Agroforestry: An Integrated Land-Use Management System for Production and Farmland Conservation
AGROFORESTRY DEFINED
"Agroforestry is an intensive land-management system that optimizes the benefits from the biological interactions created when trees and/or shrubs are deliberately combined with crops sad/or livestock."
Excerpts:
"Never in history has global concern for the consequences of human land use been more widely shared. Many regions of the world cannot meet their growing populations most basic needs for food, water and energy. Soil erosion adds to food, energy and transportation costs and threatens future food production capacity. Nonpoint source pollution from forest and agricultural lands restricts access to safe water. Loss of vegetation from land development and site degradation affects our aesthetic environment, global climate patterns and the quality of the air we breathe.
Such problems are often the legacy of our success in maximizing production of one or more agricultural products in a financially optimal fashion without sufficient knowledge of, or regard for, impacts on future productivity and the environment. This was a rational economic choice when long-term consequences were unknown, when resources appeared to be relatively unlimited, and when technology promised means for further intensifying production. Now that we are discovering undesirable longer term consequences of current land-use systems, alternatives must be sought.
One alternative is to model managed ecosystems after the structure and functions of naturally-occurring ones by reestablishing complexity in time, space and biodiversity. This would lead to a shift away from separating land uses on discrete parcels to integrating them on a landscape level. Agroforestry, which exploits the interactions between trees and crops (including livestock) when they are grown together, bridges the gap between production agriculture and natural resource management. This provides opportunities to integrate land uses on a landscape level. Furthermore, properly designed agroforestry systems provide environmentally and economically sound alternatives to unsustainable production systems.
In the past, progressive land management in North America meant increasingly intensive use of a site for production of a single product -- corn, rice, wood, or others, -- in which other values such as watershed and wildlife habitat were competitive, or at best, secondary. In contrast, agroforestry seeks to optimize production of multiple products and benefits by manipulating the interactions between components.
For example, sheep grazing a forest plantation provide short-term revenue and reduce competition. Trees planted on a floodplain yield wood products, trap sediments during peak flows, reduce bank cutting and protect adjacent croplands and downstream water quality. Resource conservation and production goals are integrated rather than assumed to be tradeoffs.
Several decades of development of agroforestry systems and their application in temperate nations such as New Zealand and China demonstrate the range of conditions under which this approach has been successful. Agroforestry requires shifting our thinking in both spatial and temporal domains, and demands skills in managing, rather than reducing complexity. Traditional disciplinary approaches to problem-solving such as the forester dealing with the trees, the soil scientist with the soil, and the hydrologist with the water, are no longer sufficient.
This may be one reason why less developed nations that have never strictly segregated land uses are today's world leaders in development and application of agroforestry technologies. Agroforestry challenges land managers to transcend disciplinary boundaries and explore the potential synergism between production agriculture and natural resource management. Essential to this is an understanding of hierarchical scalar relationships within ecosystems and recognition that defined ecosystem "boundaries" exist primarily for managerial convenience."