climate. The conditions on the farm where Renke built up his system from 2019 to 2023 were characterized by a heavily degraded sandy ground with no more than 1 % organic soil and a high compaction in the subsoil. This was accompanied by low rainfall (around 450 mm per year).
Nevertheless he succeeded in establishing and maintaining productive syntropic agroforestry lines independent from the operations on the grain and cattle farm. In Brandenburg Renke de Vries focussed on a high variety of fruits, berries and nuts like sea buckhorn, autumn olive, raspberry, apple, pear, plum, hazel, chestnut or walnut. These plants were combined in smart design solutions as multilayer systems with timber trees and an herbaceous ground cover beneath them. All in all, more than 18 km of complex agroforestry lines were established on an area of 18 hectare without irrigation or fertilisation.
Apart of this Renke de Vries wrote a concept for the scientific trial set up: How could a monoculture pine forest be transformed into a mixed broad-leaved forest? This concept won a price of the soap company Ecover. Renke could show that the syntropic principles have a huge potential for forestry. The syntropic forestry field outperformed all other comparison plots in the first two years of growth and is still under intensive research.
Due to the success of his projects in East Germany Renke de Vries started working as agroforestry consultant and is currently consulting projects in Germany, Spain, in the Czech Republic, in Serbia, Macedonia, Sweden and in the USA.
If your farm operation is looking for help in the design, implementation and further supervision of complex successional agroforestry systems feel free to contact Renke. He has experience with designs integrated into different kind of land use forms like arable land, pastureland or plantations. Also the transformation of existing simple plantations or agroforestry lines is possible.
He also helps with the design, implementation and management of afforestation sites or the transformation of existing forests into diverse forest ecosystem with a multitude of ecosystem services, timber and non-timber forest products.
