Benedetta Kyengo: Bringing back through Syntropic Agroforestry her paradise that the Green Revolution stole
As a child in Nairobi, Benedetta Kyengo spent holidays climbing trees and eating mangoes and papayas at her grandmother’s food forest in eastern Kenya. Eight years later, every tree was gone — replaced by maize and beans — and her grandmother, who used to send food to the city, was depending on money sent from it. That reversal, from abundance to dependency in a single generation, is the wound this episode is about healing.
Benedetta — founder of Feedback to the Future and a practitioner of syntropic agroforestry in Kenya’s semi-arid east — bought five acres of severely degraded land in 2020 and spent the next four years turning it into a 100-species food forest. She describes how terrible droughts almost forced her to quit, why she teaches farmers to be “greedy with water” — stealing runoff from neighbours’ plots and slowing every drop into the soil — and how training hundreds of farmers across 300 acres has measurably changed local rainfall patterns. She also explains how she plans to make this food accessible not to wealthy Nairobi consumers, but to the slum communities she grew up in: by stripping input costs to near zero, saving indigenous seeds, and packaging in the small quantities the slum economy actually runs on. For anyone asking whether regenerative agriculture can work in brittle, semi-arid landscapes — and at a price point that serves ordinary people — this episode is a field report from someone already doing it.
