Scan editions of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary from late last century and you will search in vain for the word “agroforestry”. Only the most recent include it and some sources add that it is a type of management occurring on just 3% of Britain’s farmland.
You could easily presume that agroforestry is some new-fangled quixotic farm system dreamed up by ecologists that will struggle to catch on in the cut-throat world of modern food production. But you would be wrong.
Agroforestry is one of the oldest methods of food growing. London’s Epping Forest, for example, was once an area that yielded nine separate crops – including pigs, deer, firewood and nuts – through a complex mosaic of trees interspersed with open ground.
This multi-use production technique is known in Epping as “wood-pasture”, but it is agroforestry by another name and, what’s more, it has been developing there since the time of the Romans. Today, the forest is known as a wonderful place for thousands of ancient trees and an extraordinary range of insects, but many of these habitats were created with entirely practical farm methods.
Coffee bushes thrive in the shade provided by old-growth trees
The practice is, in many ways, a reversal of modern intensive agriculture. While the latter subordinates almost everything to produce the maximum yield of one to two dominant crops, agroforestry is assembled around the idea of multiple harvests from one area of ground, with trees at the heart of its process. In this way it mimics the ecological processes of a natural environment.
Now, major food companies are embracing agroforestry as a solution to a suite of pressing challenges. Take Nespresso; the coffee brand has funded the planting of 5.2m trees in and around coffee farms in nine countries across Central and South America, Africa and Asia, hoping to bring the growing environment more in line with the coffee plant’s evolutionary habitat; the original bean-bearing shrub is a native part of the understorey in Ethiopian forests. Coffee bushes thrive in shade but the surrounding trees also preserve the soil quality, store rainwater, enhance the wider growing environment and help yield a higher-quality coffee harvest. A further part of Nespresso’s goals is to plant not just any old trees but species native to each country in which it is working.
In Colombia, for instance, Nespresso has been working since 2014 with the global agroforestry projects developer Pur Projet and local stakeholders such as NFC, the national federation of coffee growers, and has funded the planting of 1.9m trees covering 53 species, the vast majority indigenous.
“Trees are specifically selected for the shade they provide to coffee as well as their carbon-fixing capabilities, such as the carbonero (Albizia carbonaria),” says Manu Jindal, Nespresso’s sustainability and inclusivity programme manager.
“Others are planted to protect them from extinction, such as the roble (Quercus humboldtii), which used to be a dominant tree of many mountain forests in the cordilleras [mountain ranges] of Colombia, while timber trees, such as the nogal cafetero (Cordia alliodora) or the cedro rosado (Cedrela odorata), and fruit trees such as chachafruto (Erythrina edulis) and citrus trees are planted to provide communities with a potential for additional income.”
Nespresso’s nuanced approach to its agroforestry is boosting biodiversity in each different coffee-growing country. In Colombia, “the first trees have grown quite tall, providing shade and protecting coffee from heavy rains, as well as attracting squirrels, birds, butterflies and dragonflies”, Jindal says.
As well as boosting biodiversity and providing extra cash crops for local farmers, agroforestry can sequester large amounts of carbon dioxide.
The real joy of agroforestry is that it is a win-win-win alternative to intensive farming. The coffee as a commercial product is improved. The wildlife where the coffee grows also benefits from the surrounding presence of native forest. The trees are also good for the 125 million people who depend on coffee as their principal crop, because they provide additional timber-based cash crops for these farmers.
Nespresso in its core practice is seeking to reduce the carbon emissions from both its transport and production methods across the value chain, as well as creating the carbon sinks that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Agroforestry can help here, too. Trees in its coffee plantations capture carbon, storing more and more as they mature: grown as part of the agroforestry strategy, they will sequester many thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases across a 30-year lifetime, according to Jindal.
In short, the ancient wisdom inherent in agroforestry is today helping modern industry to create a more sustainable future at a time of climate crisis and habitat loss.
Discover what’s next for Nespresso’s journey to carbon-neutral coffee here
