Our Story

Our journey began in 1982, when Dr. Joachim Milz, a young agronomic engineer from Germany, moved to Sapecho, Bolivia, to work with the Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst (DED), the German Development Service (now part of GIZ). During his time as a cooperation worker in the Alto Beni region, he became deeply engaged with local farming communities and met his future Bolivian wife, further solidifying his connection to the region.

Seeking to put his agricultural knowledge into practice, Joachim purchased a farm near Sapecho, which later became ECOTOP’s learning hub. This farm served as an experimental site, where he explored ways to restore soil fertility, improve productivity, pruning management, and increase resilience in tropical agriculture. His first experiments involved converting a degraded orange plantation into a polyculture system with leguminous cover crops and trees. However, he soon realized that simply adding more plants was not enough—a more systematic, nature-inspired approach was needed.

Determined to find a truly regenerative farming model, Joachim began collaborating with a group of young Bolivian farmers, who would later become the pioneers of Dynamic Agroforestry (DAF). Around the same time, he encountered Swiss agroforestry expert Ernst Götsch, whose successional agroforestry concepts deeply influenced his thinking. Inspired by the self-organizing intelligence of natural ecosystems, Joachim integrated these principles into farming, refining a method that mimics natural forest succession while enhancing productivity.

By the early 2000s, Joachim saw the need to institutionalize these practices to ensure their widespread adoption. This led him to establish ECOTOP, a platform dedicated to developing, scaling, and advocating for Dynamic Agroforestry (DAF)—a concept and name he pioneered.

Joachim’s earlier work with Cooperativa El Ceibo, Bolivia’s largest cocoa cooperative, had already been groundbreaking—resulting in the world’s first organic-certified chocolate in 1987, developed in collaboration with Rapunzel Naturkost. However, he recognized the limitations of organic certification alone. While organic farming eliminated chemical inputs, it did not necessarily regenerate ecosystems or solve productivity challenges faced by farmers.

Joachim’s vision went further:

• Moving beyond input substitution to design self-sustaining farming systems.
• Enhancing biodiversity and soil fertility instead of merely avoiding synthetic fertilizers.
• Proving that working with nature could improve both productivity and resilience.

Thus, ECOTOP’s mission was set: to develop and disseminate scalable agroforestry models that regenerate landscapes while improving farmers’ livelihoods.