Bart van Beuzekom: Co-Founder and Father

When Bart became a father, he realized that his children wouldn’t have the opportunity to see nature the way he was able to. Why? Our way of life is destroying ecosystems. The Solution started to form after watching Life in Syntropy by Ernst Götsch.

Background

Director of Latin America for ORTEC, where we took the office from 1 to 30 employees in 8 years.

Why?

Scave.World started from the need to make a meaningful contribution to mitigating climate change.

What’s next?

Convert as much arable land to regenerative agroforestry. Making agriculture the solution to climate change.

Our first experience putting theory into practice was at project Maara with Robert and Dace. Cutting 2,5 meter tall grass to allow trees to take root, we started an agroforest. Now 2 years later it looks like this:

On our next project, we made 2 adjustments – it was in much lower grass and it was rainfed. This was an enormous learning experience given the amount of work involved. The below was after 3 months:

However, within a year the grass had reclaimed the entire area and the seeds we planted didn’t even manage to sprout. This meant we had to go back to the drawing board and deep dive into the research.

The result of this is our Literature to Support Our Approach page. Based on the research, we pivoted to include a clear focus on both scalability and economic viability.

To put this into practice, we worked with Boer-in-Natuur to get hands-on agroforestry experience in a temperate climate. This is where we ran our tests of more mature agroforests.

The resulting model combines traditional temperate agroforestry with syntropic design and intercropping of annuals. We are now testing in Waddinxveen, The Netherlands (left) and in Cidadelhe (Pinhel), Portugal (right).