Agroforestry Systems in Morocco: The Case of Olive Tree and Annual Crops Association in Saïs Region

Abstract

Climatic change and demography represent important challenges for agronomists. They have to discover more innovative systems and technologies to fulfill food, feeding and energy demands. Such innovations may mime nature and couple advantages from soil biology and plant diversity and mutual advantages between the whole systems: soil—plant and plant to plant and the ecosystems. Forests systems give us examples of natural performances to discover and transfer elsewhere. Because of negative impacts of monoculture oriented intensification, agroforestry (association of perennial—annual crops and livestock) has created an interest in the international scientific community. This Traditional and also natural innovation has many advantages (preservation of biodiversity, diversification of productions, C sequestration, alternative solution for climatic change, enhancing agricultural land profitability, livestock integration, and erosion control). In Morocco such practice is adopted in the mountainous and oasis regions where water and/or land resources are limited. In these locations many crops are mixed and hence their monitoring is complicated. Unfortunately, few scientific studies were dedicated to such system and someone might describe it as primitive, non productive and must be changed. In this chapter focus has been on, the determination of the importance of olive tree and annual crops association in Saïs region, determination of annual crops cultivated between olive trees, agronomic evaluation of the associations, determination of advantages/ disadvantage according to farmers point of view and our observations, and proposition of some technical solutions to perform olive tree—annual crops associations.