Growing food with longitude and latitude: Food forests as multifunctional sustainability solutions
Food forests often perform well on social-cultural and environmental criteria, while displaying weaknesses in economic ones, especially regarding economic viability and sustainable busi-ness model innovation.
Stefanie Albrecht, Leuphana University
Arnim Wiek, Arizona State University
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development ISSN: 2152-0801 online
Excerpt:
While practiced in tribal communities for millennia, growing food on multiple levels with trees, shrubs, and ground cover is slowly taking root in industrialized countries, too. Over the last 20 years, the permaculture movement and other regenerative agricultural techniques have sparked the uptake of biodiverse food forests using 3 to 7 plant layers.
These small-scale agroforestry systems grow food, educate people on ecology and healthy foods, offer recreational space, and provide ecosystem services such as soil regeneration, heat mitigation, and carbon sequestration.
Food forests address several problems caused by industrial food systems, including malnutrition, economic disparities, biodiversity loss, climate change, and lack of food literacy. While there are individual case studies, especially on the environmental dimension, a systematic review of existing food forests that maps out their services, management practices, and sustainability performance is still missing.
In a new JAFSCD article, “Food forests: Their services and sustainability,” authors Stefanie Albrecht and Arnim Wiek give an overview of more than 200 food forests, mostly from Western Europe and the U.S., and present the results of 14 in-depth case studies focused on management and sustainability performance. Look for a follow-up article on implementing sustainable food forests to be published in the fall issue of JAFSCD.
