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Introduction

Agriculture is well known as a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, but emerging practices in land management have the potential to curtail these emissions and reverse much of the ecological and climate harm caused by overly intensive systems. One such practice, cultivation and conservation of trees in agricultural practices, or agroforestry, is an important climate-smart solution with many important co-benefits.

There are a range of practices, that can be used for agroforestry, some of which have been employed for thousands of years. Such methods include alley cropping (planting single rows of trees and growing crops in the alley ways in between), silvopasture (combining trees with pasture or livestock grazing areas), forest farming (the cultivation of shade-tolerant crops under the protection of a managed forest), and others.1 Integrating trees in agricultural systems can certainly be complex and might be difficult to implement in various situations, and there is no one model that works for every region, but the benefits are significant. Overall, incorporating trees introduces more species types in usually one- or few-species systems, and this in turn has been shown to increase crop productivity, improve nutrient cycling, create and change microclimates, and more.