Regenerating Soil and Community in Haiti | Featuring Sidney-Max Eitenne

"Without community, sustainability cannot exist." – Sidney-Max Eitenne

This week on Herbal Radio, host Lucretia VanDyke is joined by Sidney-Max Eitenne from Grown in Haiti. Since 2014, Grown in Haiti has planted and distributed over 25,000 trees, restored degraded soil, and shared regenerative knowledge across rural Haiti. Join us as the explore:

Gathering the community to regenerate the soil Listening and learning from the patience of Elders How plant relationships teach us about human relationships Food security by having sovereignty over the seeds grown Avoiding plant trends and turning to the plants around you As always, we thank you for joining us on another botanical adventure and are so honored to have you tag along with us on this ride. Remember, we want to hear from you! Your questions, ideas, and who you want to hear from are an invaluable piece to our podcast. Email us at podcast@mountainroseherbs.com to let us know what solutions we should uncover next within the vast world of herbalism.

🎥 Watch the video version to this episode here: https://youtu.be/5uEbEqSnMTY

Learn more about Sidney-Max & Lucretia below!

🌺 Sidney-Max Etienne is the founder and executive director of Grown in Haiti, a Haitian-led regenerative agriculture nonprofit in Cap Rouge, on Haiti's southern peninsula. He arrived in 2014 and lived in a tent for more than two years, hauling water from a spring while planting the first trees. The organization grew out of that time on the land.

Grown in Haiti now runs a community nursery, a farmer network called AgriNatif, and water catchment holding close to 50,000 gallons. Its Farmer Support Program prioritizes women. More than 25,000 trees have gone into the ground through the work, and over 300 volunteers have come through the property.

His practice is syntropic agroforestry, planting in dense succession so that soil and canopy build together. Much of what grows in Cap Rouge was never planted by anyone. Documenting it has become part of the work, with more than 100 species recorded on iNaturalist so far, including nine birds found nowhere outside Hispaniola.

He teaches a free syntropic farming course through the Earthed platform and spoke as a finalist at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin. He also serves as vice president of the Caribbean Agroecology Institute. In 2026 he completed research through the Caribbean Institute in Gender and Development at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, on women's socio-ec