Agroforestry

We believe that trees offer many essential qualities to a healthy ecosystem.

Le verger-maraîcher - The Orchard Market Garden

Various French market gardens have been exploring associations between fruit and vegetable crops in permanent systems. The SMART project (2014-2017) helped create a network of producers The network is mostly made up of recently installed systems, so more long-term observation needs to be done.

The intention of these systems is to permanently integrate trees into the market garden, maintaining annual/vegetable crop production indefinitely. As in most contemporary production systems its end goal is still a relatively static state in terms of ecosystem succession, but one that offers more ecosystem functions in terms of biodiversity and complex interactions.
 

Ernst Gotsch/Agenda Gotsch - Syntropic agriculture

This is a dynamic system which relies on ecosystem succession has been developed by Ernst Gotsch in northeastern Brasil. He terms it "syntropic agriculture" to refer to the use of biological processes to drive greater organization, complex interactions, and emergent properties within a farm system. The perennial portion of this system is intensively managed through pruning and human interaction to speed up the biomass and fertility cycling which in turn increases the speed of ecosystem development.

The well-thought out origins of this practice are visible throughout native American forest management practices in both North and South America. Unfortunately, much less is known and much less has been developed for our temperate climate that can't take advantage of extremely long periods of sunlight and year-round growing.

Tree crops 

“Beside me was a tree, one lone tree. That tree was locally famous because it was the only tree anywhere in that vicinity; yet its presence proved that once there had been a forest over most of that land-now treeless and waste. The farmers of a past generation had cleared the forest. They had plowed the sloping land and dotted it with hamlets. Many workers had been busy with flocks and teams, going to and fro among the shocks of grain. Year by year the rain has washed away the loosened soil. The hamlets in my valley below the Great Wall are shriveled or gone. Only gullies remain -a wide and sickening expanse of gullies, more sickening to look upon than the ruins of fire. You can rebuild after a fire. Can anything be done about it? Yes, something can be done. Therefore, this book is written to persons of imagination who love trees and love their country, and to those who are interested in the problem of saving natural resources-an absolute necessity...”

Modular Ecological Design for Urban areas - Joseph Kovach

The goal of modular ecological design is to determine the optimal layout of an intensive fruit and vegetable polyculture system that mimics natural systems and can be used by the small periurban or urban grower.