Agroforestry – the integration of woody perennials, palms or bamboo into cropland and pastures – is the future of nature-based farming.
Developed over millennia around the world and in every biome, from the terra preta food forests of Amazonia to the vast reindeer herds of taïga, agroforestry is experiencing a rebirth as the limits of industrial farming become ever clearer.
Our mandate at the International Union for Agroforestry is to encourage the adoption of agroforestries around the world, in countries temperate and tropical, moist or arid, or industrialised and agrarian alike.
Almost 12,000 years ago, in what is today Turkey, people domesticated fig trees, a perfect tree to intercrop with cereals.
They may not have been the first agroforesters, but they were a harbinger of things to come. Soon, from Australia to Canada and from South America to China, people started transforming their landscapes with the help of trees. They encouraged their growth for the products and services they provided, whether they were farmers or herders. And by the time of classical antiquity, the victory of agroforestry was complete. Everywhere, people used it to enhance the fertility of their soils, protect them from erosion, and buffer them against storms and droughts. The trees they chose also provided timber; fodder for their animals; fruit, honey and nuts for the marketplace; and fuel for the kitchen fire.
Today, agroforestry is found on at least 40% of the world’s agricultural lands. It ranges from the highly mechanised cereal and coppice alleys of eastern Europe to the extraordinarily productive homegardens of Java; from the silvopastoral dehesas of Spain to the parklands of the Sahel; and from the spice gardens of Zanzibar to the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of windbreaks of Russia and Kazakhstan.
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The world’s agroforesters came together at their World Congress on Agroforestry in Montpellier in 2019 and decided to create an international union to represent the interests of this transformative way of managing agricultural landscapes. Soon after, this dream became a reality with the unwavering support of the Czech Republic. Thanks to its farsighted minister of agriculture, it decided to facilitate our establishment in the Czech Republic and provided us with seed funding. The Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague kindly offered it free office space and the Czech State Forests Enterprise provided important financial support to the start. IUAF, the International Union of Agroforestry, was born.