Growing coffee in a forest with other trees and plants—a system known as agroforestry—can be as productive as growing it in a monoculture field, but it’s much less harmful, according to research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Cultivated agroforestry systems in the DRC support 19 times higher biodiversity and store twice as much carbon as monoculture systems, according to the upcoming study. 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,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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