Pierre Muller

Founder of AGECO

Pierre Muller founded AGECO to help landowners across Southern Europe and beyond build farms that hold up over time, ecologically and economically. He designs agroforestry systems for vineyards, olive groves, orchards, and mixed estates, usually between 1 and 40 hectares, where trees, crops, ground cover, and grazing are planned to support each other rather than compete.

His approach is practical before it is anything else. Every design starts with reading a specific piece of land: its soils, its water, its exposure, its wind, and the people who farm it. AGECO designs working ecosystems, not utopias. A system has to produce a real agricultural yield and stay maintainable by the people who live with it, or it is not a design worth proposing.

Bridging research and practice

Some of the most rigorous Mediterranean agroforestry and soil research is published in French and rarely reaches growers working in English or Catalan. Pierre works across Catalan, Spanish, French, and English, and part of his role is to carry that body of knowledge, on tree-crop spacing, soil biology, hydrology, and fire resilience, into designs that growers can actually use, whatever language they farm in.

Background and experience

Pierre came to agriculture from an unexpected direction. A career in international luxury hospitality showed him, up close, how fragile and wasteful a long food chain can be. That is what turned his attention to food sovereignty and to farm systems built for resilience rather than waste.

His agroecology is not theoretical. Pierre has worked from inside a range of farms and agricultural operations, conventional ones included, testing regenerative methods against real economic and operational pressure. That is why AGECO designs for the constraints growers actually face, and why its proposals are built to hold up outside ideal conditions, not only on paper.

His knowledge is also rooted in years of learning directly from farmers, biologists, and agroecology practitioners, including Rosemary Morrow, Robyn Francis, Clea Chandmal, Eric Escoffier, and Pascal Depienne. He has worked alongside viticulture and agroforestry consultants such as Pascal Madevon, Alain Malard, and Rico Zook.

His winemaking path has crossed several terroirs. In the Okanagan Valley, he honed his craft at Uppercase Winery, working between innovation and tradition. In Châteauneuf-du-Pape, he deepened his savoir-faire at Maison Brotte, one of the world’s most demanding appellations. In Fully, Switzerland, he joined Pierre-Elie Carron and saw the precision that mountain viticulture requires. Each step shaped how he reads a vineyard today: as a working system, and as a dialogue with the land.

Alongside his work in Europe, Pierre has carried out field and teaching projects in Canada, La Réunion, Madagascar, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, India, and Polynesia. He is fluent in English, Spanish, and French.

Selected projects

Vineyard regeneration, Canada. Redesign of a 4-hectare vineyard integrated with native flora inside a 200-hectare nature reserve, to rebuild biodiversity and soil function. Featured in the documentary Otherwise: Living in Harmony, episode 5, “Regenerative systems.”

Crop transition, La Réunion. Support for farmers moving from sugarcane monoculture toward diversified polyculture, building several income streams instead of one.

Field-worker cooperation, Okanagan Valley. Creation and coordination of a multicultural union of orchard and vineyard workers, organised around fair conditions and shared skill.

Ecological hotel, León, Nicaragua. Construction of a low-impact hotel tied to a local circular economy and high-value food processing.

Rural revival, Alta Garrotxa. Support for the repopulation and development of mountain communities, including the conversion of a thousand-year-old masia into a collective farm and forest learning platform.

Teaching. Agroecology and permaculture courses in France, Spain, Honduras, and Madagascar.