Agroforestry practices include the cultivation, management and care of forest trees according to conventional techniques, and in the early stages (in the period of basic construction, 1 to 5 after the planting of forest trees), intercropping of short-term crops (peanuts, soybean, black beans, maize, upland rice, ginger, ginger, etc.) in the gap between rows of forest trees. Need fertilizer and intercrop care. When the forest tree is large enough and the canopy cover almost all of the ground, intercropping is not appropriate. In the Northern mountainous areas in particular and in the country in general, farmers often intercrop different types of trees, including short-term trees, fruit trees, and forest trees in the VAC production system (garden-fishpond-animal husbandry).

At present, some agroforestry experiments are being implemented by the Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology of the Northern Mountainous Agriculture & Forestry Science Institue, with rubber trees, a new plant in Son La, Dien Bien and Yen Bai. However, the application of agroforestry with rubber trees is still limited, due to the large area of ​​rubber plantations under the management of the rubber joint stock companies in the area. In addition, the ICRAF project (2010- 2016) is being implemented in all three provinces, and some agroforestry models are being developed (intercropping, tea / fruit trees intercropping with forestry and food crops). These models are currently only in the testing phase.

   

Figure 1: Figure 1: Maize intercropped with rubber (left;), upland rice intercropped with rubber (right)

The main difficulties in expanding agro-forestry applications.

- Generating on input cost and labor cost for intercropping plants

- Lack of suitable intercropping cultivars

- Market limit for some intercropped products

Table 1. List of selected sites with agro-forestry applications

(*) The area is listed at the year in the table. However, at the present time the area and application situation may be different.

                       Source: nomafsi.com.vn