Nature’s automation:
Self-organising systems in production horticulture
By Erik van Zuilekom
What if the most effective automation technology available to production horticulture was never engineered in a factory? Self-organising ecological processes, nature’s own regulatory systems, offer nurseries practical pathways to reduced inputs, stronger plant health and increasing resilience over time. This article proposes three accessible starting points for growers willing to trial them.
The control paradigm
Production horticulture operates, overwhelmingly, on a logic of control. We sterilise substrates, isolate cultivars in monoculture rows, suppress biological activity with synthetic inputs, and then replace the ecological functions we have methodically removed. It is effective, in the same manner that manually pumping air into a sealed room is effective, provided nobody stops pumping. I admit feeling somewhat uncomfortable considering this.
This approach frames every ecological process as a threat to overcome rather than a service to harness. Microbial colonisation is treated as a disease risk. Decomposition becomes waste. Each natural process that might contribute to system resilience is overridden, and the grower assumes the full cost of replacing those functions through labour and chemistry.
I have observed this dynamic across more than twenty years of ecological design in living architecture and revegetation works. Conventional maintenance regimes export organic matter, suppress biological development, and hold planted systems in permanent infancy, rarely permitting the relationships to form that would allow a system to stabilise and tend towards its own care.
Where may this direct our thoughts?
Self-organisation is not disorder
Self-organisation describes the emergence of functional order from interactions between living components, without external direction orchestrating the outcome. In plant communities, it manifests as species partitioning resources, organisms forming mutualistic relationships, and systems developing fascinating feedback loops that regulate growth, decomposition and renewal.
The science underpinning this is extensive. Jørgensen, Mejer and Nielsen described ecosystems as self-organising critical systems that maintain stability through internal feedback mechanisms¹. Research published in Nature Microbiology demonstrated that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) form hyphal networks that redistribute water and phosphorus, recruit beneficial soil bacteria, and buffer crops against both biotic and abiotic stress², and function as underground infrastructure that nobody designed, installed or powered.
This is not fringe ecology. It describes the working architecture of every intact living system on this planet. I suggest the question for production horticulture is, therefore, where, specifically, can we begin harnessing these processes within existing operations?
Bring your substrates to life
The most immediately accessible shift lies in growing media and rethinking the biology of the pot. Standard practice favours sterilised or biologically inert substrates: predictable, controllable and biologically vacant. Yet mounting research demonstrates that biologically active media outperform their sterile counterparts with notable consistency.
On-farm trials across 54 fields in Switzerland revealed that AMF inoculation generated growth responses ranging from −12% to +40%, with soil microbiome indicators successfully predicting 86% of the response variation². Separately, cooperation between phosphate-solubilising bacteria, humic acids and an AMF-induced microbiome shifts that directly enhanced plant nutrient uptake³, with the growing medium effectively generating fertility from within rather than depending upon it being perpetually added from without.
The entry point for nurseries is tangible: trialling commercially available mycorrhizal inoculants within existing potting media. Inoculants carry upfront cost and biological communities require seasons to establish, both honest realities warranting transparent assessment. Yet, as biological activity matures within a substrate, external input demands reduce.
I have observed this across multiple contexts. Engineered substrates on roof garden installations and hydroponic systems in green walls that are permitted to develop biological communities become measurably more moisture-retentive, nutrient-efficient and structurally stable with each successive year. The same process has unfolded in food production on my homestead, where biologically active beds now demand notably fewer interventions.
Design your nursery for pest regulation
The second opportunity involves pest management, reframing it not as a reactive chemical exercise but as a design challenge with ecological solutions. Diverse biological communities develop self-regulating feedback, and predator populations establish in proportion to prey availability generating a dynamic equilibrium that neither chemical spraying nor monoculture configurations can replicate.
Incorporating functional biodiversity into the physical design of production facilities, as integrated infrastructure rather than a decorative afterthought, shifts the trajectory fundamentally. Insectary strips hosting species that sustain beneficial predatory and parasitic insects can maintain biological control populations year-round. This approach dovetails perfectly with integrated pest management and the use of beneficial insect introductions, lacewings, predatory mites, and ladybirds within greenhouse or shade house structures.
My experience designing living architecture installations has reinforced this consistently. High-diversity plantings across rooftops, facades and podiums demonstrate markedly stronger pest resilience than simplified schemes. Pest and disease outbreaks are, in my observation, frequently indicators of underlying ecological stress, and a planted community lacking the biological complexity to self-regulate. A single insectary strip alongside existing production blocks represents a modest starting point with genuine potential to reduce chemical interventions.
Stack your production with succession
The third opportunity involves reconsidering how production space is configured. Conventional nursery layouts separate species into discrete monoculture blocks, logical for stock management, though ecologically impoverished. Each block bears the full burden of its own microclimate regulation, pest management and nutrient supply, in isolation.
Stacking production applies the principle of ecological succession to nursery design. Pioneer species, robust, fast-establishing, high-turnover stock, can be strategically positioned to generate microclimatic benefits for slower-growing, higher-value lines cultivated alongside or beneath them.
Ernst Götsch’s syntropic agriculture demonstrates this principle at landscape scale, regenerating severely degraded land whilst producing marketable outputs by designing with successional dynamics rather than overriding them. Through my design consultancy, I apply comparable ecological succession principles to living architecture, conservation and food-growing systems. A production system applied as a designed community rather than an isolated monoculture row has the capacity to support dynamic systems whilst building the health of both crop and growing medium over time.
This is admittedly a greater conceptual shift than introducing a microbial inoculant. It requires rethinking spatial layout and accepting that production efficiency does not always equate to monocultural simplicity.
Honest constraints
These approaches demand ecological literacy that conventional horticultural training seldom provides. Transition periods span several growing seasons before biological systems deliver measurable input reductions, and ecological outcomes are inherently more varied than those achievable under controlled monoculture conditions.
These are genuine constraints, not grounds for dismissal, but realities to plan around with transparency and patience.
Conclusion
The question is not whether ecological self-organisation works; every functional ecosystem across this planet provides that evidence. The question is whether production horticulture is prepared to trial these processes as practical tools by bringing one substrate line to biological life, installing a single insectary strip, or trialling companion species in a few production beds. The starting points are accessible, the research supports them, and the potential returns, diminishing inputs, strengthening resilience, and lower costs compounding over time, are significant. Nature has been running its own automation for far longer than our industry has existed. Perhaps it is time we paid closer attention to how.
Erik van Zuilekom
UnitedNatures Design / UnitedNatures Edible Garden
E: unitednatures@yahoo.com.au
W: https://linktr.ee/unitednatures
References
- Jørgensen, S.E., Mejer, H. & Nielsen, S.N. (1998). Ecosystem as self-organizing critical systems. Ecological Modelling, 111(2–3), 261–268.
- Lutz, S., Bodenhausen, N., Hess, J., Valzano-Held, A., Waelchli, J., Deslandes-Hérold, G., Schlaeppi, K. & van der Heijden, M.V.D. (2023). Soil microbiome indicators can predict crop growth response to large-scale inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Nature Microbiology.
- Cozzolino, V., Monda, H., Savy, D., Di Meo, V., Vinci, G. & Smalla, K. (2021). Cooperation among phosphate-solubilizing bacteria, humic acids and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi induces soil microbiome shifts and enhances plant nutrient uptake. Chemical and Biological Technologies in Agriculture, 8 (1).