- Okay.
Hello everyone.
Thanks for joining us
today on this webinar,
which is about agroforestry
and carbon dioxide removal.
It's being presented by the
Institute for carbon removal,
law and policy at American university.
My name is Jason funk, and
I'll be your moderator today,
joining you from outside of Chicago.
I'm working with the Institute
and with the American
university as a fellow.
However, most of my time
is spent running something
we call The Land Use and
Climate Knowledge Initiative,
which I founded in 2019 to
promote more informed cooperative
and charitable solutions
at the intersection
of land use and climate change.
My task today is to help all
of you become more informed
about this important
topic of agroforestry.
And I plan to do that by
staying out of the way,
as much as possible from
our excellent lineup
of speakers we have today.
So first before I get out of their way,
I need to give you a
few housekeeping notes.
You'll be muted during the presentations
and your video off for the
duration of the webinar.
So we encourage you to
read any questions you have
into the Q&A tab
that you'll find at the
bottom of your screen.
You can use the chat box
as well for asking comment,
providing comments or asking questions.
We will be recording this webinar
and it will be available
on the Institute's website
shortly after the webinar,
along with a whole host
of other past webinars
on relevant topics
related to carbon removal.
You can access these at the
website, carbon removal,
all one word.info.
So it's carbonremoval.info.
Today's one hour webinar
will explore agroforestry
as a carbon removal method.
We'll start with three
presentations from our panelists
on how the different types
of agroforestry remove
and sequester carbon
and the risks, benefits,
and solutions associated
with agroforestry.
Then we'll open up the
floor for questions.
So on behalf of all the participants,
I want to thank our panelists
for taking the time today
to be here for the support and discussion.
And I want to introduce them now,
in order of when they'll be speaking.
So first we'll have Susan Stein.
Susan is the director
of the USDAs national agroforestry center,
which is based in Lincoln, Nebraska,
the center staff lead conduct
and support agroforestry
research and technology transfer.
She has been with the USDA forest service
for more than 30 years in
a variety of capacities.
And throughout her career,
Susan has worked with
scientists and managers
to communicate science-based information
to natural resource professionals,
landowners, and policy makers.
So thank you Susan.
Next, after she speaks,
we'll hear from John, he's a professor
in the department of forest resources
and environmental conservation
at Virginia tech university.
John teaches agroforestry at Virginia tech
and has conducted research on adoption
from mountains of Appalachia
to the Highlands of Cameroon.
He is also past president of the
association for temperate
agroforestry and associate editor
for the journal agroforestry
systems coauthor
of "The Community Food Forest Handbook"
published by Chelsea Green
and a principal on the U.S
forest service national
advanced silviculture program.
So welcome John we look forward
to hearing your presentation as well.
Then to close it out for the day
we'll have Patrick Worms
a Cambridge educated molecular geneticist
who represents the world's
premier research institution
devoted to the study of the roles of trees
and agricultural landscapes,
to policymakers in Brussels
and elsewhere in Europe.
World agroforestry also known as ICRAF
has been active since
the 1970s in reporting
on the astonishing benefits
of multi crop agriculture
involving trees in thousands
of peer reviewed publications.
Patrick is also president of EURAF,
the European agroforestry Federation.
He's a trustee and treasurer
of the international union
of agroforestry,
a member of the steering committee of
international land lives, peace,
which works at the interface
between land degradation and conflicts.
And he's a senior fellow at the
Global EverGreening Alliance
and a member of several advisory boards.
So those will be our three
outstanding panelists for today.
And I among all of the participants,
we all look forward to your presentations.
So first we'll start off with Susan.
Please take it away, Susan.
- Great.
Let me share my screen.
Is that working?
You can see my screen, great.
- Yes.
- All right, everyone.
Great to be here.
My talk today will focus
on the role of agroforestry
in sequestering carbon.
I'd like to acknowledge Gary Bentrup
my coauthor who helped
me pull this together,
another national agroforestry
center scientist.
So today I'm gonna
present a short overview
of agroforestry in the United States
and then discuss the role of agroforestry
in sequestering carbon.
So at the national agroforestry center,
we define agroforestry as
the intentional integration
of trees or shrubs with crop
and or livestock production
to create environmental
economic and social benefits.
And there are,
we categorize all agroforestry
under five different practices,
and these are forest buffers,
which are intended to buffer the impacts
of annual cropping systems
from riparian areas, alley cropping,
where you're planting rows
of trees far enough apart
that you can grow other
crops annual crops typically.
And by the way in most of the systems,
I'm gonna mention the trees
can be grown for protection alone
or for timber or for nuts
or fruit or other purposes.
And that goes as well.
Oops, sorry.
Didn't mean to do that.
For silvopasture
which is gaining a lot of
attention internationally,
and I'll mention that later,
Silvopasture is managing the
same piece of land for trees,
as well as livestock.
Windbreaks are generally
planting rows of trees
to keep soil on the ground,
to reduce soil erosion.
But they have other uses as well.
And forest farming involves
cultivating edible medicinal,
or other kinds of plants
under forest cover.
And in many cases,
these plants are plants
that would naturally grow
under that kind of forest cover.
And so in this way,
you're taking pressure off
of the native population.
So in the United States,
we know that there are
at least 30,000 farmers
and ranchers plat practicing agroforestry,
and that's due to the latest
census of agriculture.
We are gonna be learning
more about those farmers
and ranchers over the next few years,
with a survey that we're conducting
in coordination with the, with NASS
the national agricultural
statistics service.
So we're excited about that.
It's also been heartening
to see the level of support
or growing support of
public and private agencies
for agroforestry research
technical assistance and adoption.
Just as an example, right now,
there are 600,000 acres
of riparian forest buffers
being supported by USDA
through rental payments
and six, since 2009 another
USDA program has invested
$43 million to cost share
about 100 thousand acres
of agroforestry practices.
Just a couple of examples.
It's also been great to
see the proliferation
and growing number of
regional agroforestry networks
across the country.
These are generally,
focused on encouraging
or facilitating
information transfer out to
and among natural resource professionals
who are working with landowners,
helping them make decisions
about adopting agroforestry.
So I'll be talking about
the ecological benefits,
but I do think it's important
to point out that there are,
many examples of agroforestry
providing production benefits
and this table on the right lists 12 crops
and the annual average, sorry,
the average yield increase.
If you compare those crops
and agroforestry systems
with those crops grown in
monoculture agriculture systems,
then you can see it ranges from 6%
for potatoes all the way up to
potentially 56% for strawberries.
And I'd like to point out that there
are also studies indicating that
benefits for livestock
under silvopasture systems
as a result of the reduced heat stress,
because of the shade
that the trees provide.
So agroforestry can provide
many ecosystem services
depending on how it's designed.
And I'll of course be talking
about carbon sequestration today.
And before I move on to that though,
I thought you'd find it
interesting to know that
in a report by the intergovernmental panel
on climate change,
that came out about a year ago,
agroforestry was cited as one of the top
three approaches to
addressing climate change
and it's scored favorably,
in all of the five categories
that they looked at,
and those are listed across the screen
mitigation, adaptation, et cetera.
And you'll notice on the
far right hand column,
that agroforestry was considered to be one
of the lower cost options as well.
So why does interest in agroforestry,
with respect to the carbon sequestration?
Well, it kind of makes sense that trees
have a lot of biomass
and they are perennial,
so that biomass is retained.
And that biomass also contains anywhere
from 46 to 51% carbon,
depending on the tree species.
As a result of growing
trees this soil carbon
is also increased through
fine root production,
rhizome deposition, and litter fall.
And just to give an example of one study.
One study indicated that Poplar
and spruce alley cropping
systems sequestered more carbon
than annual monoculture systems.
And in the case of popular
Poplar, that was 41%.
I do wanna say though that,
I don't wanna come across
as promoting agroforestry
as the only tool.
It's one tool in a toolbox
of many potential approaches
that can help to sequester carbon.
So just to give us an idea
of relative potential
benefits of agroforestry,
I'm showing you this table
indicating the range of,
potential carbon sequestration
under afforestation of previous of land
that was previously crop land or pasture
compared with other approaches.
Now, of course, with
an agroforestry system,
you can have a forest
station you're also going
to have some crops grown in that system.
So their rates would be, potentially lower
unless of course you were talking
about a silvopasture system
where you're combining afforestation
with grazing management,
which as you can see,
sort of rated that the second highest
carbon sequestration rates.
So I wanna sort of zoom in to one farm
in a study that was conducted using a
tool called COMET-Farm that is available,
for anybody to use free of charge
is a USDA tool,
on one farm the Mead Farm farm in Nebraska
when they compared
conservation tillage only
to conservation tillage and windbreaks,
they found that over a 50 year period,
the carbon sequestration
rate was considerably higher
when adding windbreaks into that system.
And just another,
couple points about
COMET-Planner and COMET-Farm,
just so you know COMET-Planner
generally use to provide kind
of a rough estimations of potential,
greenhouse gas impacts of
conservation practices.
And it's, it can be applied to a lot
of different conservation practices
and then comment farm
is more, site specific
using spatially explicit data
on climate and soil conditions.
So, wanted to give an idea
of the range of estimates,
that has been identified for
carbon sequestration rates.
This is a range of estimates
for the United States,
and you can see that those estimates
can vary widely depending
on the assumptions
used to determine sequestration routes,
which pools were included in the estimate,
presumed project lifespans
and other assumptions.
So there's a wide range.
We really need better and more research,
in order to better estimate the current
and potential contributions
of agroforestry systems to carbon.
So going, spreading out,
looking at agroforestry
potential globally
project draw down, did an,
made an estimate,
that if the current 550 million hectare
silvopasture areas were expanded
if land under silvopasture
was expanded to anywhere
between 720 and 772 million
hectors, there would,
could be considerable impacts
in carbon dioxide emission reduction,
as well as potentially
financial gains for farmers
due to the diversification.
And I guess I'll mention,
silvopasture was listed
as one of the top 10
potential approaches out of 100 approaches
to addressing climate change.
So I'll end with that.
Just wanted to give you some statistics
and a little background
would love to have you visit our website.
I'm listing the website address here.
You can also get that by just Googling,
national agroforestry center.
We have more than 100,
webinars in our webinar library
and more than 100 publications
that we've produced as well as links
to partner publications.
So, feel free to reach out as
well by calling or emailing.
And, thank you so much.
- Thank you very much, Susan.
That was a ton of great information
about what's going on in the U.S
and how it relates to the potential
and other parts of the world.
I believe we're going
to hear from John next.
So as he prepares to share his screen,
just wanna to say thank you for,
enlightening us with that information.
And I'm sure there'll be some questions.
I have a few followup questions.
So, once we get to the Q&A session,
maybe I'll take the moderator's
prerogative and jump in.
- Great.
- Thanks, it looks like
John's ready to go now.
Take it away, John.
- Thank you, Jason.
Well, what I've been asked to do today is,
take a small step back
from the carbon topic
and draw upon my experience,
in the field of the bag
or forestry to address
the social, environmental
and economic benefits
of this particular form of land use.
And also, as best I understand
present to you some of the
barriers to widespread adoption,
and kind of concluding in
terms of that discussion
related to the adoption
and use and implementation
of agroforestry on our landscapes,
I will offer some ideas and of course this
is not going to be
comprehensive by any means
or many great ideas out
there related to policies
that could help overcome those barriers.
But in the short time that
I have I'll offer a few
and really kind of the overarching theme
of my presentation is,
what good is a land use technology
if it's actually not used on the land.
So I'll talk about some of the things
that I've experienced and
learned over the years
being involved in the field,
and hopefully that will inform
an additional discussion
and conversations related
to the carbon topic.
I often like to start my presentations
with a story or a quote.
And in this case, I'll offer a quote,
from a student that was
in my class in 2012,
taking the agroforestry course
and midway through the semester,
the student raised their hand and said,
"I think I understand
this agroforestry thing.
"If you can't do one thing,
"you can always do something else."
And indeed, I think that's
really kind of an important way
to characterize agroforestry
is a land use system
that's based upon positive
rather than negative feedbacks
and much of our kind
of land use strategies,
conventionally historically speaking,
they're very prescriptive
and constrictive.
And many times you're being told
what you can't do versus what you can do,
but agroforestry takes a different angle
and thinks about the whole
landscape and opportunities
for production across that landscape
and focusing in on the positive feedbacks.
And that leads to then kind
of a philosophical approach
that it's not what one can't
do but one what one can do.
And that has some really
profound implications
in terms of addressing
our socioeconomic issues
and some of our ecosystem services needs,
in terms of land use production
and provides valuable outcomes
with respect to food and fiber,
but also a whole host of
other conservation services.
And if we just look at the food
and fiber supply issue alone,
thinking about agroforestry
is approach to land use.
It's based upon positive feedbacks.
We are looking across the entire landscape
for opportunities to produce,
match that against projections
with respect to population
and by 2050, we're looking at
an estimated 9.8 billion
people on the planet.
If you go out to 2100,
that's 11.2 billion,
and that's a lot of miles to feed.
So marginal areas and other land areas
that may be in the
negative feedback system
had been thought of as off limits.
Agroforestry sees those
as a positive opportunity
to compliment production in
some of our prime AG lands
and other spaces,
and realize some important
environmental services
in those areas as well.
But we also have to keep in mind,
it's not just in rural areas.
We often think about farming
and forestry is rural,
but agroforestry because it's scalable,
which is really one of its positive suits,
can be shaped and formed and fashioned
and implemented in small
spaces in irregular patterns,
which allows for it
then to become relevant
in our highly populated
metropolitan areas.
But it's also not just an open spaces.
So we think about
farming out at open lands
or a community garden in
the open space in a city.
But we're also talking
about the opportunity
to continue production
beyond the Wood line.
So really we're thinking
about agroforestry
and it is a holistic, flexible
and creative production framework.
That's applicable on the
whole farm in the forest,
in our neighborhoods
and in our city centers.
And multiple benefits is an important term
that's regularly used in
conjunction with agroforestry
because indeed it does have,
a whole host of benefits in terms
of food and fiber production.
In many cases through the
combination of trees and crops
on the same piece of land,
you actually produce more biomass.
You can direct that biomass
into existing markets
to enhance economic revenue
for the producers, for the farmers.
But in addition to that,
we also have because we're
integrating perennial
and annual species together,
mimicking diverse ecosystems,
we are enhancing natural capital.
There's a lot of discussion about
how much longer we have globally speaking
to continue to produce food and fiber.
Our soils are degrading,
agroforestry works in a
direction to regenerate
and maintain healthy
soils, conserving soil.
It addresses air and water
quality and quantity.
It has great biodiversity benefits
and yes indeed carbon sequestration
through those perennial Woody
species that are integrated.
It also strengthened social capital
by networking your cross fences.
It addresses land use from
an ecosystem perspective
and those things don't end
where we have maybe arbitrarily
set up government boundaries
or set up our fences from
a property standpoint.
So in many cases we see
networking and partnerships,
utilizing these practices
and these strategies,
to benefit communities
and benefit farmers and their families.
It also can increase human
capital by reducing barriers,
associated with the land
class production matrix.
I mentioned this earlier
with marginal lands,
being in the fold as
opposed to being excluded
in terms of how we think about production.
It can improve aesthetics
and energy efficiency
on farm and buffer operations
through diversification
and differentiation of products.
So, land estimates in the U.S are that 2%
and Susan throughout numbers.
Yes indeed there are 30,000 or so farmers
that are known to practice agroforestry.
But if you look at the overall number,
it's roughly about 2% on average.
Now there's some States like Vermont,
where we have 7% and others
where it's less than one.
But across the board we're looking at 2%,
some form of agroforestry.
So as I mentioned, all of these benefits,
I mentioned this kind of
flexibility and creativity
that underpins the land use.
Why are we not seeing more
of it on the landscape?
Well, just a few ideas I'll offer.
First kind of an underlying
fundamental issue
that I think is that it
really has a lot to do
with the way historically
and not historically
in terms of millennia,
but historically in terms
of the last 150 years,
the way we work with land
and organize ourselves,
our Woodlands are on
one side of the table.
Our croplands are on the other side,
distinct boundaries drawn in our minds,
and across the landscape in
terms of how we we manage.
And that also includes
how we are organized
at the university. I mean,
people I collaborate with
are not even the same college with me.
They're AG scientists,
I'm on the forestry side.
So that's a barrier to begin with.
And we're working to get around that
by capitalizing on some of our traditional
ecological knowledge to inform where we go
in terms of the future with agroforestry,
but that has been a barrier.
And we're also,
we also see that in our
urban areas as well,
the way we think about
parks and open spaces.
Also farms and farmers are ubiquitous,
but they're not monolithic.
And we fall into the trap regularly
of speaking about the farmer or the farm
they're as diverse as
any sector in society
that you will find and
agroforestry lends itself well
to meeting that diversity,
because it can be modified and adjusted
and designed in ways that can benefit
based upon the primary
objectives of the farmers,
whatever that may be.
But from a policy standpoint,
we tend to think of and
create favorable policies
that are for the iconic and classic
industrial large scale producer.
But in the U.S nearly 70% of the farms
are less than 73 acres which is 180 acres,
and most are not full time.
And they provide a enormous
amount of food and fiber,
for our population.
There's also an awareness issue.
Talk to farmers if they've heard the term,
they're not sure what it is,
and most of them have not heard of it.
So we're still working
on getting the word out
in that regard.
Another issue is that trees for services,
our ecosystem services are
often pushed as a zero sum game.
So it's about carpeting the landscape
with as many trees as possible
to get the benefit of
that forest ecosystem.
Well, that retires a lot of other uses
to include food production, agriculture,
and remembers in the mid odds,
the biomass or food or fuel dilemma.
Okay.
So agroforestry is a blended system
that allows for our agriculture
to continue on an annual basis while
integrating those trees
for the benefits longterm.
Talk to farmers, particularly
large scale ones.
They're not necessarily physically oppose
philosophically, excuse me,
opposed to agroforestry.
They're just uncertain
about how it will work
within their kind of revenue based system,
often operating on small margins, but,
you talk to them about, well,
what would cut through
the confusion? Cash would.
So, developing policies that are centered
around some of the ecosystem
services are provided
to provide that cash at the outset
while the longterm benefits being realized
is something important to keep in mind.
This is really the key question.
The time for return,
how do we ramp up return
around some of the conversions
that are happening in agroforestry
so that those farmers can realize
those cash benefits earlier
on make that system?
The big, the big issue really
is risk space and time.
You're talking about taking
a portion of arable land
that can be an annual production
out of annual production,
and then planting slow
growing perennials in there.
So that percentage of land,
the farmer has to sit on and
there's risks related to that.
Over time, they have to wait
for some of the products
that are conventional and agroforestry,
since such as fruit nuts, floral products.
Even some of the benefits
like Susan mentioned,
shade, to enhance
production for livestock.
Well, the question becomes
phosphorous nitrogen
as we have here in Virginia
water quality trading program
that pays at the outset for those BMP
best management practice conversions
that helps reduce that
time that is a benefit
to the producer by that conversion.
And what about carbon,
carbon can also be part
of that conversation.
And one of the policy
approaches it's been discussed
and I think is pretty interesting
as a performance based policy.
Where there's some modeling done
in terms of the potential
sequestration of carbon
or the potential sequestration of fosters,
which would protect water quality,
provide a portion of payment
upfront for that conversion,
and then monitor the
performance of that system.
And a farmer has to manage for carbon,
just like they went for fruits and nuts,
and that's tied into
mitigated externalities.
The government pays an
enormous amount of money
to address some of those
environmental problems
associated with land use.
This could come down and tied to that.
There's some cost share
programs out there longstanding.
They get perennial on the ground
that farmers have taken advantage of.
I can talk more about those in the Q&A.
And then the innovation
agenda, which just came out.
It is related to
agriculture's own footprint
and agriculture's own footprint
in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
So there is an interest to
try and cut some of that,
agroforestry could potentially play a role
because there's not a lot of regulations,
but there's information or interest
in collecting data to better track that.
And if we have trees on the landscape,
we can measure times are
changing just as I close
I'd like to say that there
is a generational change.
I see there's a growing
consciousness around
ecosystem agroecology and the
role agroforestry can play.
We have media, really building
awareness such as Mongabay,
and civil leads have done articles
on agroforestry there's
non-governmental efforts
like Savannah Institute,
Appalachian sustainable development.
There's even some private
enterprise out there
such as Propagate Ventures organizations,
trying to make this
happen on the landscape,
to meet the needs of the producers.
So, that's it for me, thanks for the time.
And, I'll turn it over.
- Thank you, John.
That was great.
I'm very interested in the way you talked
about the potential for stacking
up nitrogen and phosphorous
credits or incentives alongside
the carbon incentives.
I've got a good friend in New Zealand
who's doing just that with some land
that he's allowed to regenerate in forest.
And, it's,
he's just seeing the carbon
is the icing on the cake.
They, there's a lot of money to be had in
these various ecosystem service market.
It's where they exist.
Great.
So now I'm gonna turn it over to Patrick.
And we'll hear a little bit,
perhaps a European flavor to this issue.
And it looks like we've got
his slides up there now.
Patrick, you might wanna
just unmute yourself.
And then I think we're ready to go.
It looks like you're still muted, Patrick.
There you go.
We can hear you.
- Wonderful, and the screen looks good.
Great.
Well, I feel kind of embarrassed
because the previous
speakers have been brilliant
and have covered everything
that I was asked to cover myself.
What is agroforestry?
How does it remove and
sequence the carbon?
What other social, environmental
and economic benefits of it?
And what are the barriers
to more widespread adoption?
Now I've never been known
to be a short speaker,
so I have a lot of slides,
but I promise to go
through them very rapidly.
And I'll start by introducing
examples from around the world
of what agroforestry systems are.
And what's particularly interesting here
is that it doesn't matter
which biome you are in,
whether you in the Arctic or
whether you're in the Sahel
you are gonna see very similar systems,
silvopastoral systems, for example,
a silvoarable systems
or polycultural systems
as you see here.
So looking at silvopastoral systems,
you have some extremely intensive systems
like those that are being used in Holland
to combine orchards with poultry.
And whenever I look at that picture,
I'm kind of thinking that
everybody is happy in their,
the poultry is happy because there's,
they look up and they're
protected from Hawks
and the trees are happy
because the poultry
is eating the pests and
doing a bit of weeding.
And the farmer is happy
because it all means more money
from the products that he's able to sell.
And of course from the ecosystem services
and the same principle
applies across the board
and this kind of holistically managed
silvopastoral system in Poland,
or this system with a Shea butter,
the Shea trees in Burkina Faso, the shade,
benefits that have already
been mentioned by Susan,
the food benefits in
winter that are common
in the extreme North
of Europe and Eurasia.
My favorite gastronomic landscape,
because that's the best
ham in the known universe.
And the cork that comes from these trees
is stopping the champagne bottle.
So nice too.
I like to open it celebrations.
These systems are becoming
prevalent even in countries
that have not been known to promote them
like Belgium, for example,
this is a system being run
in the Belgian Ardennes,
and the way this farmer
is managing his cattle,
eat nitrophilic plants
of the degraded land,
he's picking up is in
some cases being turned
into nature reserves
which of course provides
additional income to the farmer.
Another example of silvopastoral systems
this time in an olive system in Italy.
Arable systems who are
quite familiar with you,
you've probably already
seen this iconic picture
from (indistinct) in France,
but there are many more of them.
There are horticultural systems
like this one in Belgium.
You have the vast Parkia biglobosa
somewhere between five
and 10 million hectares
around 20 to 30 million
acres in Israel and Mali.
You have, these,
quite common now walnuts and
wheat systems again in France.
You have these no till
pastures with added trees
that are being added to the system.
And you have these
widespread fertilizer trees.
This picture is quite interesting
because what you see here are fruit trees,
in and around villages,
those are the dark green blobs
and then a huge amount of great trees.
These are Faidherbia albida
a kind of Acacia that goes
into dormancy at the
beginning of the rainy season,
which means that the nutrition
that its leaves contain,
falls on the soil surface and
fertilizes the main crops,
and there is no competition
while these main crops are growing.
And that's why this tree
has actually been applied
to commercial systems like
here in Zambia, for example,
you also have the typical
shade crop systems
they're typical for coffee and cocoa.
Here's an example from Nicaragua,
and you occasionally have
inverted agroforestry system.
I really love this one because
the agroforestry components
are the small shrubs, not the tall trees.
The tall trees, the
coconuts are the crops.
The small shrubs are gliricidia
and gliricidia are leguminous trees
and the long shoots the copies,
the long shoots that you
get from them are perfect
for biomass to energy plants.
And that's becoming
quite common in Sri Lanka
where this picture was taken.
Uganda has far more complex systems
in it's more human reaches,
which typically combine
papayas and bananas
and coffee and cacao and vanilla,
and many other systems in
the temperate zone systems
tend to be mechanized.
They tend to be a
simpler like this coppice
and crop rotation system in England.
Now the most effective
agroforestry systems,
the ones that generate
the most biomass return,
but that are also a
real bitch to make money
from are these polycultural systems.
And what I mean by that is
these are really gardening systems.
They are typically farms that
are one to two hectare big.
The farmer is producing anywhere
between 10 and 30 products.
And if you are the buyer
and you're going to a landscape like that,
that means you have to deal
with thousands of different
farmers who in the aggregate
are producing dozens of different crops,
too high heterogeneity
of quality and quantity.
And you've got to figure out
a way of making money from that.
And that's why these systems,
which in biodiversity terms
and in productivity terms,
are so fantastic are beginning
to collapse around the world,
because we haven't figured out
how to make them work in a modern world
that demands homogeneous
quantities homogeneous qualities
and one single processing
facility per buyer.
We've done some work in
applying those systems
to commodity crops like oil Palm.
And I'll be talking about
the results we're getting
from those a little bit later.
Adapting these systems to the
need of particular farmers
is something that we at ICRAF
spend a lot of time doing.
And then beautiful work has
been done on this in Brazil
with dozens of different
agroforestry designs,
that are done on a
completely holistic basic,
a little bit like propagate
ventures operates.
So the scientists and the
advisors will spend time
with the farmers to try to
understand what their short,
medium and long term objectives are,
how important money,
how important returns,
how important aesthetics are
important social, et cetera,
are in these objectives
and then design things
that are going to deliver those benefits.
Some of these systems
are highly traditional.
These milpa systems in central America
have been keeping a high
population densities
well fed for centuries already.
Some of the systems that are innovative,
simply adding fodder species
into a serial systems
like here in Kenya allows you to rapidly
increase your milk productivity
which in the case of a poor farmer,
like this one has an
impact on the nutrition
of their children.
But in the case of
richer commercial farmers
has an impact on the
money that they can make.
So what exactly is agroforestry.
And Susan and gave us the USDA definition
and Europe has its own definition
and India has its own
and they kind of overlap,
but they're kind of a
little bit different.
And for me, agroforestry is really,
in the same class as hardcore pornography
that was famously described
by Supreme court justice
Potter Stewart in 1964
as being something that
could not be really defined,
but that was recognizable when you see it
and agroforestry is
exactly the same thing.
If you are in a productive landscape
and it has trees and something else in it,
it almost certainly is
a form of agroforestry.
And that means that if you
take this kind of book
view and in this case,
so my colleagues here took the view that
any kind of agricultural land
with more than 10% tree
Carver was agroforestry.
You find that over 40% of
land around the world already
is under some form of agroforestry.
And that the proportion of that land
is rising on all continents,
which is of course, great news.
It's been around.
Agroforestry is probably the oldest form
of land use known to man.
We say that because we found
evidence now that the fig tree
which is a great agroforestry tree,
if you happen to be in the middle East
was domesticated over 11,000 years ago.
And we see signs of this anywhere
in the European agroforestry Federation.
We have a member who loves
digging out art about agroforestry,
and here's a mosaic of
agroforestry systems
from Roman times.
Here is a come in almost
industrial agroforestry system
from the pro Valley in the 18th century.
You notice that there's
fruit orchards in there.
There's cereals, there's even
some fish farming going on.
You have beautiful examples
from the highlight of
impressionism and pointillism
And when photography became
widespread in the 1920s,
you had aeronauts that went into pictures
of these kinds of Bocage
systems around Europe.
Now I have no idea how
much time I've taken Jason
and feel free to interrupt me.
But, I was also asked to look
at agroforestry and climate change.
And here, as we all know,
we have a problem the way we've
dealt with a problem so far,
which is to have the big
international agreements
and talking shops have not delivered
any successes whatsoever.
The greenhouse gas emissions
keep on rising and the emission keeps
on accelerating around the world.
No matter how many cops we have
and looking at it from this perspective
is probably even more scary.
This is a logarithmic scale.
This is a table that was
published last November
in the Financial Times.
And it simply looks at
the emissions per decade
of a number of countries
starting with the industrialized ones
in on the left and finishing
with the newly emerging ones on the right.
And by newly emerging, I
don't mean China or India.
I mean, places like Sudan or
Ghana or Afghanistan or Panama
or Andras each and every one of them
is getting it's carbon
fixed because carbon
is such a fantastic way
of powering your economy.
Now, I've seen the figure 9% in the U.S
comes from agriculture.
It depends on how you count,
but roughly between 20 and 30%
of all greenhouse gas
emissions in the world
come from land use, land
use change, and forestry.
And it may even be higher because
this particular figure,
for example, does not take,
carbon dioxide emissions or removals
from agricultural soils into account.
And the more we study soil processes,
the more of course these
processes are becoming important.
So is it time to panic?
Well, you might think so
because there is no silver
bullet to this problem,
but thankfully there is a magic pizza pie
and draw downs already been mentioned
by I think both previous speakers
and draw down has done
an extraordinary service
to the world community by trying
to estimate what would happen
if everything we could do
was actually done.
And if everything we could do
in land use was actually done,
we would actually find out
that it's far more important
than these four measures,
which are the ones we tend to think about
when we talk about carbon
friendly technologies,
the ones that are connected
to the way we use land
are far more important than on their own
if the draw down figures are correct.
And if the entire world decided to follow,
these recommendations would be worth
around 200 parts per million
that would get us right back down
to before the levels we were at
before industrialization actually started.
So the promise is here we can
solve this particular problem.
And of course that's been recognized
by a number of institutions.
Susan already showed a chart from the IPCC
here's another one that
says exactly the same thing.
Basically agroforestry rocks,
if you are interested in climate change.
The reason for that is absolutely obvious.
The more complex you make, the landscape,
the more biomass productivity you have
and the more biomass
productivity you have,
the more you useful production you have
in terms of biofuels or timber or food,
but also the more useful
production you have
in terms of storage and biomass
and storage in the soil.
So the logic of agroforestry
as a carbon storage machinery
technology is obvious to all
the difficulty comes when you're trying
to estimate exactly how much it's worth.
Here for example, there's a
study that comes from 2013
from the Flemish Institute of technology,
and they took what I consider
to be relatively conservative estimates
of the draw down potential of arable
and silvopastoral systems.
And they came to the conclusion
that this might be worth about
a third of all the emissions
of the European union from all sectors.
That's clearly enormous.
And if that's true, it
would be transformative,
but we don't know if it's true.
They are a huge number
of studies out there
that are trying to look at it.
There are metal studies, there are models,
there are measures,
and they all come to different numbers.
And the fundamental problem that they face
is that the vast majority
of carbon accounting systems
are looking at the top 30 centimeters,
maybe the top 50 centimeters of soil.
But of course in agroforestry system
tree roots go a lot deeper than that.
And they posit carbon
a lot deeper than that.
Here's an example from
an experiment in France.
And so it's a Walnut wheat,
experiment on the right
and the forestry experiment on the left.
And as you can see,
most of the rootlets from the
tree are below a meter depth.
They are somewhere around two meters deep.
And if you don't have a way of estimating
how much carbon that is
pumping to that depth,
any calculations you make,
aren't gonna be extraordinarily difficult.
That's why in Europe,
they've just launched
this massive new research program,
the European joint program on
soil, on which I'm an advisor
that is trying to get a grip on estimating
exactly how much carbon
is in agricultural soil
and exactly how various interventions
is going to modify that carbon pool.
In Africa too we're trying to
get to grips with that system.
You mostly using remote sensing imagery,
and we now have enough data and notably
from what is the world's largest sample
of African soil samples,
to be able to estimate the relationship
between fractional vegetation cover
and erosion and soil organic carbon.
Now the, as you can see the relationships
are not precise enough so
that we can package it and
sell it to a hedge funds,
but it's clearly the direction
in which we're trying to go.
We're trying to monetize
these carbon services
that people are putting in.
And it's important that we do that
because the vast majority of policymakers
just don't understand how ecosystems work.
For example, most of the
world has this side of that
planting trees is a great idea
to deal with climate change.
And in that context,
there's something called
the bond challenge,
which is seeking to restore
350 million hectares of forest
which is a huge area
to curb climate change
and restore degraded land.
But 45% of the projects
that have been registered
with the secretariat are monoclonal,
or at least mono species plantations
that's not restoration.
Only 21% agroforestry and
30% on natural forest.
And I should have added
the reference there, sorry,
I can get you the read
the reference out later.
There was a paper in
nature that shows that,
all estimates that natural
forests hold up to 40%,
40 times more carbon than plantations
and agroforestry can
hold up to seven times
more carbon than plantation.
So clearly understanding what
exactly we mean by restoration
is going to be crucial moving forward.
And that means that we have to get
to a much better definition
that is agreed globally
on what exactly we mean by agroforestry.
My definition you understand
it when you see it,
it's not a good enough one
to actually do the kind of
accounting that is required.
And my colleagues know
to be Todd Rosenstock
and Christine Lamanna
both based in Nairobi,
but both American are
doing a fair amount of work
on exactly this issue.
What I find particularly encouraging
from my European coach
is how much the enthusiasm
for regenerative
agriculture and agroforestry
is progressing in the United States.
I'm sorry to say much
faster than it is in Europe.
And the proof of that
at books like this one,
and it's not the only one that
are coming out there and that
are directed at practitioners,
and that are trying to help farmers
adopt these regenerative
agricultural techniques
to their own production systems.
But of course, even if the entire world
starts planting trees tomorrow,
we still have too much
carbon in the atmosphere.
The climate is still changing
and that makes life difficult.
So adaptation is becoming a major issue.
And trees.
- Patrick, you may need
to wrap up quickly.
Just so we have enough time for some Q&A.
- I'm gonna move on.
- You have another couple of points.
- I have lots of points
and I'm going to move on
to the most important ones,
which is why doesn't it work.
First to many people it
sounds too good to be true.
Second, there's a cultural issue.
This is a picture that
comes from the website
of an agrochemical company,
and it's supposed to
exemplify a gorgeous field,
but anybody who knows
anything about agroforestry
will recognize that as being probably
not a very healthy field, it's monoclonal
it only looks like that for
a few months of the year.
It's prone to erosion and to pollution
when the crop has been harvested.
Whereas this is recognized by
most people, serious people,
the kind of people who wear
suits and sit in glass towers,
making investment
decisions as being a mess.
Whereas in fact, we know
that this is something
that has kept people fed in body and soul
at high population densities
for long period of time.
Then there was an
insidious idea of progress.
This is the picture from the 1930s
of the main commercial artery
in the city of Birmingham.
This is a picture of exactly the same area
in the late 1950s.
It was all torn down and
was replaced by modernity.
And the idea that industry's
here and farming is here
and housing is here and education is here
and shopping is somewhere else.
And this applied to agriculture, this,
I used to do some work in
the former Soviet union
and I collected this poster,
which was supposed to show the world
that the Soviet system was so much better
than the capitalist one.
And it's about farming,
but you don't see a single plant
there's not even any green in there.
What you see is a fertilizer
plant in the background
and the proud claim
that a million tractors
are coming out of a factory in the bottom.
On top of that, we have
no business model really.
Our business model mostly
involves begging for money,
and that's just not good enough.
On top of that we,
and the reason for that
is we have no cashflow.
If I'm selling you seeds and inputs,
I get between 50 and $70 per
acre from your farm every year.
If I'm giving you a
little bit of consultancy,
you might pay me.
You might not pay me,
but it's gonna be difficult
for me to scale up.
And so we can't market.
We can research and we can't
buy political influence.
So we always stay in the little corner.
The best proof of that is that the seminar
has attracted maybe 300 people.
When in fact it should have
attracted 3 million people
because agroforestry is so exciting.
Finally, there is this
feed the world, narrative,
oh my God, we're gonna be 11
million people, billion people.
Then we aren't gonna feed
them all. We need calories.
We need calories.
And who subscribes to that?
Who designs that narrative,
the people who sell and
manufacture the inputs,
the people who process
and trade and retail
and the politicians they
don't know any better.
So they subscribed to that.
And so everybody's focusing
on global calorie production,
and that means that we need better seeds.
We need more GMO,
We need better fertilizers.
And then after that,
we deal with the negative externalities,
but really let's focus first
on producing the calories.
And this is insidious because
it even infects people
who should know better, for example,
the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Then there's our marketing.
You were saying, John,
that most farmers haven't
heard of agroforestry
if only the problem was so simple,
not only does this kind
of industrial farming
describe itself as
traditional agriculture,
when it is anything bad,
but our kind of farming has a thousand
gurus each using their own little word
to describe their own tiny variation
on an agroforestry system.
My personal favorite farming God's way
that one's from Zimbabwe.
Then we always forget that
people have aspirations, right?
If trees are seen as a way of
making miserable people poor,
it's not gonna work.
If trees are seen as being
miserable, people rich,
it is going to work yet.
How do we market ourselves
usually like this, right?
What this image says is
agroforestry is great
because it allows you to
have a smile on your face
while you're carrying a
heavy load on your head.
This is not a way of promoting
these transformative technology.
This is a way of promoting
this transformative technology.
I found in regular meetings
in African villages
under the village tree.
That if I show people they get it right.
The white man, the rich man he's doing it.
That means I need to become
interested in this too.
That's it. I have a lot more notably
I was going talk about governance.
But Jason, I guess you don't
really want me to get there.
(Jason laughing)
- Sounds like you have enough
material for a whole hour.
But I know that we wanna
give a little bit of time for questions
and there are some popping up now
that I can begin to read off.
We may have a time for just a few of them.
There have been a few
practical questions come in.
So questions about, for
very young plantations,
how long does it take before
we can begin to introduce livestock?
How much do the species matter?
Some of these are
directed more toward John
and then we have some higher
level questions as well,
but maybe I'll just lead off
with those two, for John.
And then we'll pick up
a few more from there.
- Well, ecosystems vary and tree species
and their growth rates vary
within the variations of ecosystems
and psych quality and
those types of things.
It does take time.
I mean, if you just want a rule of thumb
in terms of establishing trees
and pasture at low densities
before you can actually
integrate livestock.
Well, depends upon the livestock as well.
The cattle lives is gonna be more likely
to damage the tree later
and it's growing stage then,
you or a goat of some
sort smaller ruminant.
But we tend to think about seven
to 10 years or so actually.
So, going back to that slide regarding
kind of that risk period,
there is an investment made,
there's a land taken out of production
and the producers wondering
how long do I have to wait?
What are the kind of
protective measures I need
to put in place before I
start to see some benefits?
Be the products that can be sold
or some of these other kinds
of micro climatic benefits
in terms of shading and
livestock production,
but seven to 10 years is
kind of what we look at.
Now, there are a rotational
grazing that can occur
such that you are already
on some kind of moving,
shifting pattern with respect to grazing,
that can be beneficial,
or if you'd be part of the
better part of the system.
But yeah, I mean,
it does take some time
and there are a variety
of other techniques.
I mean, you put fences and
tubes and those types of things,
but some say plant in high densities,
and there's only so many stems
that the livestock will be able to damage
before some of those leaders take over
and achieve some sort of
crown and canopy status
such that they're
protected from that damage.
But there is a time
lag in that net regard.
Now some silver pasture
work in the United States
has been converting
existing stains by thinning
to residual city where
there's enough light
that reaches the forest floor
to then establish a forage base.
And that's kind of a popular way
because you can get a silver
pasture in quick order
and rather than liquidate your forest,
you're actually painting that canopy.
You're just reducing the density
and integrating all into that system.
Just kind of a reverse of the
other form of establishment.
- Very interesting.
Another branch of
questions also relates to
some practical implications
particularly about mechanization.
So there's a question that's about,
the fact that this may
pose some challenges
for mechanized agriculture.
Although that form of agriculture tends
to work best for large scales.
And so the question is around
how do we fit this in for
small scale agriculture
alongside the idea of using
mechanized approaches?
Is that a challenge or
are there some advances
that maybe people don't know about yet?
- I can take that if you want.
Yeah, I mean, looking at systems in Europe
and across the developing world,
it's obvious that you
have agroforestry systems
that can be mechanized
and can be done by hand.
There are no principal limits,
to the size of an agroforestry system.
You have extremely large
arable agroforestry systems
in the former Soviet
union using windbreaks,
and in China and an province,
using mostly Paulownia
but all the tree species.
And then of course they are
fully mechanized systems.
In, but what's always
interesting is that often
the most productive systems,
if the thing that you're
most interested in
is ecosystem function, soil function,
and biomass productivity,
the most productive systems are the tend
to be the smaller ones.
The most innovative approach
to this problematic I know of
is what's called syntropic
agriculture in Brazil,
where machinery is being developed
to specifically deal with what
is a Multistrata agroforestry
system that involves strongly and
who species composition
changes strongly over time.
So there are people who
are working on mechanizing,
even those more highly
productive systems derived from,
home gardens or polycultures,
- Just to follow up here in the States.
I mean, that's an issue with our,
as I noted the kind of iconic large scale
industrial agriculture is,
we still get what we
can create an alleyway
and an alley cropping
system that's 18 feet wide
or 24 feet wide,
where the boom on some of their equipment,
can be upwards of 50 feet wide
for their combines and such.
And so, you see that iconic image
that Patrick shared from France.
And, that's not even wide
enough for where we are
with respect to some of our large scale
industrial mechanization today.
- Yeah and that is actually an issue
because the size of equipment
keeps on growing over time.
But trees certainly take a while to grow
and even fast rotation,
trees like poplars,
or willows, which you can
harvest after a rotation
of 15 or 20 years,
you might well have already wanted to move
to a larger piece of equipment,
which you cannot get
because you cannot invest in
because you've got your trees in place.
So this, John leads to another,
a key issue in agroforestry
is the importance
of thinking planning over the long term.
And that's a great difficulty for farmers.
Most farmers are used to
thinking in annual terms.
So you, crop in a given season,
when you suddenly have to
finish trees and in some cases,
trees that have a rotation
period of up to 100 years,
it's extremely difficult to do the vine.
- There were a host of
new questions rolling in.
Unfortunately we were almost
at the time for this webinar.
There are a number about
ID is degrading bio char,
into the system and the
potential values of that,
questions about different,
applications in the developed
and developing world.
Also questions about
governance and the challenges
that I think you touched on Patrick
about monetizing those benefits,
and especially where
there are other threats
in place, such as violating the rights
of indigenous people to their lands by
introducing these systems, or somehow
exposing them to industrialized
forms of agriculture
that may come along with this package.
So there are all these
fascinating questions bubbling up.
Unfortunately I think
we're going to be out
of time for this session.
But I encourage everyone
to go back through,
the recording of this webinar
when they have the chance.
And also I'm hoping that the chat
will be preserved in some way.
So that those of you who
want to follow up with our speakers,
might be able to refer back to that or,
see further answers down the road.
I'll hand it off to Patrick
for one more minute.
And then I think we
will be in the hands of
our behind the scenes person, Alison,
who's going to let us know
when it's time to wrap up.
- A simple question, Jason,
I noticed there's a lot of
Q&A's and we can actually,
we the speakers can actually
answer them by typing.
When the session finishes in a minute
could we leave that open?
So I, for example,
can take a few more minutes to answer
some of these questions.
- I'm not sure if that's possible or not,
but I think Alison may be willing
to keep it open for a little while longer.
- And I would just like to
note that trees are dynamic.
So we have to manage
that component as well.
It's not like they're static out there.
So that bio char question
made me think of that.
That there's actually
thinning that occurs with
these trees species that can be routed
into other forms of production
that can be tied back into enhancing,
say the natural capital on the farm
or for products for sale.
- Great.
And I'll give Susan one more chance
for a last word if she wants
to chime in on anything here.
- Sure, yeah.
Some of this conversation
has brought to mind
some of the great work
that's being done by
the Savannah Institute
and others on land leasing.
I mean, I've been hearing stories
about farmers leasing their
land for agroforestry,
and that requires a
different kind of lease
since you're looking at
a longterm investment.
I'm also hearing about some organizations.
I think it's the open space
Institute is looking into,
leasing land along riparian areas
for riparian forest buffers.
And I guess this is a way
to say that there are ways
that a farmer could potentially
continue their annual cropping
and not worry about the trees
if they were bringing in someone else
to help manage the tree aspect.
- Interesting.
That's great.
I see question here about
abandoned mine lands,
which is something that's
a little bit close to me.
I did my undergraduate thesis on,
recovering abandoned mine lands in Ohio.
So, I'll come back later to
look for the answer to that.
If it appears.
Unfortunately I have to jump off
because I'm due to give a presentation
on a different call right now.
So, we'll leave the webinar
open for a little bit longer
as Patrick suggested to allow some folks
to have a little bit of back and forth
within the chat session.
And I just wanna say
thank you to the speakers.
And it's been a real pleasure
to listen to this today
and to be your moderator.
And I look forward to following up
and hearing more about this issue.
It seems like everyone recognizes
there's tremendous potential here.
So, I hope we'll all be
able to work together
to figure out a way to
operationalize that.
All right, thanks everyone.
And I will turn it back to,
Alison now to just keep the chat open
for a little bit longer.
Everyone, please keep
well and have great day.
Onwards, onward we go.
Thank you everybody.
- Thank you for the moderation Jason.
