Description of the Business As Usual (BAU)
The “Business as Usual”for this land use will be an area of degraded forest, agriculture or settlement land. Food forests are seldom established in an area of healthy productive forest or intensive agriculture. Planting will not take place in a mature forest because of lack of sunlight, fierce root competition and ecological disruption. Large intensive agricultural parcels are seldom turned into food forests. The preference is for field corners, strips and areas which are difficult to cultivate with conventional machinery.
Description of the system change
Selective thinning is needed to transform existing degraded woodland into a food forest, allowing light to reach lower levels, followed by the introduction of useful, edible, and medicinal species. The system shifts from a wood- production focus to a multi-layer vertical system including: canopy trees (nuts/large fruits), understory trees (fruit), shrubs (berries), herbaceous perennials, groundcovers, rhizosphere (root crops), and vertical climbers (vines). This maximises the “yield per square meter” of food while maintaining the carbon stocks and microclimate of the original forest. The more usual starting point is degraded agricultural land, where you start with a blank slate and plant pioneer trees, fruit trees and understorey species at the same time. and allow them to develop a forest structure over a period of 5-15 years.