Lugar da Terra

We are a family of three, Job, Tânia and Julien and we are farming one acre of land (5000 m2) on the west coast of Portugal, 3 km away from the sea.

We started our journey as farmers after participating in the first workshop of Ernst Gotsch (Syntropic Farming) in Portugal in 2011. At the time, we were filmmakers making a documentary (“Abundance”) about his philosophy of work and decided to leave the camera on the tripod and start farming ourselves!

What we had learned, had changed our life completely and made us see what we really wanted to do with our life: farming and use our energy to grow our own food, regenerating the land.

During eight years and until July 2020 we have been developing the Food Forest of the charm hotel Areias do Seixo which we were happy and proud to start from scratch into the food forest that it has become today.

Along those years, we have studied and learned from the most important teachers in regenerative farming: Geoff Lawton, Sepp Holzer, Martin Crawford, Richard Perkins and many others.

We experimented ourselves many techniques and did trial and error until finding out what were the best methods for our climate and for our goals. Each day is a new adventure.

And now we are fully dedicated to our land, our homestead, where we aim to develop an extended Food Forest that incorporates the efficiency and productivity of the market garden principles and the integration of trees that produce food and organic matter to establish a healthy habitat for many species while producing food for our family and for our community.

We produce vegetables without pesticides, without gmo’s (genetically manipulated organisms), and on an no-till basis. We use locally produced compost for our annual beds, that allows us to direct seed and it works as a mulch layer, which implies little maintenance (weeding).

We plant a big diversity of vegetables and many flowers, this way the plants can grow together and help each other. Pollinators and other animals love this environment and help to bring balance to the system. Between the annual beds, we plant trees. As they grow, the biology in the soil changes and gets richer.

The trees produce leaves and woody material that we use to nourish the soil while producing food.