Multifunctional Agriculture - by Roger Leakey (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In a world increasingly challenged by the need to integrate and understand highly specialized knowledge in a multidisciplinary way, this book is innovative and perhaps unique in addressing this challenge. It focuses on ideas, strategies, techniques and practices spanning many disciplines at the interface of agriculture with: forestry, horticulture, plant physiology, genetics, ecology, soil science, food science, economics, and the social and environmental sciences as delivered by intensified and enriched agroforestry. Multifunctional Agriculture addresses this complexity, using case studies and insights from the needs of African farmers whose livelihoods are constrained by complex interactions between social, environmental and economic factors and problems underlying agricultural sustainability in Africa. This book, therefore, provides an important resource for those trying to understand the role of agriculture in the achievement of the new Sustainable Development Goals by providing easily implementable, practical and effective methodologies and practices.

Review Quotes

"...this book presents a thoughtful and scientifically rigorous analysis of the steps and processes needed to build a diversified and productive agriculture that allows the rural poor to break free of their existing poverty constraints. ...the book is a remarkable record of a scientific career devoted to changing the lives of the rural poor in Africa. For that last reason alone, it deserves the widest possible readership." --Food Security

"Leakey's book argues powerfully for the benefits of small-scale, diversified, multistrata agriculture and gives a comprehensive technical overview of how this might be achieved. The book is an excellent overview of the past three decades of the evolution of thinking and practice on agro-forestry." --International Forestry Review

"Leakey's posture of calling 'multifunctional' a type of agriculture which incorporates trees is valid and gives the book an immense value...an incredible resource and a key reference for agroforesters...Here is a book I'll keep forever at hand." --Forests, Trees and Livelihoods