Soil, Water, and Biodiversity Conservation Through Agroforestry for Crop Production

Agroforestry is integrated with agriculture crops, perennial trees, and livestock or pasture. Agroforestry has the potential for sustainable development and increases the overall income of farmers though intervention of trees with agriculture crops. Nowadays the population of the world is increasing day by day, and total agriculture of land is decreasing; simultaneously demand of food also increases; to fulfill the demand of food, farmers are using high quantity of different chemical fertilizer, pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides for increasing the yield; it results to soil degradation and also affects environmental conditions. Agroforestry is a suitable tool to mitigate the soil degradation problems and mitigate climate change. Agroforestry is competent to protect natural resources like soil, water, nutrients of soil, ecological biodiversity, mainline the temperature and air quality by various agroforestry practices under different regions and conditions. It is estimated that the requirement of water will be increased up to 19% by 2050 and 5% of productivity is decreased due to soil degradation. Agroforestry is able to improve the infiltration rate, water-holding capacity of soil, improve the productivity of soil, and increase the nutrient status of soil and control of soil erosion. Agroforestry system gives good strength to conserve the soil and water. Different agroforestry systems are very diverse in nature, cultivating different food crops, fruit crops, and fodder crops and integrated with livestock. Due to the diverse nature of agroforestry, it is able to provide food security and health for the farmer. It is estimated that 75% foods are obtained from 12% of plants and animal that we are cultivating on a large scale. In this chapter the main focus is on the role of agroforestry in the conservation of soil, water, and environmental and ecological biodiversity and its role on the crop production.