"The food produced in the U.S. is not produced by soil, but by oil. Herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers - oil, oil, oil. If such chemical agriculture continues, this earth will be destroyed a lot sooner than you expect."

- Masanobu Fukuoka

Agroforestry combines agriculture and forestry technologies to create more integrated, diverse, productive, profitable, healthy and sustainable land-use systems. Agroforestry practices include: alley cropping, forest farming, riparian forest buffers, silvopasture, windbreaks, and other special applications.

Alley cropping is beneficial by improved economic stability, increasing cash flow, improving plant/animal diversity, sustainable agricultural systems and improved aesthetics. This ia a type of agroforestry practice intended to place trees within agricultural cropland systems. The purpose is to enhance or add income diversity (both long and short range), reduce wind and water erosion, improve crop production, improve utilization of nutrients, improve wildlife habitat or aesthetics, and/or convert cropland to forest. The practice is especially attractive to landowners wishing to add economic stability to their farming system while protecting soil from erosion, water from contamination, and improving wildlife habitat. - Source: USDA National Agroforestry Center, 2003

For more information concerning agroforestry, visit: The USDA National Agroforestry Center at: http://www.unl.edu/nac