FOOD SYSTEMS AND NATURE


IMPROVING AGROFORESTRY BY ENHANCING ITS REGENERATIVE CAPACITY

The natural system is the composition of the earth’s plants, animals, landscape, and climatic features that work in an inter-related manner with humanity. The failure of components of the natural system negatively affects humanity. The well-functioning food system supports healthy humanity in a healthy environment, thereby attaining economic and cultural health.

As part of actions towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the Food Systems Summit (FSS) convenes in 2021 to launch its actions of delivering their progress. Among its five actions, the goal of Action 3 of the 2021 FSS is to develop innovations that would boost nature-positive production. Thus, this improves the environment’s capability to offer enough resources for food production, reducing biodiversity loss, pollution, water use, soil degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions.

In line with this goal, scaling up agroforestry by enhancing its regenerative capability is an innovative way to facilitate this action track. This sentiment agrees with a paper by FAO (2018) which recognizes that agroecology presents a unique methodology to transform agri-food systems sustainably and comprehensively. Such being the case, the following points highlight the reasons behind this choice and ways to implement this innovation successfully.

Why upscale agroforestry?

For a long time, farmers have been advised on the importance of crop diversification while restoring the degraded land by including trees and shrubs into their crop and animal farming systems, a practice also known as agroforestry (Elevitch et al., 2018, Dagar and Tewari, 2016). However, there has been a slow adoption of the same due to undervaluing trees’ value and inadequate awareness (Lovell et al., 2018). Below are some of the regenerative elements to be scaled up in order to improve agroforestry.

Benefits of agroforestry

Proper design, implementation, and management of agroforestry yield the following regenerative goals, as also highlighted by Dagar and Tewari (2016):

  • Enriching soil

It allows for the restoration of nutrients and rebuilding of soil health into the soil through different ways. Leguminous trees fix nitrogen into the soil, thereby preventing the excessive use of inorganic fertilizers. The soil microbes thrive, and their movements improve aeration, thereby aiding the thorough respiration of plants. The microbes also aid the decomposition of the dry matter into essential elements required by plants which are released gradually into the soil.

  • Enhancing water quality

The crop cover in agroforestry systems prevents excessive evaporation, thereby providing a moist medium for the plants’ roots environment longer hence efficiently using the water better than where the land is bare, ensure increased infiltration and prevent excessive runoff that erodes the soil and thereby allowing clean water to fill the water bodies.

  • Conserving biodiversity

Good soil health and water quality are vital for living things such as trees, pollinators, and microbes, which can also coexist. The niche created builds a microbiome where pest and disease pathogens do not thrive. 

  • Preserving ecosystems (services)

Symbiotic relationships exist amongst the living things (plants, microbes, birds, insects) in the agroforestry environment, where they form a niche. Other services provided are regulating, provisioning, supporting and enhancing culture as in figure.

Ecosystem services reNature
  • Carbon sequestration

Agroforestry plays a significant role in biological carbon sequestration. The presence of plants and trees that continuously photosynthesize helps absorb carbon dioxide from the environment, thereby contributing to greenhouse gas reductions hence contributing to climate change mitigation (Schoeneberger et al., 2017). 

Other benefits

  • Increased crop yields, improved nutrition and Improved rural economies:

As the soil environment gets enriched with nutrients and water availability, the crops yield better and farmers sell the surplus hereby allowing farmers to buy other nutritious foods. It also ensures developed households which extends to the whole communities. This agrees with (Schoeneberger et al., 2017) who highlighted that agroforestry allows for diversified income from fruit trees, crop yields, and livestock on top of enhancing nature.

  • For recreation and poverty alleviation

Agroforestry offers the opportunity to intensify agriculture by restoring neglected forests and landscapes (Sahoo et al., 2020). The agricultural intensification boosts food security and income, and ensure climate mitigation and biodiversity preservations (Tubenchlak et al., 2021). This suggests that agroforestry drives the regeneration of degraded landscapes in human-dominated areas while providing scenery that beautifies the environment.

  • For women empowerment

In most of developing countries, most households depend on firewood for cooking whose collection is women’s responsibility (Benjamin et al., 2018). Agroforestry offers the opportunity of firewood sources near homesteads. This allows women to have more time to be involved in other development duties other than wasting time in search for firewood.

women walking walk distances fetching firewood: reNature

Suggested ways of scaling up adoption rates of agroforestry

  • Create awareness on the importance of adopting agroforestry and its relationship to regenerative agriculture.
  • Motivating farmers to be part of the solution by incentivizing their activities.
    • By offering farm inputs to farmers willing to venture into agroforestry
    • By compensating restorative farm operations according to quality of production instead of volume or mass of production (Lovell et al., 2018)
    • By frequent visits to farmers practicing agroforestry
    • By encouraging exchange visits
  • Integrating nut and fruit tree species in the agroforestry system with shorter fruiting periods that provides incomes and shorter return rates to encourage adoption (Lovell et al., 2018).

REFERENCES

BENJAMIN, E. O., OLA, O. & BUCHENRIEDER, G. 2018. Does an agroforestry scheme with payment for ecosystem services (PES) economically empower women in sub-Saharan Africa? Ecosystem Services, 31, 1-11.

DAGAR, J. & TEWARI, J. 2016. Agroforestry research developments: anecdotal to modern science. Agroforestry research developments. Nova Publishers, New York, 1-45.

ELEVITCH, C. R., MAZAROLI, D. N. & RAGONE, D. 2018. Agroforestry standards for regenerative agriculture. Sustainability, 10, 3337.

FAO 2018. Scaling up agroecology initiative: Transforming food and agricultural systems in support of the SDGs. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Rome, Italy.

LOVELL, S. T., DUPRAZ, C., GOLD, M., JOSE, S., REVORD, R., STANEK, E. & WOLZ, K. J. 2018. Temperate agroforestry research: considering multifunctional woody polycultures and the design of long-term field trials. Agroforestry Systems, 92, 1397-1415.

SAHOO, G., WANI, A. M., SHARMA, A. & ROUT, S. 2020. Agroforestry for Forest and Landscape Restoration.

SCHOENEBERGER, M. M., BENTRUP, G. & PATEL-WEYNAND, T. 2017. Agroforestry: enhancing resiliency in US agricultural landscapes under changing conditions. Gen. Tech. Report WO-96. Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 96.

TUBENCHLAK, F., BADARI, C. G., DE FREITAS STRAUCH, G. & DE MORAES, L. F. D. 2021. Changing the Agriculture Paradigm in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest: The Importance of Agroforestry. The Atlantic Forest. Springer.