About Us: Sustainable Agroforestry
 
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Sustainable Agroforestry
 
Communities around the world, from the drylands of Africa to the mountains of Central America, report to us that they are struggling with the same problems. They have seen that as lands have been deforested, soil fertility declined rapidly and previously abundant fresh water, fuelwood, fruits, and animal forage all became scarce.
 
Agroforestry is a land-use system that integrates agriculture, trees, people, and animals in the same space, resulting in improved soil quality, higher yields, and improved standards of living. Agroforestry has been practiced around the world in varying forms for thousands years, and as such it works well with the low-input land-management systems that are commonplace throughout the developing world. Our role is to train the world’s communities in advances in agroforestry, and to facilitate the diffusion and promotion of these strategies.
 
Agroforestry tecnhiques are tailored to the needs of the community. In communal forests, tree planting programs focus on large-scale reforestation and the promotion of non-timber forest products. In agrifultural fields, fast-growing multipurpose tree species are integrated into the agricultural system for specific functions such as a windbreak, firebreak, woodlot, living fence, contour-planting for erosion control, alley-cropping to improve soil fertility, or other technology - in order to diversify products from a field and protect the fields from wind, water, animals, and fire.
 
Our Programs:
 
Our work delivers environmentally sustainable economic development by developing and implementing programs that are economically beneficial, thereby sustainably improving living standards for the participants by the careful management, rather than the exploitation, of their natural resources.
 
This, we believe, is the only way to save and restore our threatened natural resources: if we cannot develop projects that bring economic reward there will be few, if any, participants. And, as the members of these communities have already learned, if economic development is to be done without the management of these resources, it will soon fail.
 
Tree Planting: We help people plant multi-purpose, fast-growing, ecologically appropriate tree species. By choosing species tailored to the needs of the communities we serve, we create agroforestry systems that rebuild worn soils, reduce erosion, replenish groundwater aquifers and create microclimate conditions that encourage the return of indigenous species.
 
Agroforestry Training: We have developed a long-distance agroforestry training program that is being used to train community leaders worldwide in sustainable agroforestry practices. The curriculum covers agroforestry techniques, appropriate species, nursery management, livestock management, pest control, and more. Successful completion of an exam is required to graduate. To learn more, click here.
 
The "Forest Garden": The forest garden is a multi-layered agroforestry system that strives to realize the diversity and productivity of a natural forest with species of plants and animals that are useful to humans. In many cases, we see spectacular harvests from this combination of trees and cash crops. Integrating more crops on one piece of land yields greater total production, reduced incidence of insects and other pests, increased quality of food produced, and lowered damage from storms and soil erosion.
 
In this program, the land is farmed "vertically" instead of "horizontally." Utilizing the vertical space incorporates hardwood species for eventual harvest, nitrogen fixing "nurse crop" trees that continuously fertilize the soil while being harvested for fuelwood and other products, fruit and nut species, ground crops, "mini" livestock and poultry projects, root crops, marketable flowers, medicinal species and a wide variety of other crops.
 
This comparatively new idea is exciting community leaders worldwide. It is especially interesting to women's organizations because small plots of land can produce a cornucopia of goods, meeting the everyday nutritional needs of their families and offering a myriad of income-generating opportunities close to home.
 
Programs for Women and Children:
 

Destruction of forest cover creates especially difficult problems for women and children in developing communities. In much of Asia, women leave their homes at dawn, walk miles into the mountains, and climb tall trees to lop off branches. They carry these loads, about 65 pounds, back to their homes. A typical rural family in Nepal spends about 55 hours weekly just finding firewood and forage. Additionally, the kitchen is often the most poorly ventilated room in the home. Women only 45 years old are half-blind and dying of tuberculosis from the constant smoke. There are other problems: wells dry up after the rainy season ends; the "slash-and-burn" farming system reduces average life spans by six years or more; as soil nutrients are washed away, crops are deficient in essential nutrients, and children are always the first victims to suffer serious malnutrition.
 
These are some of the reasons that the projects we start with women's groups and with schools are the most effective. We design these programs to plant trees to answer these critical needs. These groups are demonstrating that planting the right kinds of trees, with good planning and management, can rebuild and protect soils, and provide organic fertilizer to produce more, and more nutritious, crops. They can also sustainably produce all the firewood needed right along the fence line of the family home.
 
Fuel-Efficient Stoves: With this program, we are introducing several models of fuel-efficient stoves. Many households are accepting this idea and, in fact, several women's groups are being formed to locally manufacture these stoves as an income generating project. Additionally, we are encouraging families to better ventilate the kitchens both to remove smoke and to reduce the danger of fire.
 
Diversity and The Trees We Plant:
 
We areoften asked if we solely plant trees indigenous to the areas of our projects. The answer in many cases is no. This is not to say that we don't want to see the return of the past diversity to these lands. In fact, that's just what we want to see but, for that to happen, a couple of additional steps are often necessary. It takes time to stop erosion, to rebuild soils, to return water back to the land. And through all that time the land suffers the pressures of people desperately trying to feed themselves.
 
We begin by planting tough, fast-growing trees that have the ability not just to survive but to begin the process of rebuilding the land. These trees have characteristics that not only make them non-invasive but which actually assist in bringing back a natural return of indigenous species. It's called "assisted natural regeneration."
 
There are hundreds of such species of which we rely on around 11 which have been proven to succeed in the appropriate conditions. We know there are others, and we keep looking, but in devastated villages all over the world, we have seen what happens when somebody plants the wrong kind of trees. We don't want to do that.
 
 
 
Trees for the Future | P.O. Box 7027 | Silver Spring, MD 20907 | 1.800.643.0001 or 1.301.565.0630 | LINK PARTNERS