Carbon Farming & Agroforestry

What is Carbon Farming?

Carbon farming is a form of agriculture that is focused on capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil and biomass of the farming system. If done properly, carbon can be stored in the soil and trees for many decades or hundreds of years. Agroforestry is one of the best forms for storing carbon in agriculture. Agroforestry is a subsection of agroecology, within the practice of regenerative agriculture, that we use at Jubilee Climate Farm.

Agroforestry

Agroforestry is a series of multi-strata levels of farming that integrates multipurpose trees into a food system. It is known to increase resilience against extreme weather events, magnify carbon drawdown, restore degraded land, and facilitate production and biological diversity. Agroforestry mimics a natural forest system while integrating food, medicine, timber, soil fertility, and many other benefits. It is one of humanity's oldest forms of agriculture dating back over 10,000 years ago, and agroforestry is considered one of the most productive food systems ever invented by humans because of its multiple layers and overall harvest of diverse species. It was invented by Indigenous peoples and is now augmented with modern ecological principles. Agroforestry systems are known to capture more carbon than a planted forest because they are designed with multiple levels of pruning and mulching that secure carbon in the soil, roots, mulch, and above-ground perennial biomass.

Here are some of the trees we use in our agroforestry systems: Asian persimmon, apple, jujube, Asian pear, Chinese chestnut, American chestnut-hybrid, European chestnut, black locust, black and red alder, tulip poplar, river locust, honey locust, mulberry, elderberry, paw paw, willow, and dogwood.

Agroforestry is a key solution to climate change in 3 ways:

Sequestering carbon in biomass and soils
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions
Avoiding emissions through reduced fossil fuel and energy usage on farms.

At the Jubilee Climate Farm, we are experimenting with and implementing several agroforestry designs including alley cropping, syntropic farming, silvopasture, and edible riparian. Shortly, the Jubilee Climate Farm will also implement a multi-strata food forest, intensive silvopasture, and supportive agroforestry systems, such as fledges, hedgerows, and fodder banks.

Different Types of Agroforestry Systems

Alley Cropping Agroforestry

The alley cropping system is designed to grow trees in rows often on contour with vegetables, grains, legumes, or animals in between. Alley cropping entails planting rows of trees or shrubs to create alleys within which agricultural or horticultural crops are produced.

Alley cropping can diversify farm income, increase crop production, improve landscape aesthetics, enhance wildlife habitat, and conserve crops. Alley cropping reduces damage from insect pests by reducing crop visibility, diluting pest hosts due to plant diversity, interfering with pest movement, and creating a habitat more favorable to productive insects.

Inga Alley Cropping is the revolutionary alternative to slash and burn developed by the Inga Foundation in Honduras in partnership with Cambridge University. This system allows C4 crops (e.g., corn) that need more sunlight to grow with trees that are annually coppiced (pruned to the ground) and allowed to resprout each year. At the Jubilee Climate Farm, we are experimenting with alder and river locust trees for this system.

Syntropic Agroforestry

Syntropic farming is an intensive form of agroforestry that imitates market gardening, slash, and mulching agroforestry. It is designed to provide yields at all stages of succession and generate its own fertility through heavy biomass production and coppicing. The end goal of syntropic agroforestry is to create a productive forest that imitates the structure and function of the native forests and restores degraded land.

Silvopasture Agroforestry

Silvopasture is the integration of trees and grazing livestock on the same land which may include chickens, geese, sheep, goats, cows, and even bison. At Jubilee, we plan to integrate chickens and sheep into a silvopasture system. Silvopasture is intensively managed for forest products such as nuts, fruit, firewood, timber, and forage, which provides short and long-term income sources.

Intensive silvopasture is designed to be more intensively managed to optimize the production of forest products and forages to increase carbon sequestration by as much as four times.

Edible Riparian Agroforestry

Edible riparian systems are built along stream banks to protect stream health, create wildlife habitats, and reduce erosion and flooding. Usually, riparian systems have a minimum width of 35 feet along the stream bank. At the Jubilee Climate Farm, we are planting edible trees for food and medicine including paw paw, persimmon, elderberry, and plum in addition to native wildlife habitat tree species in the riparian zone.

Why Does This Matter?

When we think of the causes of the climate crisis, we usually think about burning fossil fuels to create electricity or to fuel our transportation. When we think of the solutions we usually think about solar panels. However, less conspicuous are the consequences of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Our food system is powered by fossil fuels and emits powerful greenhouse gases including nitrous oxide, methane, and carbon dioxide. If we add the emissions from livestock and all other food related emissions from farming to deforestation to food waste, what we eat turns out to be the number one cause of global warming.

The good news is that agriculture can be transformed from a major source of emissions to a major solution through regenerative carbon farming practices and land restoration that captures carbon. In addition, regenerative carbon farming increases soil health, water availability, yields, nutrition, food security, and ultimately helps land based cultures and communities thrive (Drawdown by Paul Hawken).