Tailor-made agroforestry in Peru

The farms of Don Santos Acha and Don Emilio Lavajos, coffee producers from Moyobamba in San Martin, Peru are part of an innovative process of co-learning for the collaborative design and implementation of demonstration plots of agroforestry practices, undertaken by World Agroforestry (ICRAF). This is a process wherein the farmer is at the centre and where his or her particular context points to the most appropriate option for agroforestry.

‘We don't come with a model, we don't come with a recipe; we come with an approach of co-construction, reflection and learning,’ said Valentina Robiglio, senior land-use systems scientist and scientific coordinator for Latin America at ICRAF.

The co-learning process is one of reflection that brings together technical and scientific knowledge with the empirical knowledge of producers. In this way, the design of agroforestry practices is jointly constructed based on the evaluation of the context, that is, the productive, socio-economic, cultural and environmental dimensions; and a farmer’s aspirations, capacities and skills. In the co-design of agroforestry systems and practices, the farmer is the protagonist.

‘We have made a design according to our own reality, specifically in this area of Moyobamba,’ explained coffee farmer Lavajos. ‘The methodology has seemed very important to me because we have been used to doing other tasks, such as burning to prepare the soil. This is a new methodology that we want to develop and compare with what we have been doing before. In the future, we want to see the results of this work.’ 

This is within the framework of the Sustainable and Competitive Coffee Alliance project, funded by the SeCompetitivo programme, which ICRAF initiated in January 2020. It is a thorough co-learning process for the collaborative construction of agroforestry design, bringing together local producers and technicians, as well as national and international scientists and researchers.

Based on the ‘options by context approach’, ICRAF recognises that adoption and success factors for implementation of an agroforestry practice depend on the circumstances in which families operate and the socio-ecological, legal and institutional contexts. Within this framework, a five-phase process of co-learning has been proposed: diagnosis, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

The diagnosis helps to have more realistic designs within a producer's reach — designs that they themselves could implement and manage in the long term — by providing inputs to know in what state the soil of the plot is in, what the farmer’s objective is and what resources they have to achieve it according to the conditions of the plot.

‘If you are going to do agroforestry, you need to know under what conditions you are going to put the trees and crops, how they are going to relate to each other over time and how they are going to respond to soil conditions and other biophysical and climatic factors,’ explained María Baca, ICRAF’s coffee and tropical crops specialist, who designed and led the process. ‘This type of process is needed so that farmers know how to produce and manage their plant species at the plot level. A superficial soil analysis, which is what is usually done, is not enough.’