> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://sexytrees.savimbo.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://sexytrees.savimbo.com/trees/agroforestry.md). # Agroforestry systems that work **Good agroforestry isn't one thing; it's a spectrum from healthy chaos to healthy order, and this payment protocol covers both ends (see** [**Fig. C**](#figure-c-agroforestry-spectrum-from-healthy-chaos-to-healthy-order)**).** Good agroforestry reduces pressure on primary forests by improving food production in deforested areas and halting the cycle of slash-and-burn agriculture ([Teo, 2025](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01532-w)). > *"When this work began, my driving concern was for both the survival of the world's remaining rain forests and the well-being of those millions of families who were trapped in poverty and food insecurity by a widely failing agricultural technique. Considering the scale of the social and environmental problem, it seemed almost inconceivable that no alternative existed, or could exist."* — [Hands 2021](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201204), *R. Soc. Open Sci.* Whether agroforestry actually reduces deforestation at landscape scale — rather than just delivering local benefits — has remained an open question. A 2025 causal-inference study across 38 subnational regions of Southeast Asia closed some of that gap, finding that agroforestry produced a net reduction in deforestation of roughly 250,000 hectares per year, equivalent to nearly 59 megatonnes of CO₂e annually ([Teo et al. 2025](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01532-w)). The mechanism is the logic at the heart of #SexyTrees: when diversified tree systems supply alternative income — fuelwood, timber, fruit — the economic pressure to clear more forest drops. An important note that the effect was not uniform. Agroforestry curbed forest loss in some regions and accelerated it in others, depending on governance, tenure security, and local economics — a heterogeneity the authors are explicit about. Their policy conclusions [mirror our own](/foundations/grassroots-economics.md): secure land tenure, genuine community engagement, and honest leakage accounting are what separate agroforestry that spares forests from agroforestry that simply displaces clearing elsewhere, or worse, accelerates it. ### What is a good agroforestry system? There is a dizzying array of possibilities for place-based food cultivation with agroforestry. We spent six months with a rolling workgroup for this methodology, and arrived at some core conclusions. The group surfaced high-quality field-tested agroforestry practitioners around the world (see [Authors](broken://pages/oCaTY2NlUC2HNJYMiCvN) for non-anonymous participants). They were using a variety of different markets to fund their services, including climate credits (carbon or biodiversity), grants(academic, international development, food security, climate resistance, seed banks), high-tech funding (AI, eDNA, and blockchain), payments for ecosystem services (PES), charity funding, and crop subsidies (organic or sustainable food premium pricing). Too truths coexisted in the peer group. The Indigenous practitioners were more advanced, and as a result were using Nature's chaos and complexity wholeheartedly. But most of the agroforestry systems blended this perspective with Western industrial production. We've addressed this in the protocol by describing *chagras* both as one end of a spectrum *and* as a completely different paradigm that is its own category entirely. This group has continued to expand over the following year-and-a-half of protocol development, but the following observations have been relatively consistent over the last year. * **Native trees are a pretty good rule**. It doesn't *always* hold; there are some strong arguments for non-native nurse trees in some sticky bioremediation, contamination, or sterile food production situations (e.g., breadfruit, even eucalyptus, or plastic trees). But some of the most useful plants (water hyacinth has immense bioremediation properties, bamboo is a miracle solution for paper and construction materials) are truly invasive outside of their ecosystem. * **Actors are** [**easy to distinguish**](#how-to-figure-out-who-to-work-with-and-fund)**.** You have to ask a group to let you pay the landowner to plant a tree directly to know if they are talking from actual practice. This single requiest reliably separated groups that were presenting themselves as agroforestry practitioners, from those that were actually practicing agroforestry, a true Venn diagram. No other question was as reliable. * **Place-based differences must be removed from the equation**. Desert, mountain, tropical, and island ecology dramatically change the practices and obscure common themes that can be used to scale funding. This increases infighting among practitioners like the blind men and the elephant. * **Agroforestry *****does***** have a basic theme.** The agroforestry enthusiasts all have different ecosystems, and their enthusiasm reflects a place-specificity that, debate semantics, But practically nature has a pattern, and most groups were using similar themes to interact with it. * **Agroforestry *****does not***** have a consistent nomenclature.** There is a distressingly [wide variety of terms](/practice-guide/inga-agroforestry/plot-dimensions.md#on-semantics) in academic disciplines (farmers trade organizations, permaculture, silviculture, and agronomy backgrounds) and cultural differences (smallfarmer, vs indigenous vs conscious living community enthusiasts). This means search engines remain siloed for ontology problems, but possibly AI engines can aggregate findings.
### How to figure out who to work with and fund One major finding from our work with the rolling workgroup was how to reliably identify practitioners who were viable to work with for outcomes-based funding. **TL:DR = do a test outcomes payment.** As you can see from the Venn diagram below, you can't rely on what people say to figure out who to reliably fund. In our direct experience, in the 25 countries we work in, there is a large iceberg of virtually silent high-quality practitioners on the ground, and many of the people at conferences and workgroups talking about agroforestry have no physical signature on ground vetting, or even any connection with ground activities. Some people at conferences *do* check out out, and have quite authentic grassroots programs, the problem is that they sound virtually identical to their peers in a virtual or Western setting. We found that the most authentic, fast, and valid way to distinguish who is in the pink circle is not traditional site visits. It's still relatively easy for intermediary orgs to mask authentic ground activity with a well-paid local guide in the short time a traveler has available. It's actually quite simple and can be done virtually. It's to ask to pay a distributed group of landowners in the region a small outcomes-based payment for the trees they had planted. That immediately distinguished people who were actively reforesting from those who weren't, as reforestation is a physical labor task; people actively doing it have to buy supplies, compensate planting staff, and run operations. They both need funding and have immediate and pragmatic responses on where to plant, what authentications are in place, and who to pay in a distributed fashion. Orgs that haven't be compensating locals with their budgets will almost universally self-select out at that point as it would lead to questions from locals as to why they haven't been paid previously. Harsh, but effective. The orgs that stay and follow through are worth working with and tend to go the distance. #### Figure D: Venn diagram describing who should be funded in agroforestry
Venn diagram contrasting "people who say they do agroforestry" (yellow circle, labeled TALK) with "people who actually do agroforestry" (pink circle, labeled ACTION). A small overlap in the middle represents those who do both — talk about it and practice it.

To isolate the pink circle for funding, arrange a #SexyTrees outcome payment.

### Covering the spectrum of good agroforestry To financially cover the spectrum of high quality agroforesty providers, it became clear quickly that place-based issues were a red herring. Instead, we had to address [reductionism](/trees/agroforestry/chagras.md#reductionism-and-black-boxes), and more importantly, reject it in the case of the highest-quality systems we found, [Indigenous chagras.](/trees/chagras.md) We decided to focus on two example grassroots agroforestry systems for real-world testing our proposed payment protocol. We hypothesized that real-world payments that worked for either end of the spectrum could be blended to address any individual site. The spectrum is from healthy chaos to healthy order. * [**Healthy order**](/trees/agroforestry/inga-agroforestry.md)**.** For the sake of this protocol, we chose the rigorously field-tested system of Inga alley cropping to represent systematic, ordered, agroecological systems. This is a 37-year-old design, with a history of field cultivation, and a Cambridge science team ([Hands 2021](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201204) and [Inga Foundation](/practice-guide/community/field-schools.md#inga-foundation-in-honduras)). We included an [Inga agroforestry practice guide](/trees/agroforestry/inga-agroforestry.md) for interested adopters. * [**Healthy chaos**](/trees/agroforestry/chagras.md)**.** We found the most advanced (and difficult to quantify) science in authentically preserved Indigenous chagras systems. We chose the 5-year-old teaching of the Kamëntsá from Colombia (Miguel Chindoy and [Agropueblos](/practice-guide/community/field-schools.md#agropueblos-in-sibundoy-colombia)) to test outcome-based payments at the chaotic end of the spectrum. We included a [chagra practice guide](/practice-guide/chagras/reward-protocol.md) for interested adopters. #### Figure C: Agroforestry spectrum from healthy chaos to healthy order
Diagram showing a spectrum from "healthy chaos" on the left to "healthy order" on the right, with a pink dot marking an example site's position near the center. Below the spectrum, two overlapping triangular regions indicate qualification likelihood: agrobiodiversity units (purple) dominate at the chaos end, while tree and climate credit units (teal) dominate at the order end. The example site near center falls in the overlap zone where both unit types may qualify.

Where a site falls between healthy chaos and healthy order determines which credit units it qualifies for. The example site shown straddles both.

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