Land use planning with rural farm households and communities: participatory agroforestry research

Agroforestry is a form of land use and management familiar to millions of farmers and forest-dwellers throughout the world. Like any other production system, it has a social basis for existence, and the success or failure of future research efforts to improve that system will depend largely on the ability of researchers to serve the social ends of rural producers and to reconcile those ends with the demands of the urban markets."" Formally, agroforestry (AF) can be taken to include any system of land use in which woody plants are deliberately combined , in space or over time, on the same land management unit as herbaceous crops and animals. (Lundgren,1982). This applies to classical shifting cultivation, as well as to such variations as the Chitemene system in N.E. Zambia. It al30 refers to a variety of land use systems ranging from very intensive farming to extensive pastoral systems. These include: bush fallow farming systems; management of fodder trees in private or communal grazing lands; planting of trees and shrubs as live fences on farm and plot boundaries for fuelwood, small timber and other useful products; intercropping of hedges with grain crops, tor leaf mulch/fertilizer (hedgerow intercropping) home gardens of all types where trees and annual crops are mixed; and many other systems where farmers and herders combine trees with field crops or animals

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