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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
As is the 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,