Alley Cropping with Eric Toensmeier

What quickly emerges in this conversation with Eric is how farmers can use alley cropping, at scale, to create regenerative on-farm systems that also introduce perennial plants into annual vegetable agriculture. Permaculture practitioners can also integrate alley cropping into our toolkit of techniques and how we can adapt alley cropping, like food forests, to smaller spaces.

With his background in perennials, edible plants, and carbon sequestration, we circle back to these benefits in alley cropping systems and the vital need for trees in our systems to get carbon out of the air and into the ground.

And that was Eric Toensmeier. His work on alley cropping is out in late 2022 in partnership with Interlace Commons. Look for that book and learn more about alley cropping at InterlaceCommons.org.

Support Eric's ongoing work at Patreon.

What I like about this conversation about alley cropping is that it already fits with the other strategies we have within permaculture, such as food forests, that lead directly to a technique: plant trees in rows with our annual gardens or farm fields. If we want to intercrop long-term, then space the rows two-and-a-half to three times the height of the mature trees. We stack functions not only in space, but also in time, and implement incrementally as we adapt our gardens and farms as the canopy matures.

Can you see using alley cropping on the land that you work? Do you find this to be another valuable tool in your permaculture kit?

Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Until the next time, spend each day caring for plants and sinking carbon into the ground, while taking care of Earth, yourself, and each other.