Talk:Agroforestry

Merge proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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I propose merging Silvopasture, Dehesa, Forest gardening, Forest farming, Syntropic agriculture, Inga alley cropping, Farmer-managed natural regeneration and Kuojtakiloyan into this article, because they all seem to be types of agroforestry and are fairly short. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:02, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Some merging may be in scope here, but Dehesa is a sharply distinct subtopic and fairly long; Silvopasture is even longer, and is only borderline "forest", being at least halfway to meadow, so I'd Oppose at least those two. If Inga alley cropping were better cited I'd probably oppose that too, but since it's so poor it can probably be compressed to a paragraph without much loss. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:27, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Support, but likely keeping some separate as per Chiswick Chap's comment above. How did it happen that we ended up with so many short, stand-alone forestry type articles, I wonder? And where are all the Wikipedia editors with an interest in forestry topics nowadays. EMsmile (talk) 13:57, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

• Support: these articles all overlap a lot, and while they aren't always short, they routinely contain paragraphs that are either completely uncited or seemingly copied directly from the source, and the faster we deal with this, the better.

Looking at the other comments, I can see the case for leaving Dehesa alone due to its regional/cultural context, but I am not convinced it deserves to remain standalone: not when most of its referencing is currently unverifiable.

Dehesa is described in multiple reliable sources, some of which are listed in the article. Many more are available: it is a well-documented subject. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:31, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

I would like to note that a lot of the hits from Google Scholar are articles on completely unrelated subjects where one of the authors' last names happens to be "Dehesa" (i.e. just one example) and some of the others are from non-English journals of unclear reliability. Having said that, there are decent references in English as well (2000, 2009, 2015 so it can probably be left alone if it is rewritten to actually use them.

Silvopasture, however, is consistently described as an agroforestry practice (the USDA link in my other comment is just the most official example) so I'm now strongly in favour of merging it. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:56, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

I am also not convinced silvopasture is really that distinct, considering phrasings in the article like Wood pasture, one of the oldest land-use practices in human history, is a historical European land management system in which open woodland provided shelter and forage and It utilizes the principles of managed grazing, and it is one of several distinct forms of agroforestry. However, that second sentence is cited to an MDPI journal, and we probably want better verification here. So, merge the others first, and then see what to do with those two. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 19:09, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Support Chiswick Chap's statement by observing that pasture plus trees is definitely distinct from something resembling a forest. So, careful, hold your horses, let's please not merge everything that happens to mention trees or simply touches upon aspects of silviculture. -- Kku (talk) 17:19, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

@Kku But the proposal is about merging into agroforestry, not into forest. So, the relevant question is not "Does this activity take place in a forest?", but rather "Is this activity generally considered as an example of agroforestry?" Here, it turns out that a source no less official than the United States' Forest Service says that it is. (Look at the sidebar, which includes Silvopasture under "Agroforestry practices".) InformationToKnowledge (talk) 06:43, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose merging dehesa. Dehesa is not a generic practice but a (rather well-defined) landscape associated to both silvopasture and a specific bioma/flora. Sources about the topic abound.--Asqueladd (talk) 09:32, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

• I don't support this merge. I bought a farm in the last few years to plant agroforestry and have been doing a lot of reading on the topic: Syntropic forestry, Silvopasture, Dehesa, Kuojtakiloyan, Forest gardening and Farmer-managed natural regeneration are all separate technical concepts or traditions that can be applied within different agroforestry systems that could be reasonably searched for separately which have ample separate source material. We are already very poor at coverage at agricultural topics in general, merging doesn't improve that situation.

Forest farming clearly needs to be merged, and Inga alley cropping should be merged into Inga. That is a super narrow technique, in a larger system of legumous planting.Sadads (talk) 13:31, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Guys, we seem to have reached a consensus that the minor variants of AF can be merged, while the sharply-distinct items and substantial subsidiary articles should remain distinct. Could someone close this so that the agreed bits of the merge can proceed? Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:42, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

"Forest farming" and "forest gardening" should be merged, since those are near synonyms, but distinct forms of agroforestry specific to regions or certain methodologies should have their own pages. PerytonMango (talk) 19:04, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

I did some research on Inga alley cropping trying to improve the article, and I could not find anything that showed it was distinct from other tropical agroforestry techniques. If you have sources for the unsourced statements, by all means add them. I was looking to see if the article was a keep, but at this point I think the sourced statements should be merged to specific species pages. My searches in the Wikipedia library were for 'inga "alley cropping"', 'inga "Mike Hands"', and "inga alley cropping" in JSTOR, EBSCO, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and Wiley. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 19:48, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.