Long-term experiments into agroforestry, combining research, education, and prototyping—learning to work with diversity and to work within ecological systems by designing relations
Context
Industrial agriculture “impoverishes both the soil and the worker”. Large-scale factory farming often requires extensive deforestation, eliminates biodiversity, pollutes the ground with chemical fertilisers and pesticides, leads to poor labour conditions, and generates high levels of greenhouse gases. As a consequence of these numerous side-effects, such farming is not even very efficient. For decades, many agriculturalists and ecologists have been experimenting with forms of agroforestry alongside market garden and allotment schemes. Agroforestry is the combination of agriculture and forestry: it brings different plant species together for mutual benefit, and offers an ecological and ethical alternative to industrialised methods of growing food, allocating land, and organising labour.
Practice
Martin Crawford—a horticulturalist and researcher—developed his first Forest Garden over thirty years ago, on a site behind Schumacher College near Totnes in Devon, England. It is now part of The Agroforestry Research Trust. The Forest Garden’s seemingly overgrown nature provides bountiful food crops by using a horticultural technique known as companion planting, whereby species are planted near each other that have mutually beneficial impacts such as natural pest resilience, fertilisation, or nitrogen fixing. Companion planting encourages plants to follow natural cycles of growth and decay, and fertilises the earth with natural compost rather than cutting and removing so-called waste material. Although the garden needs to be harvested by hand (its geometry isn’t suited to large-scale machinery), Crawford claims it produces more food per hectare than the equivalent factory farm and requires less labour, because agroforestry works with, rather than against, the land, stewarding nature’s emergent capabilities within a regenerative cycle.
More recently, Crawford has developed more technologically-enhanced methods, combining repurposed architectural elements in a pragmatic way. Banana trees grow in a second forest he has planted, thanks to a combination of ground heat storage systems which moderate the temperature inside to prevent frost. In a combination of architectural and planted experiments, a stack of repurposed 1000-litre bulk liquid containers lines the southern wall of a large greenhouse, providing thermal mass (what indoor garden designer Jerome Osentowski calls “climate batteries”) whilst using very minimal energy.
Forest Gardening is a model of regenerative, low-intervention, non-extractive spatial practice that has emerged from decades of experimentation through observational, hands-on learning. It is a way of working with diversity, rather than isolated elements and narrow efficiencies, constituting both a science and a political and ethical approach to ecology.