Forests and Fields: A Collective Guide to Scaling Agroforestry

Agroforestry is the intentional integration of agriculture and forestry into a productive system with economic, social, and ecological benefits. The multi-layered interactions between people, plants, animals, and fungi embedded in these practices enhance or preserve the fertility of the land and create hyper-local and regional reciprocities that support complex social systems. While the roots of agroforestry can be traced to tropical food production systems and Indigenous land stewardship practices worldwide, it has more recently emerged as a practice with significant potential to contribute to efforts to the adaptation of temperate food systems and mitigation of increasing environmental and climate-based risks.

This course will explore the potential for scaling agroforestry practices in the US by examining the relationships built through the cultivation of North American tree crops, from species-level interactions to regional distribution systems. Significant species and their immediate understory collaborators will be the starting point for unraveling and describing cultivation and stewardship, related ecological and social communities, craft, and other cultural practices.

The medium of study will be the field guide. Traditionally a tool for interpreting nature and identifying organisms in their environment, the field guide is commonly a static, one-way means of field study and knowledge sharing. Might a field guide offer insights for collective study and action? How are field studies shaped and practiced? What forms might allow for ongoing input and collaborative knowledge contribution that informs potential futures? Students will respond to these questions and reimagine the field guide not only as a tool of interpretation but as an instrument of change, collaboration, and design. Drawings, fieldwork, and other crafts undertaken in the course will be informed by studying social and ecological relationships and exploring interactive, collective, and fluid means of knowledge sharing and organizing.

The course will unfold in three parts: An exploration of the field guide as a form of knowledge collection and dissemination, research and field studies of tree crop species and their dynamic ecological and social communities, and speculation into the potential for these communities to thrive in a climate-impacted future. The outcome will be a field guide to action, at once a collection and a vision for the potential future of collectivity.