Sunday 12 June 2011

Agro Forestry Conference dilemas

Wed 8 June
What a dilema - so many things I wanted to do - so many people to talk to, international relationships to build, presentations to see etc - Hope they upload all the presentions onto the internet so I can see the ones I couldnt get to.
Interesting and thought provoking presentations from Cristian Dupraz from INRA Farnce - and I have an invitatioin to visit this autumn. Information on the poor state of the inventory of trees, where they are what they are etc and a debate on the emerging visibility of AGroforestry. SOme good data and contacts of the amout of carbon sequestration by diffrent tres of different ages and research work in Patagonia and Argetina on AF prectice.
Now I ned o work out how to weigh a growing apple tree at home...assuming the carbon equivalent is c.45% of the dry wood weight (kg) of a tree......um lets say 10kg per apple tree x 4500 planted = 45,000kg x 45% = 20,250kg carbon - thats 20t carbon sequeterd per year by outr apple trees at home ...bring on carbon credits per tonne I say!!!!!

Useful work being done on economics and economic modelling to look at breakevens and rate of return on different systems - I will corespond with those doing the work in due course.

The French - INRA - are doing some innovative work on 'agrovoltaic' systems - crops grown under upperstoreys of PV cells - allowing tractors etc underneath - productivity is comparable to open field systems but with the added bonus of elec generation!!!! - inovative, clever, mad but brilliant all at the same time.
Some work at the Uni Misouri by Terrance Stamps looking at ecological and economics of systems which showed that not much difference in ecology of 12 or 24m wide alleys, artehr the presence of the tres is the main benefit both ecologically and economically - similar work to that we are doing at Whitehall Farm and It would be good to compare data collected in the systems.

A very useful synopsis of Agroforestry systems is that they are 'loose systems; which are dynamic and change over time...........they are "Imperfectly Perfect"

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