Food forests on peat soil

Abstract

Food forests are gaining attention in the Netherlands as a concept that holds the promise of delivering a variety of ecosystem services our society depends upon. However, there are no insights available what a food forest could look like on peat soils nor what its environmental benefits could be. At the same time the Dutch peat area represents 12% of the total agricultural area and is subjected to soil subsidence releasing carbon dioxide, accounting for 2.5% of the national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This thesis designed a food forest for the Dutch peat area and assessed it on three ecosystem services being: food provisioning, climate regulation and wildlife habitat provisioning. The results were put into perspective by comparing them to the currently predominant land-use for organic milk production. The plant species were selected based on selection criteria which took into account the environmental conditions and marketing potential. Yield estimates were made based on documented yields and proxies. GHG emissions and carbon sequestration potentials were determined by both available comparative literature and calculations. For the indications of wildlife habitat provisioning birds were taken as indicator species group and the attractiveness was determined by available literature. The proposed peatland food forest (PFF) consists of 21 different plant species that were estimated to produce a mean dry weight yield of 863 kg/ha/a over the first 20 years with a maximum of 1569 kg/ha/a. Furthermore, the PFF is expected to store between 0.37 and 0.52 Mg CO2 eq./ha/a compared to the current emissions of 15.8 Mg CO2 eq./ha/a. Finally, the PFF provides a habitat that is likely to attract more but different bird species than the current landscape, including a greater number of endangered species. The results are in range with existing literature on either food forests or swamp forests and highlight the potential of food forest on peat soil to contribute to sustainable food provisioning, reduction of GHG-emissions, and preservation of wildlife habitats. This study promotes to conduct a field experiment to validate the promising initial results.