Abstract
Understanding farmers’ perceptions of and preferences towards agroforestry is essential to identify systems with the greatest likelihood of adoption to inform successful rural development projects. In this study we offer a novel approach for evaluating agroforestry systems from the farmer perspective. The approach couples rapid rural appraisal and normative optimisation techniques to determine favourable land-use compositions for meeting various socio-economic and ecological goals, based on farmers’ empirical knowledge and preferences. We test our approach among smallholder farmers in Eastern Panama, obtaining data from household interviews and using hierarchical cluster analysis to identify farm groups with similar land-use and income characteristics. We found that moderate differences in farmers’ perceptions between these groups altered the type and share of agroforestry included in the optimised land-use portfolios that balance the achievement of 10 pre-selected socio-economic and ecological objectives. Such differences provide valuable information about potential acceptability of agroforestry within each group. For example, we found that farmers who derive most of their farm income from crops may be more willing to adopt silvopasture, whereas farmers who are more economically dependent on cattle may benefit from diversifying their land-use with alley cropping. We discuss the potential of this modelling approach for participatory land-use planning, especially when dealing with small sample sizes and uncertainty in datasets.
Highlights
Agroforestry has clear potential to enhance ecosystem services within agricultural landscapes of tropical regions (Jose 2009)
We found that farmers who derive most of their farm income from crops may be more willing to adopt silvopasture, whereas farmers who are more economically dependent on cattle may benefit from diversifying their landuse with alley cropping
By coupling empiric interview data of farmers in Eastern Panama with a mechanistic optimisation model, we demonstrate a new approach for investigating the potential of agroforestry to meet the multiple needs of different groups of farmers
Summary
Agroforestry has clear potential to enhance ecosystem services within agricultural landscapes of tropical regions (Jose 2009). Like any agricultural innovation, farmers will only integrate trees into their farming systems if they perceive agroforestry to align with their objectives and available resources (Pannell et al 2006). Understanding how farmers perceive the advantages and drawbacks of different agroforestry systems will help to identify systems that best meet farmers’ needs, and to target extension activities . Quantitative data, are often needed for land-use modelling approaches. These models can help analyse trade-offs between various objectives achieved by different farming and agroforestry systems, providing a powerful decision support tool for researchers, policymakers and land managers (Kaim et al 2018; Le Gal et al 2011). Farm level models can serve as a discussion aid to support co-learning between researchers and farmers (Le Gal et al 2013; Voinov and Bousquet 2010)
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