How a way of farming worked out with growers in Alto Beni, Bolivia, became Dynamic Agroforestry and reached farms across the tropics.
How an agronomist and a group of pioneer farmers in Bolivia turned degraded plots into Dynamic Agroforestry, and how the method reached farms on other continents.
Our journey began in 1982, when Dr. Joachim Milz, a young agronomic engineer from Germany, moved to Sapecho, Bolivia, to work with the German Development Service (DED, now part of GIZ). In the Alto Beni region he became closely involved with local farming communities and met his future Bolivian wife.
Working with the El Ceibo Cooperative, then a young alliance of smallholder cocoa producers, Joachim helped set up the world’s first certified organic cocoa supply chain, launched in 1987, and the partnership between El Ceibo and the German company Rapunzel Naturkost that opened international markets for Bolivian organic cocoa.
He then bought a farm near Sapecho, which later became ECOTOP’s learning hub. His first experiment turned a degraded orange plantation into a polyculture with leguminous cover crops and trees. He soon saw that adding more plants was not enough: a more systematic, nature-inspired approach was needed.
Joachim began working with a group of pioneer Bolivian farmers, among them Walter Yana, who still works with ECOTOP today. A visit from Swiss agroforestry expert Ernst Götsch, with his ideas on forest succession and natural self-organisation, sparked their interest in successional agroforestry. The group started adapting these ideas on their own farms and turned degraded plots into diverse, resilient systems. Together with Proyecto OSCAR, one of the first DAF plots in Bolivia was planted.
The method was refined in the field, by observation and trial and error on their own plots across Alto Beni: species combinations, pruning intensity, planting density and succession sequences. They kept what the soil and the canopy rewarded and dropped what did not.
It shared core principles with Götsch’s parallel work in Brazil, but the Bolivian path developed on its own, shaped by Alto Beni’s soils, its cocoa cooperatives and the realities of smallholder life. By the end of the decade it was proven on a handful of farms, but it still had no name, no scientific evidence base and no institution behind it.
Organic certification had removed chemical inputs, but on its own it did not rebuild soil, restore diversity or lift the yields smallholders were stuck at. The next step was to design self-sustaining farming systems that build fertility and diversity, and to prove that working with nature improves both productivity and resilience.
2003 ECOTOP SRL is constituted in Bolivia, the first legal home for the practice.
2005 The team introduces the name Dynamic Agroforestry for the Bolivian method, adapted for smallholders and larger farms alike.
2007 With FiBL, ECOTOP sets up SysCom Sara Ana, a long-term comparison of four cocoa production systems on the same Bolivian soil.
By the end of the decade the pieces were in place: a legal home, a name and a long-term trial. The method was ready to scale.
In 2010 Fundación ECOTOP was constituted in La Paz as a non-profit arm for research, capacity building and development cooperation. In 2018 ECOTOP Suisse GmbH followed, to handle international consulting and partnerships.
In Alto Beni, years of work alongside cocoa cooperatives led to municipal rules that restrict slash-and-burn and make slash-and-mulch the legal alternative. Community-led legal processes that ECOTOP accompanied then had Alto Beni declared free of mining. ECOTOP also built the Peritaje Indígena programme, a ten-module curriculum certified by the Universidad Católica Boliviana for indigenous and rural leaders.
From 2018 the work spread across continents, with DAF trials and farmer programmes in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, the Dominican Republic, Madagascar, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and beyond, each led by a local partner and supported by ECOTOP’s design, training and implementation.
By the mid-2020s ECOTOP was working in 18 countries, with more than 10,000 farmers reached directly and over 6,000 hectares under Dynamic Agroforestry. What began on a handful of plots in Alto Beni has grown into a network of practitioners, researchers and partners.
From its roots in Sapecho, ECOTOP became a centre for research, training and practical implementation.
We work directly with smallholder farmers and design agroforestry systems with them, so each system fits their needs and their land.
We train farmers, researchers and companies, host international courses and develop programmes with Bolivian universities.
With growing interest in carbon insetting and agroforestry-based removals, we help shape methods that link restoration with companies’ climate goals.
With NGOs, governments and the private sector we bring DAF to more farms, showing that agriculture can be productive and regenerative at once.
Regenerate landscapes, strengthen farming communities and show that working with nature is the key to a resilient agricultural future.
