Changing perspectives on chicken-pastured orchards for action: A review based on a heuristic model

CONTEXT: Agroforestry and, more precisely, the integration of animals into orchards, represent an interesting source of income diversification for fruit growers who are confronted with rising climatic and economic risks. Besides farm resilience and optimisation of land use, this association seems to provide reciprocal benefits for both trees and animals, such as: nutrient cycling, weed management, natural protection and pest control. In particular, poultry and, more specifically, chickens, have caught the attention of numerous fruit growers in search of simple and time-saving agroecological solutions to regulate pests and weeds in their orchards. Yet, whereas traditional silvopastoral systems involving livestock have been extensively studied, the advantages and disadvantages of introducing chickens into orchards have been overlooked.OBJECTIVE: In this review, we aimed to build a heuristic representation of a chicken-pastured orchard in order to better understand this complex agroecosystem. We also compared the scientific state-of-the-art concerning some characteristics of this system to situations in the field.METHODS: We first carried out a synthesis using an initial set of information (scientific articles, grey literature, testimonies, etc.) to build a simple heuristic representation based on compartments in interaction. We then examined the nature of information on interesting interactions by comparing 86 scientific articles to 26 farmers' testimonies.

Automated summary

Integrating chickens into orchards can provide income diversification and ecological benefits, but there is currently a lack of comprehensive research on this agroecosystem.