Agroforestry as a Potential Remedy for Global Climate Change

Trees fertilize crops and mitigate climate change. Image shows trees such as Faidherbia albida and Adansonia digitata on Farmlands in the village of Toukar, Senegal, West Africa.

I’m a farmer-scholar from a small village in rural Senegal, West Africa. I’ve lived, and I’ve researched, the rapid change in our global climate and what it means for the most vulnerable. I can see clearly how people have made this mess. And as I think about the lessons from my ancestors, and study those in global context, I can see how we can get ourselves out of this predicament and save our planet. But we need to wake up, take the crisis seriously, and act urgently to revive techniques from indigenous knowledge, blending them with new ideas. There isn’t much time, so let me try to be brief about what I see. 

First, it’s time to cut through the nonsense, wake up, smell the coffee, and acknowledge exactly where we are right and what’s going on. 

We need to grow food to survive but we are killing the planet in the process. Modern, industrialized agriculture is a major contributor to climate change.  We rip out forests and brushlands to open space for massive, mechanized farming and ranching dependent on energy-intensive irrigation and tons of fossil fuel-derived fertilizers. All of this pumps carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. 

My home country, Senegal, illustrates this story, tragically. Senegal and many West African countries face multiple social and ecological problems related to environmental degradation.  Much of the trouble stems from clearing land for export cash crops, a change that began in colonial times. Decades of loss of vegetative cover has increased temperatures and diminished soil fertility and freshwater tables. Formerly arable farmland is now unprotected from severe winds from the Sahara to the north, over time, eroding much topsoil. Food security is now in jeopardy, especially in light of increased population density. 

Yep, people need to keep farming to survive. They have no choice but to spray chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; spread ever-growing amounts of chemical fertilizers; and overgraze remaining livestock on diminishing pastureland. This land is drugged, heavily drugged, to produce ever more feeble yields of cereals, vegetables and cash crops. The heavy use of pesticides in crops such as peanut, cotton, vegetables, and rice to increase food production has caused respiratory diseases such as acute asthma. These crops are often sprayed twice a week and may come to the market with high degree of contamination. People are moved to despair, migrate to overcrowded cities, take to rickety boats to cross oceans for jobs and hope.  The downward spiral is tragic. And actually unnecessary, if we act soon. 

My grandfather used to tell us stories about how the introduction of peanut cash-crop and pesticides in our area led farmers to change traditional growing systems. He told us that plowing had reduced yields a lot because it was unsuitable for the soil and unknown to the spirits. People lost many native plants used as medicine, and they grew too many peanuts, reducing tremendously the production of staple cereals (millet and sorghum).  

Confirming my grandfather’s point of view, Western scholars note that 90% of the crops now grown in Africa are imported and, unlike native crops, require huge amounts of fertilizers and pesticides to keep them alive in their alien environment. “In 1960s and 1970s, massive amounts of fertilizers were shipped to Africa from overseas, all chemical based derived from petroleum; they didn’t improve the soil, but keep the cash-crop growing (Rodale, 1991).”

I myself sprayed insecticides such as parathion and malathion on my crops to get rid of bugs and insects that were destroying them. I had no idea of the danger involved until I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring while an undergrad at Berkeley, 10,000 miles from my home. This scared me and made me think of my compatriots back in West Africa who still use these pesticides all the time. Lax regulations limited protective equipment and poor labeling put them at risk, not to mention that many pesticides banned in the US, such as DDT, are still being used in developing countries. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. As my grandfather hinted, people like my own, the Serer of west-central Senegal, have long known other ways, alternatives that can help us all right now. There is a way for humanity to avoid this tragedy, to eat and save the planet at the same time.

Indigenous agricultural practices, which have supported people for centuries, have been neglected or abandoned to make room for ill-advised, destructive modern high-input agriculture. 

Agroforestry is at the heart of the alternative. In my part of the world, agroforestry is embedded in indigenous knowledge of crops, soils, and animals, as well as a long view of time and the spiritual dimension of farming. Agroforestry is the intentional use of trees and livestock in croplands. It has long contributed to food security and climate change resilience. This sustainable land-use practice integrates trees, shrubs, crops, and livestock to increase yields of tree crops, ground crops, and animal production in the same unit of land. Growing trees on farms offers many environmental and social benefits such as moderate soil and air temperatures, micro-climate, biodiversity, and income from the sale of fruit, nuts, and other tree products. The technique helps mitigate climate change through carbon storage (sequestration). Rattan Lal, a distinguished professor of soil science at Ohio State University, estimates that agroforestry lands store as many as 135 billion tons of carbon/year (Ohlson, 2014). 

Agroforestry includes a wide range of variants, specific to local ecosystems and livelihoods. Alley-cropping is an especially common form, involving the cultivation of crops in alleys of trees that fix nitrogen into the soil, an essential nutrient for plant growth. According to Paul Harrison, “alley cropping is a superior successor to fallowing and shifting cultivation in a time of booming populations. The leguminous trees not only fertilize the soil, but also have various other uses for the tropical farmer such as fuelwood, fodder and mulch (Harrison, P.1986, p.192).” In other places, agroforestry combines trees for timber and livestock production, or maintains riparian buffers, vegetated areas near rivers, to protect water resources from pollutants (pesticides and fertilizers) from nearby industrial farms. Some climates permit forest farming, or the cultivation of shade-tolerant crops in forest areas to reduce forest pressure. In more open landscapes, we find windbreaks, or the planting of rows of trees along croplands to control erosion and provide habitats for small animals like birds. Agroforestry systems create better soil quality, reduce soil erosion, and increase soil fertility through nitrogen-fixing trees, and thus help improve crop yield, lead to food security, and improve better nutrition and health. This is a triple win-win strategy for resource-poor farmers (carbon sink and hunger and drought alleviation) (Nair, 1982, cited by Hyde, 1995).

Agroforestry can seem like a new solution. But for centuries, my people, the Serer of Senegal, adapted to social and environmental changes using indigenous agroecosystems based on tree-crop-livestock interactions and rotating fallow systems to enhance soil fertility and maintain and raise agricultural productivity (Faye, et al., 2020; Faye, 2020). In these sandy soils just south of the Sahara, my ancestors had to develop these sophisticated techniques to survive. Rain is scarce and limited to a few summer months. Soils are thin. But we prize nitrogen-fixing trees like the Acacia albida. We respect spiritually-grounded land management systems that insist on a fallow year and ensure a place for people to graze their livestock (cleverly using animal manure as natural fertilizer). We have long carefully rotated cereal, vegetable, and other crops to maximize both yields and long-term soil fertility. And our traditional religion justified all of this in terms of the crucial relationship among the living, the ancestral spirits that ensure the well-being of the land, and the whole environment, and the legacy we leave to future generations.  

The traditional environmental knowledge behind our indigenous agroecological system sustained fragile farmlands and ensured creative ways to reduce climate vulnerabilities. Over many millennia, my people used these survival strategies, embedded in traditional ecological knowledge, to resist adversity (i.e., drought and diseases). Their shared values, meanings, cultural identity, and spirituality have played significant roles in keeping the community united and have been the basis for sustainable food systems. Indigenous peoples’ expertise can indeed certainly teach the “modern world” valuable techniques in untangling the knot of denuded soils, over-reliance on industrial inputs, collapsing yields, food insecurity, and the social disintegration resulting from uncontrolled rural exodus. 

The lessons of Serer agroforestry don’t demand a return to pre-modern ways of farming. Not at all. We rotate crops, fallow fields, plant and sustain trees, and respect the spiritual aspects of the nature around us even as we grow cash crops for export, use new tools, and check market prices and best sales options on our smart phones. We can do all this with a careful, judicious inclusion of some industrial inputs. The key is that we take control of our own farming practices and trust our heritage and ancestral wisdom. I know my grandfather understood the big picture when he worried that the ancestral spirits would be upset by turning too fast, and too fully, to wholly modern techniques. If he were alive today, on hearing about the planet warming uncontrollably, he’d shake his head slowly and remind us we upset the spirits, we made this happen, we’re reaping what we sowed. 

But we don’t have to accept this fate. It’s incumbent upon this generation to reverse the course of events in order to survive these environmental changes. We can be intentional about this, and that involves looking to the past, and to peoples who are usually dismissed as “pre-modern,” for solutions that can help us all farm, eat, and live much more sustainably.   

But we don’t have much time. Trees are being lost at an unprecedented rate because of climate change. If this continues, we will lose an important tool to slow global climate change. Not only do we need to plant trees in both rural and urban settings, but we also need to protect habitats for plant and animal diversity. We absolutely need an agriculture that is environmentally sound, socially responsible, and economically feasible to fit the needs of present and future generations.

References

Altieri, Miguel. A. (1995). Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture-2nd edition. Colorado, USA: Westview Press, Inc.

Faye, Jean B., Anya, M. Hopple, and Scott, D. Bridgham. (2020). Indigenous farming practices increase millet yields in Senegal, West Africa, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, pages 1-16, DOI: 10.1080/21683565.2020.1815927.

Faye, Jean B. (2020). Indigenous farming transitions, sociocultural hybridity and sustainability in rural Senegal, NJAS – Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences 92, pages 1-8, DOI: 10.1016/j.njas.2020.100338.

Harrison, Paul. (1986). The Greening of Africa: Breaking through in the battle for land and food.  IIED. London, England: Penguins Press. 

Hyde, A. A. Serah. (1995). Women’s Role in Agroforestry: The Case of Senegal. MS Thesis in Agricultural Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Ohlson, K. (2014). The Soil Will Save Us. Rodale 

Rodale, Robert. (1991). Save Three Lives. PA: Sierra Club Books Publications.

Jean Faye’s research centers on the West African Sahel region. He studies ingenious land use and farming practices that improve climate change resilience and food security among some of the poorest people on the planet. These practices include agroforestry, soil fertility and nutrient management, ecological management of plant diseases, and biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes. He is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Centre College.

(c) 2021 Jean Faye