Complementarities or complexity ? The case study of Horticultural Agroforestry Systems

Abstract : Among agroforestry systems, the intercropping of fruits and market gardening (Horticultural Agroforestry System – HAS) is innnovative and attracts more and more new entrants to farming(Burgess et al. 2018; Léger et al. 2018). Although HAS meet environmental and social challen-ges, particularly with regard to diversified and local food consumption, their management is challenging because of species diversity and the complexity of fruit and vegetable manage-ment practices (Lauri et al. 2016).The present study aims to understand how labor organization and management practices are impacted by the agroforestry configuration.A framework co-developped with farmers was implemented to record workload in market gardening and orchard activities. Regular follow-ups and semi-structured interviews in 9 farms made it possible to acquire data on workload for fruit-trees and vegetable management prac-tices and to highlight frictions points between these two activites.The results reveal (i) an increase in the overall workload induced by the management of two activities; (ii) numerous friction points between orchard and market gardening management practices (Fig.1); (iii) innovative strategies developed by farmers to address this increasing complexity.Often very promising on paper, HAS are sometimes more difficult to set up in the field (Eksvärd 2016). The present work points out the main antagonisms related to the simultaneous imple-mentation of fruits and vegetables in an agroforestry design. Figure 1: Network of “friction points” between orchard and market gardening management practices; circle nodes (.) represent or-chard management practices. Node size is proportional to the number of interactions in which they are involved. Edges thickness is proportional to the intensity of the interaction between two nodes (number of occurrence among farmers).