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Study Questions
1 Throughout Chapter 1, the authors attempt to make a case for agroforestry’s importance as a viable land use practice in North America. What are three major issues identified by the authors that agroforestry can be used to address in a cost effective manner?
2 To understand why agroforestry began in the United States, one must study the evolution of forest management. Of particular significance was a decision made by the U.S. Forest Service to manage public forest lands for multiple uses. What led to this decision?
3 Why has agroforestry always been the primary land use approach throughout the developing world, but is relatively new in developed nations?
4 In the late 1980s, Steppler (1987) suggested that agroforestry was “a practice in search of a science”. What do you think was meant by this phrase? Has research in the past nearly four decades changed its validity?
5 Does agroforestry have a role in helping address global warming and dependence on foreign oil? Explain.
6 Do you agree that the importance of agroforestry in North America relates more to ecosystem services and resulting environmental protection than to production and economic gain? Justify your answer.
7 What role does state and federal policy play in the adoption of agroforestry? Has agroforestry policy development kept abreast of agroforestry technology development? Why or Why not? What do we need to do as agroforestry community to ensure the development of sound agroforestry policy?
2 Agroforestry Nomenclature, Concepts and Practices
Michael A. Gold and Harold E. “Gene” Garrett
Application of agroforestry practices responds to economic (e.g., rural unemployment), environmental (e.g., soil erosion), and social (e.g., quality of life) issues common to all regions of the earth. However, differences exist between U.S. and Canadian agroforestry, tropical agroforestry, and agroforestry in other temperate regions of the world due to differences in ecosystems, their condition, and economic, social, cultural, and political realities.
Developing nations must deal with major issues that include inequitable land ownership and distribution (e.g., land and tree tenure), lack of access to credit, inability to purchase inputs (e.g., fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, machinery), minimal rural infrastructure (e.g., roads, electricity, communications), and lack of information access (e.g., limited research and extension). Tropical agroforestry, long practiced and widely accepted by farmers, is viewed as an important alternative to traditional slash‐and‐burn agriculture and to conventional agriculture practiced on steep hillsides and marginal lands, practices that often result in overexploitation, massive erosion, and exhaustion of tropical soils. Whether highland or lowland tropics, wet or dry ecosystems, ecologically‐based agroforestry practices help restore and maintain biodiversity, bring ecological stability to farms and watersheds, sustain production of basic needs, and create market opportunities for millions of rural poor (Garrity, 2005; Russell and Franzel, 2004; Nair et al., 2005; Garrity et al., 2010; Hillbrand et al., 2017).
In Europe, agroforestry applications are diverse and the development of agroforestry science parallels that in the United States and Canada (Palma et al., 2007; den Herder et al., 2017; Dupraz et al., 2018a; Mosquera‐Losada and Prabhu, 2019). Differences arise due to Europe’s patchwork of many countries, each with different land use practices and traditions in agriculture, forestry, and agroforestry (Eichhorn et al., 2006; Rois‐Diaz et al., 2018; Gordon et al., 2018; Lovric et al., 2018). Agroforestry practices were widely utilized throughout Europe from Roman times until the post–World War II onset of agricultural industrialization (Lelle and Gold, 1994; Eichhorn et al., 2006). European Union subsidies have been largely directed to agriculture and forestry and as a result, acreage in traditional agroforestry practices declined dramatically during the latter half of the 20th century. Agroforestry systems have often been neglected in Europe because administrative structures within many national governments have considered that only agriculture or forestry are legitimate. This has resulted in the loss of agroforestry systems in European countries and a loss of the benefits that they provide (McAdam et al., 2009). The lack of recognition of agroforestry practices within the different sections of Europe’s Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) has reduced the impact of CAP activities by overlooking land use practices that would optimize the use of agroforestry (Mosquera‐Losada et al., 2018).
Native American Agroforestry
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