Agroforestry is the practice of growing agricultural crops and trees together. The formal science asks whether specific plant combinations accelerate growth or act as a brake. Research over the past 20 years has confirmed that agroforestry can be more biologically productive, more profitable, and more sustainable than forestry or agricultural monocultures. Each one is successively less common, with forest gardening, the type practised by PFAF, being very rare indeed. The forest garden system is designed to be self sustaining, in that it requires no external fertilisers to keep plants happy and producing good quantities of food.
Nutrients come to the soil only through natural processes.
In a neat botanical trick, two types of plants make food available for all the other plants. When combined with recycled woodland waste such as leaf fall, herbaceous die-back, rotting creatures and droppings, the soil becomes a nutrient superstore. Ecologically, modelling agriculture on woodland makes a lot of sense. Temperate woodland is a self- regulating, perpetual, abundant and stable ecosystem which supports a wide variety of flora and fauna. The sheltered environment inside the woodland reduces temperature fluctuations, wind and frost, so plants grow more easily.