Imagine walking through a forest – think of how many different types of plants you see, how dense the growth is, and how interconnected the ecosystem is as a whole. 

The same is true of a food forest. A food forest is a way of growing a large amount of plants in a small space by mimicking the structure and function of a traditional forest. 

The primary goal is to create a self-sustaining ecosystem that requires minimal human intervention once it’s established. 

The key is selecting plants that naturally balance one another’s needs. For example, taller fruit trees can be used to provide shade and protection for plants that require less direct sunlight. Likewise, plants that consume nitrogen can be paired with nitrogen-restoring plants to maintain soil health throughout the forest. Ultimately, the plants co-create a harmonious system in which each part supports the whole, and the whole, in turn, supports each part. 

This is not a new concept: it’s the way food naturally grows. 

Food insecurity is a complex issue that goes beyond simply having enough food. In addition to the amount of food available to individuals and families, determining an individual’s food security include several additional factors, including: 

• Accessibility: Are people able to access the food that’s available? If they need to purchase it, do they have the funds needed to do so? 

• Stability: Is that access stable? In other words, is food available on a consistent basis without sudden disruptions?

• Nutritional Content: Is the food healthy? Does it provide the nutrition people require? 

• Diversity: Is there enough variety to ensure a balanced diet? 

• Desirable: Is the food aligned with individuals’ cultural, religious, and personal preferences? 

Food forests can be used to meaningfully address each of the components of food security, ensuring families have easy, ongoing access to abundant food sources.

• Availability. Food forests are incredibly dense, enabling women to grow a significant amount of food in a small amount of space.

• Accessibility. The food forests will be planted on women’s land, ensuring easy access to healthy food.

• Stability. The food forests will be designed to incorporate successive harvest intervals, ensuring families have access to food all year round. They will also be paired with interventions to extend the life of the produce once it’s harvested, including cool storage (using MIT’s design) and solar-powered dryers (using UC Davis’s design).

• Nutritional Content. Research demonstrates that fruits and vegetables lose a significant amount of their nutritional value within several days of being harvested. By providing women with their own food forests, they will be able to harvest their food just prior to preparing it, ensuring the maximum nutritional content for their families. Additionally, all the food forests will be organic and regeneratively farmed, ensuring that families are not exposed to the toxic chemicals that are often included in traditional farming methods.

• Diversity. The food forests will incorporate an average of 30 different crops, which will be carefully curated to ensure they collectively provide the balanced nutrition families need to thrive.

• Desirable. We will use a participatory design model to ensure program participants are able to customize their food forests to their unique needs and preferences.

Today, most farmers employ monocropping — an agricultural practice in which farmers repeatedly grow a single crop on the same land.

Farmers that practice monocropping are often able to produce a high yield of a single crop in a short period of time (for example, imagine growing a field of sweet potatoes to address an immediate need for sustenance). In this way, monocropping can be a great way to provide a short-term response to an acute issue. However, to truly solve food insecurity, we need a different approach. 

Food forests provide families with a diverse, climate-resilient food source that becomes more robust each year, enabling them to truly solve hunger, one family at a time. 

Consider this side-by-side comparison:

Food Sources

• Monocropping typically involves just one crop, harvested once or twice per year, which limits both the variety and volume of produce per plot.

• In food forests, crops are harvested from multiple layers—trees, shrubs, herbs, vines, root vegetables, and ground cover plants—all within the same plot. This allows for diverse harvests of fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, and even medicinal plants, providing a greater total yield than a single crop could offer.

Harvest Intervals

• Monocropping produces a large, single harvest that may lie fallow or underutilized for the rest of the year, leading to a lower yield over time.

• Food forests are designed with a variety of plants that mature and produce yields at different times of the year, leading to ongoing harvests. This setup ensures that the land is productive for a more extended period, rather than just during one short season, as is often the case with monoculture crops.

Use of Space

• When farmers employ monocropping, plants are usually grown at the same height and spread out across the land, leaving vertical space unused.

• Layering in a food forest means that plants at different heights are grown together, maximizing both vertical and horizontal space.

Costs of Inputs

• Monocropping can lead to soil degradation, because growing a single crop repeatedly depletes specific nutrients, requiring fertilizers and soil amendments to sustain yields.

• Food forests are often more sustainable, with plants like legumes fixing nitrogen, decomposing leaf matter enriching the soil, and ground cover plants preventing erosion. This natural cycle of nutrients reduces the need for fertilizers, pesticides, and tilling, which are often required for monoculture farming.

Resilience to Pests and Diseases

• Monocultures are more vulnerable to pests and diseases, which can spread quickly through fields of identical plants, potentially causing significant crop loss.

• In a food forest, biodiversity helps prevent pest and disease outbreaks, as different plant species support beneficial insects and natural predators that keep pest populations in check. This balance reduces crop loss and helps ensure more consistent yields.

Long-Term Productivity and Sustainability

• While monocropping can produce high yields at first, it often depletes soil health over time, leading to a growing dependence on synthetic inputs to sustain productivity. This dependency on inputs can diminish the economic and environmental sustainability of monocropping.

• Food forests are designed to be self-sustaining ecosystems that require fewer resources over time. Once established, they can continue to yield crops with minimal external inputs and less labor. This approach makes food forests more productive and economically viable in the long run, especially in regions with limited access to resources.

The families with whom we are working have an urgent need to solve hunger. Thus, the design of our food forests will be optimized to meet families’ immediate and long-term needs. To do this, we will incorporate crops typically included in a kitchen garden as the understory of the food forest, ensuring families have access to foods like berries, sweet potatoes, maize, beans, and leafy greens within four months. 

We’ll combine this with mature saplings, ensuring fruit trees, such as apple, banana, mango, and avocado, begin producing fruit within the first year. 

Mature nut trees, such as cashew and macademia, will be incorporated to provide an important source of protein and will likely be ready to harvest after 18 months. 

As a result, families will enjoy abundant and diverse food production within 4-18 months. Over time, as the ecosystem matures, the food forest will grow increasingly resilient and productive, and will likely produce greater yields each year.  

Monoculture crops often require lower upfront costs, however, they tend to require higher recurring expenses for labor, agricultural inputs like fertilizers, and irrigation. Food forests are the inverse: they often require a greater initial investment but provide long-term savings. As a result, we anticipate that the women will experience ongoing cost-savings as their food forests mature into self-sustaining ecosystems. 

Consider this side-by-side comparison:

Initial Costs

• When farmers practice monocropping, their initial costs are often lower because they focus on a single crop.

• The setup cost for food forests is generally higher due to the diversity of plants, trees, and shrubs needed, as well as the investment in soil improvement and water management systems.

Maintenance Costs Over Time

• Monocropping requires significant maintenance over time. Including:

  • Labor: Ongoing labor for replanting, weeding, and pest management.

  • Inputs: High costs for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to maintain crop health.

  • Watering: Monocultures generally require regular irrigation, increasing water costs.

• After the first year, food forests require minimal intervention to maintain: 

  • Labor: Lower ongoing labor costs after the first year, as plants grow and natural systems for soil fertility, pest control, and water retention improve.

  • Inputs: There is little to no need for chemical inputs, as the system reduces reliance on fertilizers and pesticides naturally.

  • Watering: At first, food forests may require more water, but as they mature, they improve water retention, reducing the need for irrigation over time.

Yield and Profitability

• Farmers that practice monocropping can produce higher yields per acre for a single crop in the short term, making them profitable quickly, but they’re more vulnerable to market fluctuations and crop failures.

• Though it takes several years to reach full production, a food forest provides a diversity of yields, which can offset market risks (e.g., if one crop fails, others may still produce).

Long-Term Sustainability

• Monoculture tends to degrade soil health, requiring costly soil amendments and potentially resulting in lower yields over time if soil health is not managed effectively.

• Food forests build soil health, require fewer external inputs over time, and become cheaper to maintain, making them more sustainable and resilient.