Читать книгу North American Agroforestry - Группа авторов - Страница 66

Within the scientific community, agroforestry concepts have much in common with sustainable agriculture, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and agroforestry in the rest of the world. Common goals are to conserve the natural resources upon which agriculture depends, minimize the environmental impacts of agriculture, maintain productivity and profitability, and provide for people’s economic and social needs (Fig. 2–1). At the science level, it is more important to focus on agroforestry concepts and their underlying process level functions, and less important to debate nomenclature.

Aside from differences in nomenclature, the concepts of agroforestry over most of North America are not very different from those in the rest of the world. Agroforestry has emerged as a science‐based practice and is increasingly finding its place in our agencies and educational institutions (Nair, 2007; USDA, 2017; Munsell and Chamberlain, 2019). However, the success of agroforestry science will ultimately be determined by the accomplishment of interdisciplinary research, development, and applications between forestry and natural resources and agriculture and livestock communities working in close cooperation with specialists in rural sociology, community development, applied economics, and marketing. The final measure of success will be agroforestry practices adapted to local conditions and seamlessly integrated into mainstream agriculture production systems in all regions of temperate North America.