Marc Leiber – 200 euros, 160,000 trees, and how to build a syntropic paradise from scratch

Marc Leiber, founder of Grow Back and farmer at Quinta das Abelhas, in Portugal, grew up between Germany and the Netherlands, studied International Horticulture and Business Management, spent nine months on Ernst Götsch’s farm in Brazil after organising the agroforestry pioneer’s first-ever visit to Northern Europe while still a university student, and arrived in Portugal six and a half years ago with 200 euros in his bank account. Today, the six-hectare piece of land he acquired from a neighbouring 500-hectare farm, on terms that started without a contract, holds 50,000 native tree seedlings in a single one-hectare field alone, produces essential oils, cereals, almonds, mulberries, and grapes, and maintains a soil temperature at 15 centimetres depth of a constant 21 degrees Celsius while the control field next door swings between 38 and 28.

The Montado is a forest ecosystem that humans turned into a savanna over centuries of fire, felling, pruning, and grazing. Marc sees it as a system with its structure upside down — dense at the top, clear underneath — and has been quietly reversing that, adding layers beneath the oak canopy, managing the eucalyptus most of his neighbours consider a pest, and pruning the oaks in a way nobody around him was taught. Life creates life is how he frames it: plant a potato under a fruit tree and the potato builds mycorrhizae that benefit the tree; fell a eucalyptus and use the biomass to grow native species in its place. Nothing takes more than it gives back.

In this walk-and-talk episode — recorded in a landscape dense with birdsong, then stepping outside the farm gate into the silence of bare control land just metres away — we get into how a grandmother’s wartime farm in northwestern Germany shaped a conviction about food security, how a student group got Wageningen University to pay for Ernst Götsch’s flight tickets, what six weeks of gathering acorns by hand has to do with getting a farm started, why 98% of Marc’s trees survive when reforestation projects next door lose 98%, why eucalyptus is not the villain it’s made out to be, and why he’d change the human relationship to life processes before he’d change a single farming practice.

Climate action’s singular focus on CO2 and CO2 equivalent misses the bigger picture, intact water cycles cool the land, recycle, rainfall, and stabilise local temperatures. This episode is part of our ongoing Water Cycle series where we focus on how restoring small water cycles is unusually actionable when it comes to climate change.

STARTING A FARM WITH 200 EUROS IN YOUR POCKET

Marc arrived at the farm with no capital, no contract, and a vision that had been building since conversations with his grandmother, who grew up on a 30-hectare farm in northwestern Germany where the family never bought anything except salt, sugar, tea, and coffee, fed refugees during the Second World War, and traded food for paintings and jewellery when the cities ran out. That story of embedded food security became a lens for everything that followed. His first income from the farm came from six to eight weeks of gathering acorns by hand — 1.5 tonnes of them, all from the floor — to sell. The land itself was acquired by a combination of trust, timing, and a 24-hour layover in Lisbon on the way back from Brazil: no formal contract existed for the first year and a half, while Marc was already planting trees. The owner helped fund the fencing. The contract followed two years later.

“I spent about six or eight weeks to gather 1.5 tonnes of acorns, all by hand. I was on the floor all day picking up acorns.” — Marc Leiber

EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

The conviction that any proposition can find its funder if it’s presented to the right person runs all the way through Marc’s story from a student group with no budget getting a university to fund a Ernst Götsch, agroforestry guru’s flight, to a 20-year-old with 200 euros acquiring land on a 500-hectare farm. Marc attributes part of it to useful naivety: if he’d thought it through fully, he would have concluded it was impossible and never made the ask. Part of it is organisational experience built before anyone thought of it as a skill: getting 30, 40, then 150 people to show up to plant trees or attend lectures, managing a student food forest with 50,000 euros of funding in the second year of university. Those foundations made the asks feel natural.

“Whatever you want to do is possible. There’s money for it all in the world. You just need to somehow make the right proposition presented to the right people.” — Marc Leiber

GETTING ERNST GÖTSCH OVER FOR 4 DAYS OF LECTURES

Marc became obsessed with the idea of bringing Ernst Götsch to the Netherlands after watching with some university colleague the short film Life in Syntropy. The problem: Ernst had no internet on his farm and no phone. It was practically impossible to reach him unless you already had a connection. The group found that connection through Jonas Steinfeld, a food forest pioneer who had done an internship on Ernst’s farm, and Ernst agreed to come for four days. The student group went to the university director, explained the project, asked for a lecture space and the plane tickets, and got both. Ernst visited farms, gave lectures that drew crowds, and spent four days in the Netherlands at a conventional agriculture university’s expense. Marc has been building towards that visit ever since.

“Those four days really changed my life. It was at the end of the second study year, and I always say those four days taught me more that was significant to what I came to university to learn and what I wanted to achieve than the two previous years.” — Marc Leiber

THE MONTADO NEEDS OTHER TREES

The Montado as it now exists — cork and holm oak savanna, mostly cleared beneath, grazed or not grazed, with very few other species — is an ecologically degraded version of what the landscape was. Marc’s reading of the system is that it was originally a multi-layered forest that centuries of human management compressed into a single canopy layer over exposed ground. That structure creates a thermodynamic problem: with the soil hot and the canopy high above it, water vapour moves upward into the atmosphere rather than cycling within the system. The fix, in Marc’s approach, is to restore the pyramid — open canopy at the top, increasing density of layers as you go down, soil surface fully covered. His farm is already showing what a Montado-plus version looks like: the bird diversity exceeds the official most-biodiverse ecosystem in Portugal, which is also Montado. The difference is the layers.

“Really, ecologically speaking and historically speaking, this is a forest ecosystem that has been altered by humans through fire, through pruning, through grazing, and through cultivation into a savanna system.” — Marc Leiber

EUCALYPTUS TREES ARE NOT EVIL, BUT VERY GENEROUS

Marc grows vegetables, cereals, fruit trees, and 50,000 native seedlings in the shade and presence of eucalyptus trees, and none of them have suffered for it. His argument: the problem with eucalyptus in Portugal is not the tree itself but the way commercial plantations are established — bulldozers, drainage works, synthetic fertilisers applied to compacted, de-vegetated ground. What would have grown on that land if they hadn’t planted eucalyptus? Nothing. The tree is doing its job on already degraded soil. When a eucalyptus is felled, Marc doesn’t kill the resprout — he manages it, uses the biomass to build organic matter, and plants native species alongside it. The eucalyptus becomes the scaffold for the next forest rather than its enemy.

“I say always, it’s one of the most generous trees that we have in this landscape, and most abundant trees.” — Marc Leiber

OAK TREES SHOULD BE PRUNED DIFFERENTLY

Decades of received wisdom about how to manage cork and holm oaks — essentially, to clear everything beneath them and let the canopy spread wide — have left the trees structurally wrong. Marc describes it as curtains: heavy branches hanging down and outward, the tree’s energy spread laterally, the canopy too dense at the top for light to reach the layers beneath. His intervention is to remove those curtain branches and bring the tree back toward its centre — upright, vigorous, with light penetrating to the ground. The results are visible: trees that have been pruned this way show incomparably better health, more foliage, and faster growth than those that haven’t. It is also not how anyone around him was taught to manage oaks.

“What I have done is to actually take those curtains that are hanging down and remove them and bring the trees back to the centre, and the health of them and the amount of foliage and growth that they have are incomparable.” — Marc Leiber

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

Koen and Marc also talked about:

Magic wand — a shift in mindset: from humans working ‘with’ nature (a term he finds undefined and overused) to humans working ‘in favour of life processes’; his conviction is that this shift would have a ripple effect on the whole planet, including how we treat each other and how we manage natural resource conflicts
The land’s original state — stepping outside the farm gate to stand in the bare, silent control field metres from the farm’s canopy: soil temperature already 15°C warmer in April, no birds, no layers, the visual and acoustic before that makes the after undeniable;
Life creates life — his most held contrarian belief: there is no competition between plants in these systems, only collaboration; potatoes under fruit trees build mycorrhizae that benefit the tree; eucalyptus biomass feeds the native seedlings growing in its shade; in nature, one plus one is three
Challenging the agribusiness narrative — his university taught that we need industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population; Marc’s response, backed by six and a half years of data, is that these systems can feed the world today and in 200 years, and that the stock-portfolio analogy captures it: a land system where you can take value from it and still have more than you started with at the end of the month
What Marc would do with €1 billion — build farms like this at larger, more mechanisable scale in countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the US, each with an educational centre reaching both general public and farmers; prioritise data: bioacoustics, leaf analysis, microclimate stations, because the value being created here is enormous and largely unmeasured

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