Our Story

Determined to find a new farming model, Joachim began collaborating with a group of pioneer Bolivian farmers, such as Walter Yana — who continues to work with ECOTOP to this day. Their interest in successional agroforestry was sparked by a visit from Swiss agroforestry expert Ernst Götsch, whose pioneering concepts on forest succession and natural self-organization left a lasting impression. Deeply inspired, the group — led by Joachim — began experimenting and adapting these ideas on their own farms, converting degraded plots into diverse, resilient agroecosystems.

Refinement happened the only way it could at that stage: empirically. Through patient observation, trial and error, and small-scale field investigations on their own plots across Alto Beni, the group tested species combinations, pruning intensities, planting densities, and succession sequences — keeping what the soil and the canopy rewarded, discarding what didn’t. The approach was not designed at a desk; it was discovered by watching how nature operates and learning to work with it. What ECOTOP would later teach in classrooms and consult on across continents, they first grew with their own hands.

At this stage the approach was still referred to simply as successional agroforestry. It shared core ecological principles with Götsch’s parallel work in Brazil, but the Bolivian trajectory developed independently — shaped by Alto Beni’s soils, its cocoa cooperatives, and the realities of smallholder life. By the end of the decade the method was field-proven on a handful of farms, but it didn’t yet have a name that travelled, a science apparatus to defend it, or an institution behind it. That would change in the years that followed.

By the early 2000s, Joachim’s earlier work with Cooperativa El Ceibo had already produced a milestone the cocoa world still remembers — the first organic-certified chocolate, launched in 1987 with Rapunzel Naturkost. But two decades of farm-level experimentation had taught him something organic certification alone couldn’t deliver. Eliminating chemical inputs was a floor, not a ceiling. It didn’t regenerate soil, didn’t restore biodiversity, didn’t address the productivity ceiling smallholders kept hitting. The next move had to go further.

That move was to design self-sustaining farming systems — to build biodiversity and soil fertility rather than simply avoid synthetic inputs, and to prove that working with nature could improve both productivity and resilience. The mission was set: develop and disseminate scalable agroforestry models that regenerate landscapes while improving farmers’ livelihoods.

In 2003, ECOTOP SRL was formally constituted in Bolivia — the first legal vehicle for the practice, dedicated to developing, scaling, and consulting on the agroforestry method that had taken shape on Bolivian plots over the previous decade.

In 2005, the team formally introduced the term Dynamic Agroforestry to distinguish the Bolivian methodology — adapted for both smallholders and larger operations — from the parallel work emerging in Brazil. The name signalled both a debt to Ernst Götsch’s principles and a deliberate divergence: the Bolivian system was dynamic rather than dogmatic, with looser species protocols and an explicit pruning-driven fertility engine.

In 2008, ECOTOP began working with the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) of Switzerland to establish SysCom Sara Ana — a long-term scientific comparison of four cocoa production systems on a single Bolivian soil. Over the next two decades it would become the most-cited DAF cocoa dataset in the world.

By the end of the decade, the pieces were in place — a legal home in ECOTOP SRL, a name in Dynamic Agroforestry, and a long-term scientific apparatus in SysCom Sara Ana. The method was ready to scale.