case elsewhere throughout the world, agroforestry in the United States and Canada also has historic roots. Native Americans across what is now the United States and Canada have been practicing indigenous forms of what could be termed landscape‐scale agroforestry for millennia (Rossier and Lake, 2014; Nelson, 2014; Anderson and Rosenthal, 2015). Some of these indigenous communities managed – and continue to manage – integrated systems of trees, plants, animals, and fungi in complex ways at multiple organizational scales (MacFarland et al., 2017).
Because indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from their aboriginal landscapes and/or their ability to manage, the long‐standing indigenous agroforestry traditions of many Native peoples across the United States are unknown. United States fire suppression policies stopped Native American people from burning their agroforest landscapes in the complex and integrated ways they had developed over millennia to provide needed foods, fibers, fuels, and other resources as well as to manage the complex food and interaction webs inherent to the agroforest ecosystems with which they evolved (Norgaard, 2014; Anderson and Rosenthal, 2015).
Native Americans throughout much of California actively managed trees, understory plants, forages, and animal populations in such an integrated complex way that when John Muir arrived to Yosemite Valley and many other parts of California, he remarked upon their pristine, wild, garden‐like quality, and stunning beauty. However, because they did not look like European agricultural systems, Muir did not fully understand the degree to which they had been managed by Native peoples (Anderson and Rosenthal, 2015). The Karuk Tribe in the Klamath Mountains of Northern California historically used fire, pruning, coppicing, and many other techniques to manage hundreds of plants, animals, and fungi in an integrated indigenous agroforestry system (Taylor and Skinner, 2003). This system includes tanoak and black oak acorn trees, tanoak mushrooms, elk, deer, evergreen huckleberries, blackcap raspberries, gooseberries, currants, hazel, willow, Indian potatoes, manzanita and madrone trees and their berries, elderberries, alder, yew, Douglas‐fir, and so much more (Vinyeta et al., 2016).
Agroforestry as a Science
In spite of an increasing awareness of Native American traditional agroforestry practices over the past few decades, in the United States and Canada agroforestry has mainly been viewed as a new science and set of practices tailored to address numerous sustainability issues associated with production agriculture (Matson et al., 1997; Nair, 2007; Jose et al., 2018; USDA, 2019; Jose et al., 2022). Following an era of “efficient production” through the 1970’s, U.S. and Canadian agriculture is slowly transitioning to an era of sustainable production and regenerative agriculture. Development of a sustainable, regenerative agriculture is stimulated by critical issues including long‐term economic decline in rural America, need for crop diversification, and concern about soil erosion, environmental pollution, habitat loss, and climate change. These issues have been accentuated by repeated periods of massive flooding in the greater Mississippi River watershed (e.g., 1993, 2019) raising national awareness of problems stemming from increasingly large‐scale monoculture production farming, especially excessive runoff and flooding, non‐point source water pollution, and loss of critical wildlife habitat (Pimentel et al., 1995; Jordan et al., 2007; Porter et al., 2015; Lerch et al., 2017). Sustainable agricultural practices (e.g., use of cover crops, no till), organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, are now recognized as viable additions to mainstream production agriculture (Liebman and Schulte, 2015; Geertsema et al., 2016; LaCanne and Lundgren, 2018; OTA, 2018).
While conservation programs were de‐emphasized in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, the sustainable, regenerative agriculture, carbon farming movement has created a more receptive climate for agroforestry development (Liebman and Schulte, 2015; LaCanne and Lundgren, 2018; Feliciano et al., 2018). Agroforestry is directly relevant to sustainable and regenerative land use. The context is that agroforestry concepts and practices need to be incorporated into agricultural production systems to utilize productive niches, diversify products and income, and restore and/or enhance certain ecological services that are vital to achieve sustainable land use (Jordan et al., 2007; Udawatta et al., 2017; Jose et al., 2018). Thus, agroforestry in the United States and Canada is not recognized as an end in itself, but rather an important ancillary discipline contributing to sustainable and regenerative agriculture and sustainable forestry.
It must be recognized that the present supporting infrastructure, including agricultural research, developed during the “efficient production era”, remains strongly oriented toward commodity production (Sooby, 2003; IPES‐Food, 2016). Moreover, in the United States and Canada, agriculture and forestry land uses are traditionally segregated on the land and in our institutions. Thus, many of the agroforestry concepts (i.e., integrating trees with crops and/or livestock) run counter to traditional thinking and existing infrastructure. To overcome these barriers, it is very important that agroforestry concepts and practices be relevant, pragmatic, and market‐driven to foster interdisciplinary cooperation within our institutions, cooperation among businesses across the market value chain, and adoption on the land (Geertsema et al., 2016; LaCanne and Lundgren, 2018).
In summary, agroforestry in the U.S. and Canada is driven by sustainable development and growth in the “green” marketplace, which in turn will positively affect rural decline and the environmental impacts of agriculture. Agroforestry seeks to help bridge the gap between production agriculture and natural resource management. The development and definition of agroforestry reflects the commodity focus of agriculture, yet it is simultaneously and equally focused on conservation. Global awareness of tropical agroforestry has positively affected the development of agroforestry in the U.S. and Canada, and many of the current practices are adapted from the tropics. However, with foci and priorities differing from those in the tropics (Fig. 2–1), agroforestry over most of North America has evolved its own distinctive definition and nomenclature (Table 2–1). In the United States and Canada, agroforestry is in an active phase of development and, since 2010, has emerged over the past decade as both a science and a defined set of practices, shaped and tailored to address urgent land use sustainability issues. Agroforestry completed the definition phase by the turn of the 21st century and is currently in a period of rapid scientific development (Nair, 2007; Feliciano et al., 2018: Jose et al., 2018; Garrett et al., 2022), outreach (Shelton et al., 2005; Gold et al., 2004; USDA, 2015; Elevitch et al., 2018) and farm‐level application (Faulkner et al., 2014; Rios‐Diaz et al., 2018; Van Noordwijk, 2019).
Fig. 2–1. Agroforestry priorities: Temperate and tropical.
Table 2–1. Global definitions of agroforestry.
| Region | Definition | Citation |
|---|---|---|
| Canada | “An approach to land use that incorporates trees into farming systems, and allows for the production of trees and crops or livestock from the same piece of land in order to obtain economic, ecological, environmental and cultural benefits” | Gordon and Newman, 1997 |
| Global, Tropics | “The set of land use practices involve the deliberate combination of trees (including shrubs, palms and bamboos) and agricultural crops and/or animals on the same land management unit in some form of spatial arrangement or temporal sequence such that there are significant ecological and economic interactions between tree and agricultural components” | Sinclair, 1999 |
