Under the Shadow of the Tree
Our goals
SOA aims to promote the real added value of agroforestry. The aim is to study whether, in the shade of the tree, it is possible to build new sectors; of production.
The different editions of the Under the Shadow of the Tree project focus on agriculture that has taken the challenge of integrating trees into their ecosystem.
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Does Agroforestry bring social, economic and environmental benefits to the farms where it is implemented?
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What are the choices and life journeys that are told around Agroforestry?
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Through a documentary and educational content, the aim is to give a voice to farmers, scientists and other actors who are setting up new production sectors around agroforestry. We want to raise awareness among a wide audience of the need to integrate agriculture into programs to combat climate change and protect biodiversity. Agroforestry represents asolution resilient possible in a world where all balance is upset.
The outcome of a project
Today, agricultural methods are dominated by a general, largely globalized model, which chooses to separate from trees and their services to extend productivity, thanks to other accessories that involve petrochemicals. Paradoxically, we know that this widespread model leads to deforestation, overexploitation and soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, uncertainties in long-term yields, but also economic fragility of farmers, and social tensions.​
However, all over the world, the practice of Agroforestry is developed and varied. This technique, which combines several trees together, trees and crops, or even trees and livestock, profoundly questions intensive monoculture systems. It places trees at the heart of cultivated ecosystems, and is a source of other production (fruit, wood). It circularizes the material differently and is generally linked to low use of inputs. Agroforestry is therefore linked to broad issues such as the multiplication of sources of income, the resilience of agricultural operations, as well as the reasoned use of inputs, the maintenance of biodiversity, the fight against soil degradation; all of which generally impacts the integration and social development of farmers in their rural regions.
​The idea of SOA is therefore to analyze agroforestry systems and their social, economic and ecological consequences; in order to transmit knowledge between the actors, but also and above all in order to deliver testimonials during our dissemination phase in France. Because then, agroforestry represents a potential solution to the ecological problems of our consumption patterns: consumption patterns which are deeply questioned for their ethics and their sustainability.
