Agroforestry is the tending of trees for human needs, blurring the line between food sovereignty and ecological restoration. It’s an ancient practice of farming like the forest, inviting cultivation under canopies and planting trees in fields. It’s a polyculture practice that hybridizes gardening and gathering, farming and forestry into mosaic habitats to grow useful products, cycle nutrients and water, build organic matter, buffer from pests and intense weather, and serve as shelter for biodiverse ecosystems. Agroforestry is the intentional integration of field and forest to feed ourselves. Basically, agroforestry means farming with trees.

To be meaningful and useful, agroforestry should be seen as a branch of agroecology: the science of ecology applied to agriculture, the practice of traditional stewardship and sustainable use, and the movement for radical agrarian reform, social justice, and a world without hunger. Agroecology promotes ways of growing food that nurture high levels of biodiversity, land and water protection, diversified production, resilient and robust systems, respect for traditional ecological knowledge, and cultural values and collective organization.

The USDA defines agroforestry through five practices: forest farming, riparian buffers, windbreaks, silvopasture, and alley-cropping (see the definitions provided by our friends at Interlace Commons). Some add forest gardening as a sixth. While helpful for grant applications and broad categories, these narrow lists don’t represent the profound diversity and creativity of how agriculture, horticulture, and forestry can harmonize.

When we think of agroforestry, we think of both modern definitions and perennial practices growing from traditional ecological knowledge and peasant agroecology. We think of English Hazelnut coppices, the biochar soils of terra preta in swidden-and-fallow rotations of Amazonian rainforests, the jaden lakou of Haiti, hillside stacks of shiitake log terraces on misty Japanese islands, silvopasture terraces hydrating Arabian deserts, pollarding tree hay as goat and sheep fodder and mixed herds browsing Palestinian olive orchards, stealthy Black herbalists hunting and gathering in the liberating understory of the Underground Railroad, the milpa cycle of Maya Guatemala and the Willow-woven chinampas of Mexico, Chestnut masts from Appalachia to Asia to Iberia to Corsica, Indigenous-tended Oaks dumping acorns on fire-cleared California savannahs, sap tapped from Walnut and Maple and Sycamore over floodplain Pawpaw thickets with moon-timed harvests.

The examples are endless, as diverse as the people that practice them and the landscapes and watersheds that house them. When we think of agroforestry, we think of the cultural care of the trees and their care for us in return.