Regenerative Agriculture Takes Many Forms
Alley cropping, fallows, hedgerows, multistrata, parklands, shaded perennial-crop, silvoarable and silvopastoral systems, the list goes on. An enormous quantity of distinct agroforestry systems have remained in relevance for a long time, some being far older than others. Perkins (2019), Voort et al (2020), Burgess et al (2020), and Neto et al (2016) give us a glimpse of some such forms; clearly, this subject is complex.
Although specific and inter-comparable works of research are uncommon, consensus does exist regarding the benefit of trees: Toensmeier (2016), P. Pardon et al (2017), Lorenz and Rattan (2014), and R. Cardinael et al (2020) conclude that their addition can multiply cropland carbon capture by a factor of 2-10x. Not only this, large increases in soil nutrients reduce or eliminate the need for fertiliser.
Visualizing Agroforestry: Carbon Capture Adding Trees
According to Johnson et al (2015) and J. Wubs (2016), improvements in both Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) and crop yields can be kickstarted and significantly increased by adding and maintaining the correct microbiome to the soil. Although this can be done before, during, or after planting, there is no inter-method comparison research at the time of writing. Therefore, all three application times will remain in use until research arises regarding best practices for our agroforestry model.
The Scave model was designed taking inspiration from several different works of research. The framework comes from combining the general ideas from Neto et al (2016), placement and use of tree varieties from Frascarelli (2017) and Boulestreau and van Eck (2016), and finally model strips from Perkins (2019). The yield data and method come from Burgess et al (2020), and the financial model of S. Jourquin (2012) suggested planting grain annuals in between tree strips.
Our grain of choice is, when possible, a high yield “cross composite population” (CCP) wheat. This was chosen due to the need for high yields and population wheat’s adaptability as studied in Weedon and Finckh (2019). Based on this study, alongside personal advice from the author, we constructed our wheat/peas intercrop model, one of our first planting models. Later, U. Prins (2015) and J.J. Neuvel (1991) influenced us to add beans three years after the first sow. We consistently intercrop with yearly rotation in the crop strips.
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