Agroforestry

Agroforestry is a term related to land use whose exact meaning has changed as different approaches to studying land use have arisen. The oldest use of the term, as the adjective agroforestal, was to name a category of land use. This meaning was introduced in the 1930s and was firmly established by the 1950s, a period when the areal differentiation approach in geography was prominent. Originally, agroforestry was used when an observer considered agriculture and forestry as distinct land uses but wished to combine these categories in mapping or analysis. This concept reflected the traditional view that agriculture did not include the cultivation or management of trees and that forestry did not pertain to herbaceous plants. Although this narrow meaning has not been entirely superseded, in the 1950s and 1960s many geographers recognized that the distinction between agriculture and forestry is neither absolute nor clear in many landscapes, especially from the perspective of rural land managers in traditional societies. Thus, agroforestry came to designate land use in which farming, often including livestock husbandry, and tree cultivation and/or management are practiced, whether simultaneously or sequentially. In situations where livestock is prominent, the adjective agro-silvo-pastoral has been used.

The second broad meaning of agroforestry is a system of land use in which trees and crops, and often livestock, are deliberately associated in space and time. In other words, this meaning refers to land and resource management practices in areas where land use can be classified as agroforestry, according to the second sense described above. This meaning also has two distinct senses. First, “scientific agroforestry” is a field of study that uses agronomic methods to analyze productivity in settings where trees and crops are grown together. The concept and pursuit of scientific agroforestry became prominent beginning in the 1960s, although there were earlier “scientific” efforts to combine agriculture and forestry. For example, during the 1880s in colonial Burma, British foresters developed the taungya system, now widely practiced in southeast Asia, in which forests are cleared for timber plantations and crops are grown among saplings for several years. Scientific agroforestry represents a positivist approach to agricultural development that many international research and development institutions have promoted. While scientific agroforestry has been more important in the applied natural sciences than in geography, the social and environmental effects of its promotion interest many geographers. Second, agroforestry has been used to describe the resource management practices of rural land managers in traditional societies where trees are an integral part of farming systems. In this sense, the term is often qualified as “indigenous agroforestry,” although many nonindigenous, traditional peoples—such as the Brazilian caboclos—also rely on trees and crops for food and other resources. Many indigenous/traditional agroforestry practices serve to manage [Page 61]soil fertility, as in the Southern African citimene system, where tree branches are collected from a large area and burned on a field to release nutrients. Many geographers have studied indigenous/traditional agroforestry, mostly taking the perspective of either cultural ecology or political ecology. For instance, a cultural ecological study might examine how agroforestry practices relate to local soil and vegetation conditions, while a political ecological study might examine how multiscale political economic processes affect agroforestry practices.

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