Agroforestry at International Farming System Association Conference - Berlin, Germany

AGFORWARD researchers: Dirk Freese, Rosa Mosquera Losada and Piero Paris played a key role at the International Farming System Association (IFSA) conference (1-4 April 2014) held at Humboldt University in Berlin. This included a field trip and workshop focused on “Agroforestry Research and Practice in Europe”.

Dirk Freese hosted a field visit to a well-established alley-cropping experiment with poplar and robinia short rotation coppice. The aim is reduce soil erosion, improve biodiversity, and produce a bioenergy crop. This was followed by a visit to the Spree Wald UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. This popular tourist area has an “agroforestry landscape” and producers are successfully marketing organic food from the area.

The agroforestry workshop, chaired by Dirk Freese and Piero Paris, included three presentations about short rotation coppice alley cropping systems in Germany. Sarah Keutmann (Humboldt University, Berlin) explained that 1900 ha of bioenergy plantations had been established over the past five years in Brandenburg although market insecurity remained a concern. Tanya Medinski and Penka Tsonkova (Technical University of Brandenburg, Cottbus, Germany) described the effects of alley coppice on soil carbon and other environmental services. The system improved soil fertility, biodiversity, and water quality, helped to control erosion, and reduced groundwater recharge.

Johanna Björklund (Örebro University, Sweden) presented some recent participatory research on the introduction of permanent edible gardens and silvopastures on semi-natural grassland in Sweden. Rosa Mosquera Losada (University de Santiago de Compostela, Spain) showed that the soil organic matter in a poplar silvopastoral system in north-western Spain was sensitive to the addition of lime and sewage sludge. Piero Paris (CNR-IBAF, Porano, Italy) presented seven years of field research of an innovative agroforestry system combining high value timber trees with short rotation coppice (www.agrocop.com). Further details of the presentations can be found on the conference website (http://project2.zalf.de/IFSA_2014)