Sustainable Agroforestry: A Living History
From ancient homegardens through colonial disruption — to the rediscovery of practices never truly lost.
Common agroforestry practices. Adapted from Emilie Austin, Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) and Frontiers in Sensors (2022).
What is Agroforestry?
Agroforestry is the intentional integration of trees and shrubs with crops, livestock, or both to create agricultural landscapes that are ecologically and economically resilient. More than a simple combination of agriculture and forestry, it reflects a holistic way of land use and management. As part of the landscape, agroforesters actively design and manage productive systems to sustain their livelihoods, generate income, and maintain long-term environmental well-being.
Today, agroforestry is promoted primarily through the lens of our most urgent challenges: climate change mitigation (carbon sequestration, microclimate buffering), food security (diversified yields, reduced risk), and rural development (income from timber, fruit, and non-timber products). The current environmental challenges are real and important framings, but environmental uncertainty is not unique to our time. Earlier agroforestry systems emerged under climatic variability, ecological disturbance, and livelihood risk. They persisted because they remained productive while adapting to uncertainty.
This prompts a deeper question: what can history teach us? The rich history of agroforestry spans millennia and cultures, rooted in Indigenous lives and practices, offering lessons that institutional frameworks have only recently begun to recover. In our urgency to engineer solutions to climate change, the first step is to adopt a continuous historical perspective, recognizing that agroforestry is not a recent innovation, but an adaptive form of land use and management accumulated over time. These sustained practices can guide us toward a more sustainable future.
Historical Phases of Global Agroforestry Systems
"Agroforestry" is a modern term applied to long-standing place-based practices. These phases trace not simply chronological time, but shifts in institutions, power, and land-use governance — from integrated indigenous landscapes, to colonial extraction and simplification, to the 1970s academic "rediscovery" of practices communities had sustained all along.
Phase Timeline
A non-Eurocentric framing: shifts in institutions, power, and land-use governance — not simply "ancient / classical / modern."
Phase I
Integrated Landscapes
Multi-strata Indigenous mosaics: diverse products, risk buffering, long-term ecological resilience.
Phase II
Extraction & Simplification
Colonial logic: complex mosaics reframed as "primitive"; trees and food separated by law and policy.
Phase III
Academic Reframing
1970s institutional "rediscovery" — formal science for practices communities had sustained all along.
Phase I · ~7000 BCE – 1600 CE
Integrated Landscapes
Multi-strata Indigenous mosaics: diverse products, risk buffering, long-term ecological resilience.
Phase II · ~1600 – 1950
Extraction & Simplification
Colonial logic: complex mosaics reframed as "primitive"; trees and food separated by law and policy.
Phase III · ~1970s – present
Academic Reframing
1970s institutional "rediscovery" — formal science for practices communities had sustained all along.
Key Scholars: Political Ecology, Historical Ecology, Landscape Ecology
These scholars help explain why complex agroforestry mosaics were erased, misread, or renamed — and why "rediscovery" narratives persist.
William Denevan
Historical Ecology · Americas
The "pristine myth": the Americas were not empty wilderness — pre-Columbian peoples managed vast, productive landscapes that colonial science erased from view.
Melissa Leach
Political Ecology · West Africa
With James Fairhead: colonial scientists systematically misread farmer-shaped forest mosaics in West Africa as degradation. In many cases, farmers had expanded forest cover.
Ivette Perfecto
Landscape Ecology · Latin America
With John Vandermeer: the "matrix quality" framework — complex agroforestry landscapes function as habitat and corridors, not just farms. Shade coffee as empirical heartland.
Victor Manuel Toledo
Ethnoecology · Mexico / UNAM
Indigenous knowledge systems as living databases of biocultural memory — traditional land use encodes millennia of ecological experimentation not yet fully legible to Western science.
Global Systems Through Time
Select a phase, then click a system to explore its overview, key characteristics, literature, and location on the map.
Select a System
Select a phase and a system on the left to view historical details.
Grassy Trees and Agroforestry
Many of the crops historically embedded in agroforestry systems are not woody trees, but large canopy-forming monocots — bamboo, palms, and bananas. These "grassy trees" combine rapid growth from grasses with tree-like structures and functions, making them especially effective components of diversified farming landscapes. At the same time, many grassy trees became colonial cash crops that drove deforestation and labor exploitation. The issue lies not in the plants themselves but in the systems that organized their production.
We often search for new solutions and call them sustainable, but the most reliable sustainability lies in practices that have already endured through history. Agroforestry is one of those systems — grounded in centuries of human knowledge about how to grow food while living with forests or natural vegetation. Grassy trees are the spices in the agroforestry recipe. They are always part of the dish, but often overlooked. Rediscovering them also helps us recognize the enduring design of traditional land-use systems.
Bamboo
Bamboo has long been integrated into Asian agroforestry landscapes, particularly in wetland and terrace systems. Its rhizome growth enables rapid regeneration, soil stabilization, and reliable biomass production.
In traditional farming landscapes bamboo functions as windbreak, construction material, food source, and boundary species while supporting mixed cropping systems.
Palm
Palms have historically structured multi-layer agroforestry systems. In West Africa, oil palms were maintained within forest–farm mosaics, while date palms anchored oasis agriculture across arid regions.
Their tall canopy moderates microclimate and allows understory crops to grow beneath them, making palms natural framework species in tropical agroforestry.
Banana
Bananas are giant herbaceous monocots that provide rapid canopy cover and continuous harvest. Historically they have been integrated into multi-strata homegardens across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Banana plants function as shade crops, pioneer species, and soil protectors in diversified systems alongside coffee, cacao, root crops, and fruit trees.
Photo credit: Aiyu Zheng. All photos taken at Phyllostachys edulis-dominated forests in Zhejiang, China.
Figure 1. Grassy Trees: Between Trees and Grasses
Grassy trees have a hybrid nature derived from their unique evolutionary lineage and adaptations to human-impacted forest environments. As large forest-adapted monocots with tree-like structures and canopy-forming capabilities lacking secondary growth, they exhibit distinct ecological functions that set them apart from conventional growth forms of trees and grasses.
Figure 2. Global Overlap of Agroforestry and Grassy Tree Resources
Regions where agroforestry systems are widespread strongly overlap with regions where bamboo and palms are abundant. This geographic pattern reflects a long history of farmers integrating these species into diversified landscapes. The global distribution of grassy trees (bamboos and palms) is concentrated in developing regions in South and Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. Country- or region-level areas are based on the Food and Agricultural Organization's (FAO's) Forest Resource Assessment (fra-data.fao.org).
Figure 3. Grassy Trees as Versatile Nature-Based Solutions
Grassy trees provide context-based socioeconomic benefits, functioning as versatile nature-based solutions across agroforestry landscapes worldwide.
Source for Figures 1–3: Zheng, Aiyu, and Mingzhen Lu. "Grassy trees: the neglected hybrids for sustainability." Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2025). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2025.10.002