Introduction to Agroforestry - RUVIVAL Toolbox
Channel: RUVIVAL
Date: 2016-12-01

This video introduces the viewer to Agroforestry and is part of the Toolbox of the e-learning project RUVIVAL on the HOOU website: 
https://www.hoou.de/projects/agroforestry/pages/agroforestry-introduction-video

Simply put, agroforestry is a combination of agriculture and forestry. It represents the inclusion of trees or other woody perennial plants into agricultural systems, including crop and livestock production. Agroforestry, unlike conventional large scale agriculture, has the objective of emulating natural ecosystems. This helps realise a number of ecosystem services. Those include the protection of soil against erosion and water-logging, minimising evaporation of water from soil and plants by decreasing wind speed, water protection through deeper and more extensive root systems and increased biodiversity. Long term stability and productivity of agroforestry systems surpasses those of conventional monocultures or pasturelands as they tend to be more resilient. However, the establishment of trees on farmland comes with certain challenges.

RUVIVAL - Sustainable Rural Development and highly productive New Towns is concerned with restoring degraded areas and to create new not just inhabitable, but liveable spaces. It is an e-learning project of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) in cooperation with the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU).

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Agroforestry by Stefan Hügel and Ruth Schaldach https://youtu.be/BpEc9TSG6hw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.