The practice of Evergreen Agriculture, essentially integrating trees into crop and livestock production systems to sustain a green cover on the land throughout the year, is explained by Dennis Garrity in an interview in Spore magazine.

Garrity is Chair of the Evergreen Agriculture Partnership, Senior Fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre and Drylands Ambassador with the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

In the interview, he outlines the benefits of growing properly managed trees among crops, such as providing a source of biofertilisers, reducing temperatures, conserving rainwater in the soil, providing fodder for livestock and producing wood for fuel and construction.

Farmers in Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Senegal and Zambia have already achieved success with Evergreen Agriculture practices. The challenge is to scale-up such innovations with support from international and national organizations, NGOs and governments.

In 2009 the Evergreen Agriculture Partnership was launched to build the capacity of smallholder farmers “to integrate trees in their cropping systems in order to increase productivity and incomes, while making farming systems more resilient in the context of climate change”.

Garrity believes building more climate-resilient farming systems is key to overcoming the challenge of achieving food security in the future. To this end, a recent pan-African meeting developed the African Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance with a target of enabling 25 million African farmers to practice climate-smart agriculture by 2025.

Read the full story: Evergreen Agriculture: rethinking modern farming

Spore is published by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA).