What is a Food Forest ?
So what exactly is a Food Forest?
You are right to ask. The term food forest has become more popular lately, but I rarely see it clearly defined. "Food forest" is simply a more common term for agroforestry, the practice of growing food in a system that mimics a natural forest.
Picture a "typical" farm or garden. In your mind’s eye, you probably see a field of wheat or corn, or tidy rows of vegetables. The "typical" farm or garden has just one or a few types of plants growing on one level. A food forest produces many different useful plants on multiple levels.
A garden, a forest, and a farm are only arbitrary labels. Not all people in all places at all times perceived a garden as a backyard veggie plot, a farm as orderly rows of crops, and a forest as a mysterious wild place for hiking and horror movies. In fact, we modern Western folks are unique among cultures in our narrow categories for garden, farm, and forest, much to the detriment of ourselves and the planet.
Every garden and every farm can be a food forest.
First, let’s take a closer look at the key elements of a food forest, or agroforestry system.
Agroforestry systems are diverse.
Diversity is nature’s path to resilience. The more diverse an ecosystem is, the more rich in varieties of life, the more life can exist in service to feeding, supporting, and reproducing. Life forms in a broadly diverse ecosystem are affected by changes in weather, viruses and disease, and seasonal occurrences like fire or flood. Shifts happen when more successful life forms adapt. Changes occur over centuries and millennia. But it is extremely difficult to annihilate every living thing in a diverse ecosystem.
To destroy an ecosystem, first you would have to chip away at the diversity, creating a sameness that could be wiped out by a single disturbance.
Create sameness? But look at all the species becoming extinct? Isn’t that what we are doing?
Yes, exactly. But the inverse is also true. By restoring ecosystems where diversity can thrive, we can also be instrumental in cultivating resilience. That’s what agroforestry accomplishes.
Agroforestry is self-sustaining
Agroforestry is a long-term cost effective way to produce a variety of food and other useful things (animal fodder, clothing fiber, building materials) because forests can regenerate over long periods of time without external inputs like commercial mulch or fertilizer. Instead of trucking in big bags of soil amendments or spraying noxious chemicals — both very expensive — a well-designed agroforestry system will produce its own nutrients and transport systems for them naturally. How?
Well, these are the complex biochemical processes that soil scientists get really excited about. I’ve read several tomes on the subject and consider myself enlightened enough to paint you a picture in broad strokes.
Picture a woodland or forest in your mind’s eye. See the tree branches outlined against the sky, the trunks descending into big roots that plunge the soil. Let’s really look at what’s going on here. Assisted by hundreds of meters of soil fungi, tree roots mine the soil for minerals and channel them through their branches and leaves. Then, branches and leaves fall, which are in turn digested by soil microbes on the forest floor. Bacteria mainly take care of chewy leaf tissue while fungi work on woody stems and trunks. Groundcover plants and shrubs die back and send up new growth every year, adding to the layer of nutrient-rich organic matter for microbes to digest and make accessible for new plant roots to extract. Swarms of insects, birds, and mammals do their part to strengthen and maintain the cycle.
If you can remember these two things, you've got it:
No one fertilizes a forest.
In a healthy cycle, nothing organic “rots down” or “decomposes.” In an ecosystem, organic matter is DIGESTED.
Agroforestry Mimics a Natural Succession
Mature forests don't spring up all at once. They evolve by going through several successive waves of development, each more diverse and multilayered than the one before. The first plants to take hold are called pioneers, appropriately enough. Their job is to stake out and colonize bare patches of soil, slopes, and otherwise less hospitable zones to get the cycle of life going. Once the pioneers get established, it's much easier for successive waves of growth (long-lived trees, vines, and groundcovers) to get their foothold. Pioneers usually live anywhere from one to ten years. By the time the larger ones die and topple over they have shaded out the competition below and improved the soil with leaf fall. When they go down, now there’s a clearing with improved soil. Seeds dropped by birds or other animals can more readily germinate in these "prepped" areas. A few of those seedlings will survive and become the granddaddies of the forest.
In nature, tough weedy plants are usually the first ones to colonize new areas (like those bare patches of soil in your garden, ahem). But when we design a food forest, we can select from among cultivated plants for their pioneer characteristics. For example, while regenerating our deforested land in sub-tropical Ecuador, we started with large blocks of bananas and cassava (yuca/manioc). Bananas grow very quickly, reaching maturity in about a year. Their big leaves weaken and shade out the invasive pasture grass. Chopped and dropped onto the soil, the foliage also makes excellent biomass or food for the soil biome. Meanwhile, the enormous tubers of the cassava plant plumb the depths of even the tightest soils, opening up passages for beneficial insect life, bacteria, fungi, and of course, water.
No matter where you are in the world, there are pioneer plants suitable for your climate and location. Finding out what they are and using them is absolutely a key to avoiding disaster and creating a healthy system.
Agroforestry works on multiple layers.
This principle goes back to diversity, but is more specifically about creating a multi-tiered system that works on several layers, both above and below the soil. Books and permaculture designers quibble about how many layers a food forest can have, but here's the basics (in descending order from tall to small):
Canopy: The tallest level of plants, the canopy serves to filter hard rains and harsh sun and protect the layers below. The canopy also hosts important predator and apex animals from large birds to tree-dwelling mammals, snakes, and lizards. In a rainforest, the canopy can include large trees like jackfruit and brazil nuts. In a temperate orchard, the canopy could be chestnut or oak trees. In a home-scale food forest, the canopy might even be a small Asian pear tree and a cluster of Siberian sunflowers. It’s all about scale.
Mid-level trees: This layer functions below the canopy and often includes the target species of the system: the plants we are focused on cultivating for a particular value. In a sub-tropical system, mid-level trees often include cacao and citrus trees. In a temperate zone, apple, pear, apricot, fig, and persimmon are good mid-level options. In your garden, taller plants like okra or corn can function as mid-level “trees.”
Dwarf trees and shrubs: The shortest of the tree tiers, the dwarf and shrub layer helps to provide dense shade, protection, and shelter for many smaller forms of wildlife. The leaf fall creates blankets of mulch that microbes can transform into humus. Whether this layer consists of coffee bushes in the tropics or blueberries in Canada, dwarf trees and shrubs also tend to produce edible fruit earlier than the taller layers, providing food for people and wildlife alike.
Vines: Strange plants that snake up any available support, the vine layer of a food forest is one benchmark of maturity. Why? Because you cannot have vines unless there are trees to support them. In rainforest agroforestry, vining plants produce edibles from garlic-flavored leaves to nuts, pumpkins, and melons. In home scale food forests, pole beans, cucumbers, and squash are great choices for the vine layer and you can use trellises, drainpipes, or a fence as a support.
Groundcover: This often overlooked layer serves multiple important functions. Ground-hugging plants filtrate massive amounts of water and hold it like a sponge. They help to keep soil from drying out and provide shelter for important insects like ladybugs and beetles. Camote, or tropical sweet potato, makes an excellent edible ground cover in warm zones, while fodder crops like clover and alfalfa do the job in temperate climates. Even in a small home garden, creeping herbs like thyme, oregano, and nasturtium make excellent edible ground cover choices.
Roots. Under the soil, the root layer delves into the soil, plumbing the depths to improve drainage and create passages for soil life and nutrient-laden water. From the heftiest cassava tuber to the humble potato, the root layer is absolutely fundamental to the health of the system overall.
Ok, so what's Permaculture?
Agroforestry is one form of permaculture, a broader term that encompasses any system of multi-functional elements constituting a self-sustaining whole. Permaculture can inform a regenerative approach to farming in a desert, a prairie, or even an ocean. It isn’t the place that matters, or the size — as we will see throughout this guide. You can use permaculture to design a productive backyard, rooftop, or container garden. As long as the end result is a diverse system that by and large takes care of itself, that’s permaculture.
In the 1970s, an Australian named Bill Mollison coined the term permaculture as a combination of the words permanent and agriculture. As it often goes with people who name things, Mollison is usually credited as “the founder of permaculture.” Not to take away from Mollison — he was by all counts a remarkable thinker and teacher — but many of permaculture’s principles were being applied by people long before he coined the term and gave it a formal definition. We have much to learn from them.
It’s very possible that food forests originated right where I am sitting writing these words, in an equatorial subtropical forest. We know that the native peoples who inhabited the humid forests of Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, and much of Brazil practiced agroforestry and were able to sustain large populations from the abundance of food they produced. Mollison himself spent many years in tropical and sub-tropical forests around the world observing, studying, and refining the principles of permaculture.
Even today, the Amazon basin boasts at least 138 edible plant species; over half of them grow on trees. Such a remarkable abundance did not “just happen.” The indigenous population cultivated what many archaeologists and botanists consider the world’s largest food forest. These people, not Bill Mollison and his followers, were the original forest gardeners. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
Food Forests are a smarter way to garden — for you too.
A food forest is a system. As a grower and steward of food forests large and small, I’m not very interested in writing about "just gardening" per se. I want to explore systems and invite you to join me. It’s much more interesting — and effective.
Most organic gardening guides focus on specific remedies for specific problems: prescriptions for “companion plants,” “natural fertilizers," or "organic pesticides.” Frankly, I have nothing against commercial compost or a homemade hot pepper insect repellent. As a way to get started or as a last resort, they are a better alternative to a petrochemical cocktail sprayed on your food. But these piecemeal solutions for "bad soil” or garden "pests" are really part of the problem — a problem akin to how modern medicine treats symptoms as isolated from the whole topography of our bodies and minds.
Spraying an “organic pesticide” in your garden is like taking an aspirin for a headache. There’s nothing wrong with it. But we all know it merely relieves the symptoms but doesn’t treat the cause of the headache. Instead of dousing the pesky chomping bugs in your garden with some “green spray,” perhaps you ought to find out why you have so many pests in the first place and work from there.
Like our bodies, food forests of any size or scope, from the rooftop garden to the hundred acre plot, are integrated and self-regenerating systems. Planting gardens is a step in the right direction, but we can and need to do better. Let’s create systems. Let’s plant food forests.
The beauty of agroforestry isn't just for large pieces of land. A home garden can also be a food forest. Even a very small patch of ground in the city can be transformed into a colorful and productive space.
Intrigued but not sure where to start?
Sueño de Vida offers a fully online Food Forest at Home course that breaks the art of permaculture gardening down for you into the most practical and actionable steps. With engaging explanations of how to do everything from make a space to keeping weeds in check to naturally saving seed, our course takes you through the entire growing season journey from early spring to late fall. Also loaded with planting guides, easy-to-follow tables, and short demonstration videos, this learning experience is designed to show you how to nurture your own green space with ease and joy.
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At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building, year-round soil cover with plants and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Thank you.
Kristen Krash is the director and co-founder of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative agroforestry farm, education center, nature reserve in Ecuador’s Chocó Andino Cloudforest. Prior to moving, Kristen was known for her guerrilla gardens — productive green spaces she created in any available space. Now an urban transplant in the South American rain forest, she has adapted her urban gardening and sustainability skills to large-scale reforestation of degraded land. She takes a practical and accessible approach to helping others achieve more balance and self-sufficiency in their lives.
Kristen’s articles and interviews have been featured on popular sustainability platforms like Abundant Edge and The Mud Home, and in the Rainforest Regeneration Curriculum at the Ecological Restoration Camps.
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