Agroforests provide habitat for a wide variety of plants and animals and are highly sustainable. With agroforestry, we come closest to wild nature while still producing enough yield for people to live from it. In a way, agroforests are the opposite of destructive monocultures.
Organic certifications are very helpful, but they paint a simplified picture. Healthy ecosystems are much more than the organic seal on a single product. In the end, an organic label says little about soil health, biodiversity, and the quality of life of farmers. That is why it is worth looking more closely. Only agroforestry is truly sustainable agriculture for all living beings.
The Maya Mountain Research Farm counted more than 150 different bird species in its agroforest. Conventional monocultures do not provide shelter for nearly as many animal species. Agroforest systems, also called permaculture, can be used all over the world. The permaculture movement is gaining traction among farmers around the globe, and that is hardly surprising. Permaculture saves farmers a great deal of work and lets them plan decades into the future.
Imagine you are a cacao farmer with a monoculture of cacao trees. The beans are therefore everything you can sell, perhaps several tons per year. Now imagine the global market price for cacao, which is traded on the stock exchange, collapses. Suddenly, you may have lost money that year instead of earning it. You have to take out a loan just to keep operating.
Or worse: imagine your cacao trees become diseased. Suddenly you can only harvest 50% of your crop, while your costs increase because of pesticides if the cacao is not organic. You are facing bankruptcy.
If, on the other hand, you manage an agroforest farm, you can also sell vanilla, bananas, coffee, nutmeg, and more. You get the idea: the possibilities are almost endless. Which system would you choose: monoculture or agroforest?
The answer is clear, because only agroforests create a sustainable economic climate for producers of tropical export goods.
Soils are sensitive ecosystems that have formed over tens of thousands of years. They are full of nutrients. When only one plant species is grown in a soil system, only certain nutrients are removed from the soil. When that happens, the missing nutrients have to be added artificially as fertilizer.
In nature, of course, there are no artificial nitrate fertilizers. Nature has developed a sophisticated ecosystem in which one plant species provides other plant species with exactly the nutrients they need to survive. Agroforestry tries to use precisely these symbioses.
The Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) compared agroforest systems with conventional monocultures in a long-term study over 20 years. What did they find? Organically managed agroforests may produce the lowest cacao yield per hectare, but overall they can help farmers achieve higher income and more stable income security. Farmers are less dependent on international price fluctuations or crop failures because they grow many different products. You can find the study here.
The Maya Mountain Research Farm is a living example of the potential of permaculture in the tropics, and they make great videos. Here is their website.
The Ghana Permaculture Institute works intensively on permaculture and agroforestry. You can find their website here.
You can find a helpful Readcacao Magazine article about agroforestry cacao here.
