AGROFORESTRY LANDSCAPING AND WILDLIFE

Until the mechanization of agriculture, the struggle of farmers to keep their arable land productive was a continuous battle with water and wild vegetation. Let us bear in mind what the countryside was like all over the world until before the Second World War, and in many places, even until a few decades ago. Without heavy machinery, people would go into the field with a pack animal or cart and hang their bag and water container on the branch of a large tree, usually in the middle of the field. It was a tree left over from the native vegetation or one that had been allowed to grow from an acorn or seed that rolled down from the surrounding slopes to provide shade in the summer.

Agricultural land is the result of the modification of natural areas by humans: forests, scrublands, wetlands and steppes were transformed to farmland. Agriculture is in fact the extension of human activity into the habitat of other species. Until the total mechanization of agricultural land and the levelling and homogenization of large areas, wildlife could be found anywhere in traditional agricultural systems. Moreover, some species must have been favored, such as those which require large open spaces. Until the widespread use of firearms and the extensive use of pesticides, hares were almost everywhere, in meadows, in wheat fields, in vineyards, in olive groves. On the contrary, they are absent in large agricultural areas without hedgerows. Even such a highly adaptable animal cannot survive there.

Agroforestry landscapes, by contrast, offer opportunities for survival and well-being for many different species of terrestrial animals, except those that require a pure forest environment. These landscapes retain elements of their pre-human intervention state, allowing several species to use them as their primary habitat or as part of their range. These elements and species biology are keys to understand the value of agroforestry landscapes for biodiversity, but also to plan for an agriculture that is based on the principles of yield stability, safe food production and conservation of the species of each site.