What is #Agroforestry ?

Trees woods & forest gardens - agroforestry arboriculture
Trees woods & forest gardens - agroforestry arboriculture
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Published 2017-04-06
Agroforestry is non monoculture agriculture and is a more efficient farming method with Improved biodiversity particularly of pollinators.

Silvoarable systems - trees with crops (arable agricultural or horticultural crops are grown with a long-term tree or forestry crop)

Silvopastoral systems - trees with animals (combining forestry and grazing of domesticated animals for example)

In it's most diverse AgroSilvaPastoral system - trees crops and animals together (combines forestry, crops and animals in an integrated system ecosystem)

In its simplest form lines of trees are planted in fields. The trees are spaced to allow farming equipment access to the rows with the planting spaced to fit the machinery. The loss of the primary crop yield is more than made up for by the second crop. Improved biodiversity and crop disease and pests reduced compared with monoculture.

This introduction is part of our Agroforestry playlist.
   • Agroforestry, forest gardening, susta...  

With thanks to:

This video introduces the viewer to Agroforestry and is part of the Toolbox of the e-learning project RUVIVAL: www.ruvival.de/

Simply put, agroforestry is a combination of agriculture and forestry. It represents the inclusion of trees or other woody perennial plants into agricultural systems, including crop and livestock production. Agroforestry, unlike conventional large scale agriculture, has the objective of emulating natural ecosystems. This helps realise a number of ecosystem services. Those include the protection of soil against erosion and water-logging, minimising evaporation of water from soil and plants by decreasing wind speed, water protection through deeper and more extensive root systems and increased biodiversity. Long term stability and productivity of agroforestry systems surpasses those of conventional monocultures or pasturelands as they tend to be more resilient. However, the establishment of trees on farmland comes with certain challenges.

RUVIVAL - Sustainable Rural Development and highly productive New Towns is concerned with restoring degraded areas and to create new not just inhabitable, but liveable spaces. It is an e-learning project of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) in cooperation with the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU).

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Agroforestry by Stefan Hügel, Ruth Schaldach and Ralf Otterpohl    • Introduction to Agroforestry - RUVIVA...   is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: creativecommons.org/licenses/....
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