Tree crops for whom? The socio-ecological implications of agroforestry on farmscapes in the Northeast.
This post is part of Sophia Hampton’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.
As I drove between farms in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine this summer there was always one or two of those blueish cardboard pints wedged in my car’s cup holder and filled with varying seasonal riches. In June, mulberries, serviceberries, currants, and goumi berries. In July, blueberries and cherries. Then, sweet peaches and plums, the colors of an August sunset.
ripening plums
Being in a constant state of fruit abundance was a highlight from my summer researching agroforestry (the intentional integration of trees and shrubs on farmland) in the Northeast. It’s also one of the reasons I get so excited about the increasing amounts of trees and shrubs that farmers are planting on their land as agroforestry gains momentum in the US.
Where conventional agriculture prioritizes production over social and environmental values, combining trees and shrubs with annual crops presents an opportunity to address multiple competing values in the climate crisis. Depending on species and design, agroforestry systems can provide timber harvests, carbon sequestration, erosion reduction, flood control, diversified crop harvests, and biodiversity benefits on lacking landscapes. In short, a winning equation: all the good stuff that trees can do + economic benefits + the delicious and productive benefits of a farm = financially viable farmers, ecologically sound landscapes, and good eating.
And yet, solutions in a capitalist economy are rarely that straightforward. As US agroforestry grows in popularity, taking on significant investment and institutional backing, I wanted to spend some time critically engaging with agroforestry as a so-called solution. To this end, I spent my summer conducting research on how agroforestry engages with the logic of property law in the Northeast, the place I call home. While these may seem like unrelated spheres, they are anything but. The takeaway of my almost four years of grad school working towards a dual degree in law and environmental science is that property regimes have a foundational impact on the socio-ecological outcomes of land-use decisions.
Several scholars are making the case that to truly transform agriculture’s negative impact on socio-ecological systems, there needs to be a shift in property relations–a land reform. The big question I carried with me this summer was: can agroforestry without land reform be everything it pitches itself to be?
mulberries from the summer
The history of agriculture in the US is one place to see how property regimes dictate specific results. Before European settlement, Indigenous groups in the eastern parts of Turtle Island participated in what some scholars call landscape-level agroforestry, tending woodlands for chestnuts, hickories, pawpaws, maple syrup, wild game, and countless other food crops and medicinals. They also managed open, fertile floodplains as planting grounds for annual crops in complex planting rotations and patterns. Waterways and the abundance they hold played a significant role, too. A defining feature of this system was kincentric tenure relations, where communities of people managed whole watersheds together while reaping abundant harvests for the collective. The binary between forest and farm I grew up knowing probably wasn’t very relevant.
When European settlers arrived on the eastern coast, they brought property concepts that disrupted any cohesive land management. Instead, settlers converted land into a speculatable asset that individuals could use for their own wealth accumulation at the collective’s expense. Anchored in this system, settlers carved up the landscape into homesteads, estates, and plantations utilizing a style of agriculture that relied on clearcutting forests, enslaved labor, annual crops, and domesticated livestock.
Central to the conceptual origins of this property system was racial domination. Cheryl I. Harris’s foundational paper, Whiteness as Property, articulates the parallel impact of White supremacist identity formation in converting Black people into property while also extinguishing any property rights for Native Americans. The racialization of property continues today. Of particular relevance here, White people currently own 98 percent of all US farmland.
Agroforestry is a ripe place to engage with ideas of land ownership because a person planting trees is acting on an assumption, or a hope, that the tree will be there for many years. Depending on the species, maybe for hundreds of years. Planting a tree is a statement, an investment in a future that looks a particular way. With my research, I wanted to know what type of future farmers are imagining when they integrate trees into their land. Who is included in this future? When the USDA offers 60 million dollars, paying farmers to plant trees on farmland, whose future on land are they investing in?
The racialized status of farmland ownership today adds another dimension to the growing investment in agroforestry. As one of my interviewees from my summer fieldwork asked, “Who is this solution for?”
Sophia Joffe Hampton (she/they) is a JD/MESc candidate at Vermont Law School and the Yale School for the Environment.