MILAN – Let’s talk again about the Republic of Congo (a country we recently covered in this article), this time to address the issue of deforestation in connection with climate change: two topics that have been addressed by a study analysing how agroforestry systems that alternate coffee with other crops manage to have a lower environmental impact
We read the details from the article published in news.mongabay.com.
The research aimed to quantify the trade-offs among yield, carbon storage and biodiversity
“to see whether agroforestry could be a pragmatic solution for farmers instead of merely a solution proposed by scientists, conservationists and development cooperation actors,” co-author, Ieben Broeckhoven, a researcher at Belgian university KU Leuven, told Mongabay.
Agroforestry is a method of agroecology which combines annual or perennial crops like coffee in a system with beneficial trees and shrubs that provide shade, moisture and nutrients to the main crop while providing carbon storage plus food and habitat for bugs, bats, birds and more.
Analyzing 79 plots covering an area equal to about 192 tennis courts (50,000 square meters or 538,000 square feet), scientists compared coffee yield, woody species biodiversity and organic carbon both aboveground and in the soil, across four different coffee growing systems in the DRC.
The two highest coffee yields, of almost a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of green beans per plant, came from both monoculture and cultivated agroforestry.
In the monoculture plots, farmers cleared land to only grow coffee trees. While in the agroforestry farm, coffee was grown alongside other useful, native tree species.
Growing coffee naturally in the rainforest yielded just 2 grams (0.07 ounces) of beans per plant. But this system, not surprisingly, easily beat the rest ecologically, supporting 90% more biodiversity and storing three times as much carbon as agroforestry systems.
