Whats your
experience?
Here is my take on it!
I really like these lines from my latest EDU article from the tree chapter on Alley Cropping and Silvopasture.
Alley cropping is essentially bringing edge to a landscape to break the monotony of monoculture. By developing rows of
trees in your farm landscapes and growing things in between in the alleys, a farm becomes more resilient as trees and their cascade of benefits are realized.
https://treeyopermacultureedu.wordpress.com/chapter-6-trees/alley-cropping-and-silvopasture/
Excerpt:
Alley Cropping
While known widely in the agroforestry realm, this technique of inserting lines of trees within croplands is being explored more and more as farm scale
Permaculture takes off. It moves from an Agroforestry realm to a
Permaculture landscape when the ethics and principles frame its
permaculture application. No matter the scale, alley cropping can be a great way to stack in space and time thus creating growing conditions for all sorts of crops in the lines of trees and in between in the alleys. Alley cropping is essentially bringing edge to a landscape to break the monotony of monoculture. By developing rows of trees in your farm landscapes and growing things in between in the alleys, a farm becomes more resilient as trees and their cascade of benefits are realized. Often the aim is long term for the tree crops, but in between the alleys remain productive space for all sorts of crops including grain production, animal rotations, small fruiting shrubs or bushes, or even row crops. It’s a system that could be furthered explored in many already existing commercial systems like cork production in Iberia and other suitable climate analogs in the world. Much
energy is put into planting the trees in rows already along with maintaining the alley and in row itself, most often with chemical and mechanical inputs, but could be managed holistically with the use of biological resources.
Creating the Alleys
The decisions around alley cropping design are due to many factors and presses the need to use a design process. Soil types, inclination, orientation, and access to
water are all key factors and intertwine with the grander scale of social and economic realms. The idea with the alley cropping is to bring diversity to the farm in terms of yields and economic resilience; all which hinge upon creative human interaction with nature. With that, alleys can be set up on the farm effectively in combination with
earthworks. Currently, for example, the cork industry in Portugal uses an earthworks technique known as bancadas, or small earthen banks that follow contour for the most part. These slightly raised beds are how new cork plantations are laid out. However at some point they flow off contour due to the lack of uniformity within a hillsides’ contours. This is the main problem with swales that are on contour as they don’t facilitate staying on-contour and parallel spacing that broad acre cropping requires. However, this is the power of the keyline design when applicable. With the keyline technique of layout, parallel lines are created in the landscape falling from valley to ridge to evenly distribute water throughout the landscape. This exemplary technique of the principle of least change for the greatest effect is once more gaining traction and has allowed a few quite famous farms to sprout up based on this alley cropping idea. One main one that is normally sited is
Mark Shepard and his Restoration Agriculture system that emulates the
native human cultivated ecosystem, the oak savannah. This is of course the exact ecosystem of the montado in Portugal, the widely spaced Cork and Holm Oak plantations of the past with animal integration. However now the animals have largely been removed which does give farmers an unique opportunity to interplant effectively or bring animals back into the landscape. Furthermore on flat ground one can choose to orientate the rows of trees differently according to aspect. Most often this is done with a east/ west orientation to allow sun to penetrate into the alleys most effectively.
An important part of the alley creation is to remember that it is not an orchard but rather a place where the tree rows are spaced even further to allow abundant sunlight to enter the space between the rows of trees (alleys) for quite some time. This allows for cropping to continue for an extended period until the long term yield is realized and cash flow remains giving a buffer to farm conversion. The alley of trees can be just one single row but also can be several rows of trees. This makes sense in a soil microbiology perspective as keeping a good fungal environment for your trees is important. The cropping alleys will be more bacterial driven so creating three lines of offset trees maybe the best way to go in the end. These trees and shrubs on the outer zone could be more short term harvests of either food, timber, or simply biomass. An example could be for a nut or timber crop of walnuts, either English or Black. To get them to grow straighter and more quickly up with less side branching for timber production, fast growing
black locust could be grown on the outside rows and in between the trees. This nitrogen fixer can be harvested for poles and
firewood, in particular, but then once coppiced they become a prolific biomass creator of rough mulch as they are quite multifunctional. For nut production a denser shrub like Eleagnus could go on the outside to
shelter the young nut trees but not impede the
canopy formation. The bigger the canopy the more nuts are produced while reducing side branching in timber production drives up the value in the long term as well.
Selecting the Trees
The trees one will wish to incorporate again depends on your context and climate. What is the yield I want to harvest at the end? It’s very popular in alley cropping for the yield to be for nuts. Most of these trees take quite a while before producing and grow to be quite some size when mature. Because of our current state of agriculture, a farmer can’t just immediately switch from being a corn farmer to a walnut, pecan, or almond farmer overnight more often than not. Again these trees will take time before they produce but a farmer can put in such a crop while also growing corn in between for example. Over the years as the trees grow, the alley edges along the tree rows will become less productive because of overtaking but its also good because ploughing too close to the
root base could be quite damaging as well. Again its good to bring diversity further into the landscape besides just your main crop tree. Having support species that yield early helps to turn this agroforestry technique into a reflection and manifestation of the
permaculture principles. And it doesnt have to be just trees in between, herbs could be grown inline for varying end products including essential oils or
honey production. Furthermore, the trees themselves can be over or underplanted depending on your intercropping desires. If a tree has a 60 foot (18 m) spacing recommendation you could plant it at 35 ft (10.5 m) and after so many years cut every other one down to take advantage of early yields and the energy that is being put into maintaining the line already. A note to that is that in the tropics things are planted much more dense. While consulting in Malaysia and Sinagaopore (2009) we were recommending taking every third
garden bed out since production had dropped from soil degradation in these row cropping markets contexts. This every third planted bed was to be planted instead with fast growing
nitrogen fixing trees such as gliricidia that does well with coppicing and also bunching grasses like lemongrass or vetiver. These strips bring diversity and much needed mulch material and despite a 1/3 space reduction would have increased production on the farms we consulted for. This is again why I stress these are climate and context dependent. In this above case, it was the humid lowland tropics and market gardening. Totally different details than the cork farmer of Portugal but that is why we examine patterns to details in Permaculture.
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