Agroforestry (also known as agro-sylviculture or forest farming) is a land use management system that integrates trees with crops or pasture. It combines agricultural and forestry technologies. As a polyculture system, an agroforestry system can produce timber and wood products, fruits, nuts, other edible plant products, edible mushrooms, medicinal plants, ornamental plants, animals and animal products, and other products from both domesticated and wild species.

Agroforestry can be practiced for economic, environmental, and social benefits, and can be part of sustainable agriculture. Apart from production, benefits from agroforestry include improved farm productivity, healthier environments, reduction of risk for farmers, beauty and aesthetics, increased farm profits, reduced soil erosion, creating wildlife habitat, less pollution, managing animal waste, increased biodiversity, improved soil structure, and carbon sequestration.

Agroforestry practices are especially prevalent in the tropics, especially in subsistence smallholdings areas, with particular importance in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to its multiple benefits, for instance in nutrient cycle benefits and potential for mitigating droughts, it has been adopted in the US and Europe.

At its most basic, agroforestry is any of various polyculture systems that intentionally integrate trees with crops or pasture on the same land. An agroforestry system is intensively managed to optimize helpful interactions between the plants and animals included, and "uses the forest as a model for design.". The integration of tree species into farming systems initiates the development of an agroecological succession akin to natural vegetation. Hence, agroforestry is applied agroecology

Agroforestry shares principles with polyculture practices such as intercropping, but can also involve much more complex multi-strata agroforests containing hundreds of species. Agroforestry can also utilise nitrogen-fixing plants such as legumes to restore soil nitrogen fertility. The nitrogen-fixing plants can be planted either sequentially or simultaneously.^{[citation needed]} Recent research also highlights that many farmers practicing agroforestry do not identify their land use as "agroforestry," signaling a need for greater education and awareness to increase adoption of these sustainable practices

The term "agroforestry" was coined in 1973 by Canadian forester John Bene, but the concept includes agricultural practices that have existed for millennia. Scientific agroforestry began in the 20th century with ethnobotanical studies carried out by anthropologists. However, indigenous communities that have lived in close relationships with forest ecosystems have practiced agroforestry informally for centuries. For example, Indigenous peoples of California periodically burned oak and other habitats to maintain a 'pyrodiversity collecting model,' which allowed for improved tree health and habitat conditions. Likewise Native Americans in the eastern United States extensively altered their environment and managed land as a "mosaic" of woodland areas, orchards, and forest gardens.

Agroforestry in the tropics is ancient and widespread throughout various tropical areas of the world, notably in the form of "tropical home gardens." Some "tropical home garden" plots have been continuously cultivated for centuries. A "home garden" in Central America could contain 25 different species of trees and food crops on just one-tenth of an acre. "Tropical home gardens" are traditional systems developed over time by growers without formalized research or institutional support, and are characterized by a high complexity and diversity of useful plants, with a canopy of tree and palm species that produce food, fuel, and shade, a mid-story of shrubs for fruit or spices, and an understory of root vegetables, medicinal herbs, beans, ornamental plants, and other non-woody crops.

In 1929, J. Russel Smith published Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, in which he argued that American agriculture should be changed two ways: by using non-arable land for tree agriculture, and by using tree-produced crops to replace the grain inputs in the diets of livestock. Smith wrote that the honey locust tree, a legume that produced pods that could be used as nutritious livestock feed, had great potential as a crop. The book's subtitle later led to the coining of the term permaculture.