Including sustainable food production: Treeing and crop integration
For vegetable breeders, trees offer a great opportunity to enhance the diversity of food grown in the same field or garden, while ensuring other benefits. Not only performance optimizationBut also soil improvement, pests and water management, increasing biological diversity and reduction of costs.
The following fragment comes from Silvohorticulture: A breeder to integrate trees with crops By I am Raskin and Andy Dibben. Has been adapted to the network.
Why integrate trees and crops?
At the simplest level, the trees are brilliant. Since they evolved 360 million years ago, they were the main element of the evolution of all life on earth, providing habitats and valuable resources. The removal of trees from agricultural landscapes had a subtle but deep impact on both food production and a wider environment. The time has come for us to integrate them again with all our foods producing food.
For vegetable breeders, trees offer a great opportunity to enhance the diversity of food grown in the same field or garden, while ensuring other benefits. Wind protection, soil health improvement, flood shifts, drought management, soil erosion reduction and shadow are key benefits that can be used by introducing trees. These benefits can be tools for solving inseparable historical problems on your site, such as soil erosion, wind or wetlands.
They will also be essential because climate change attracts traction, helping to solve problems that you have not experienced before. Regardless of whether you have already influenced the climate change or not, the time has come for the future of vegetable production from these challenges, which will certainly affect all food producers in the next twenty years.
What can trees do for me?
We have announced bold claims about the potential benefits of trees. How this potential is really dependent on treating every site as a special occasion. Each field and garden require a unique project to really maximize the benefits. Identification of current and potential problems on your site is the most powerful stage of the design process. Take your time to understand and evaluate it.
Discover other benefits, such as fresh arable lines and fewer agricultural contributions, in addition to this initial assessment. Many trees can fulfill the role of solving problems in system design, and in this role you will need a variety of tree species.
Standard single apple row with managed grass mowed in Close Farm. On the left, the Polar includes one of the mixed vegetable beds. Photo courtesy of Ben Raskin.
A really original part of the system design combines solving specific challenges on the site with providing a useful end product. This product can be a fresh crop line that can be sold – edible, floral, healing or drinkable. However, the financial and balanced impact of reducing production expenditure is often overlooked.
After taking into account this, a completely fresh level of benefits can be realized. Compost of propagation, compost of a general purpose, strengthening the population of predators, growth of pollinators, truss materials and reducing irrigation are the result of growing trees, without which we will see that we enhance the burden of what is already hungry for resources.
Observe the impact of your environment on the environment, producing them locally. Reduce the financial impact of your information by producing it yourself.
Which trees meet these goals?
After identifying the problems you want to solve, and fresh crops and agricultural resources that you can produce on the spot, you need to choose which species will meet one or many of these goals. How you choose and place them in a field or garden is a really original and invigorating part of the design process, translating the theory into reality.
Individual features of different species of trees, such as root behavior, canopy shapes, height, pads and growth rate, are everything that you need to make you aware of, not only in an instant, but over time they evolve. When considering crops for sale, you must understand whether they will develop here or in the future, and whether they can be sold. When trying to limit agricultural entrance data, you must also determine if you can produce significant amounts of a specific resource.
How will trees interact with crops and sometimes?
Definitely which trees plant and how to organize them, the correct tuning of the design process is to understand how this arborist invasion will affect vegetable crops. To achieve this, you need a realistic understanding of complicated interactions between different species of trees and vegetables. The key is balancing competition with lithe, water and nutrients; The key is to understand how these interactions take place in a seasonal and multi -person time scale. Extras your design within 10 years and visualize each year, trying to launch various scenarios of what real invasion is possible: for example, predation, market changes or intensifying weather.
When does each stage have to happen?
Plan. Prepare. To win. Bet. Protect. Solving the problem. And most importantly, please.
Annual vegetables are an invigorating annual addiction that enslaves many vegetable breeders. Adding a long game of trees to your system causes a deeper and more reliable, resistant and deep presence in the production system.
Life is tiny. True happiness is to enjoy the moment, but watching half an eye on the future. The philosophy that the authors joined and both see in the content of all forms in the agrolexes, a passion with which there was pleasure.