‘Evergreen Agriculture’ Project Proposed to Meet Rising Food Demand

Global agricultural experts are calling for the widespread adoption of what they call “evergreen agriculture,” which relies on planting so-called fertilizer trees in and around fields to boost crop yields, replenish nutrient-depleted soils, and sequester carbon. Meeting at the World Food Prize Borlaug Dialogue in Iowa, food experts said that with the world population expected to grow from 6.5 billion today to more than 9 billion by 2050, agricultural production will have to double as global warming causes more droughts and overpopulation leads to deforestation and soil degradation. A key solution, the experts said, is to integrate fertilizer trees into agriculture. The trees draw nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil through roots and leaf litter. Hundreds of thousands of farmers in Zambia, Malawi, Niger, and Burkina Faso have seen yields jump appreciably when trees are planted around fields, the experts said. In Malawi, farmers increased their maize yields by 280 percent when the crop was grown under a canopy of a particularly effective fertilizer tree, Faidherbia albida, a type of acacia.