Agroforestry Practices in Farming

“Agroforestry is the best way to improve our land productivity, and the best link between environment and economy.” - Fatimata Niang Diop

Agroforestry is the intentional combination of agriculture and forestry to create productive and sustainable land-use practices. These practices take advantage of the interactive benefits of growing trees and shrubs together with crops and/or livestock. Agroforestry has its roots in tropical food production systems.

FAO has defined Agroforestry as a dynamic, ecologically based, natural resource management system that, through the integration of trees on farms and in the agricultural landscape, diversifies and sustains production for increased social, economic, and environmental benefits for land users at all levels.

In particular, agroforestry is crucial to smallholder farmers and other rural people because it can enhance their food supply, income, and health. Agroforestry systems are multifunctional systems that can provide a wide range of economic, sociocultural, and environmental benefits.

There are three main types of agroforestry systems:

1. Agrisilvicultural systems: These are a combination of crops and trees, such as alley cropping or home gardens,
2. Silvopastoral systems: These combine forestry and grazing of domesticated animals on pastures, rangelands or on-farm, and
3. Agrosilvopastoral systems: Here three elements, namely trees, animals, and crops, can be integrated into home gardens involving animals as well as scattered trees on croplands used for grazing after harvests.

Agroforestry systems can include an alley of benefits which include but not limited to the following:

• Controls runoff and soil erosion, thereby reducing losses of water, soil material, organic matter, and nutrients.
• Maintains soil organic matter and biological activity at levels satisfactory for soil fertility. This depends on an adequate proportion of trees in the system - normally at least 20% crown cover of trees to maintain organic matter over systems as a whole.
• Maintains more favourable soil physical properties than agriculture, through organic matter maintenance and the effects of tree roots.
• Leads to more closed nutrient cycling than agriculture and hence to more efficient use of nutrients. This is true to an impressive degree for forest garden/farming systems.
• Checks the development of soil toxicities, or reduces exiting toxicities - both soil acidification and salinization can be checked and trees can be employed in the reclamation of polluted soils.
• Utilizes solar energy more efficiently than monocultural systems; different height plants, leaf shapes, and alignments all contribute.
• Leads to reduced insect and - use and associated diseases.
• Employed to reclaim eroded and degraded land. Agroforestry can augment soil water availability to land use systems. In dry regions, though competition between trees and crops is a major problem. Nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs can substantially increase nitrogen inputs to agroforestry systems.
• Trees can probably increase nutrient inputs to agroforestry systems by retrieval from lower soil horizons and weathering rock.
• The decomposition of trees and pruning can substantially contribute to the maintenance of soil fertility. The addition of high-quality tree prunings leads to large increase in crop yields.
• The release of nutrients from the decomposition of tree residues can be synchronized with the requirements for nutrient uptake of associated crops. While different trees and crops will all have different requirements, and there will always be some imbalance, the addition of high-quality prunings to the soil at the time of crop planting usually leads to a good degree of synchrony between nutrient release and demand.
• In the maintenance of soil fertility under agroforestry, the role of roots is at least as important as that of above-ground biomass.
• Agroforestry can provide a more diverse farm economy and stimulate the whole rural economy, leading to more stable farms and communities. Economic risks are reduced when systems produce multiple products.

Agroforestry is the smart farming we need to embrace and promote for onward looking small-scale farming.

Green farming and sustainable agriculture is seen through agroforestry.

Grow crops under trees with animal manure.