Abstract
Trees are thought to have been a part of agriculture from its very beginning and in Europe the complex of agroforestry management techniques was once widely distributed and diversified. Nowadays however land use combining agriculture and forestry - while gaining momentum in tropics, is declining in temperate zone.
While the agroforestry systems here are becoming scarce or extinct, their ecological, cultural, socio-economic and historical value is starting to be recognized both on the theoretical and political level and incentives for their preservation, restoration or at least documentation are made. In Czech Republic both agroforestry research and practices are virtually non-existent phenomena.
However with the use of Austrian-Hungarian stabile cadaster records from the years 1824-1845 it was discovered that in the near history- in the middle of nineteenth century, there were distinguished more than five different agroforestry categories. Quantitative analysis of the tax records has further shown that some form of agroforestry could be found in all regions irrespective of the landscape type, land fertility, altitude and population density and nationality.
Meanwhile the discursive research of the contemporary 19th century Czech expert agricultural literature indicates otherwise- agroforestry is rarely mentioned here and if than in context of eradication of "obscurantist" traditional uses of landscape, while the narrative of change, rationalization, modernization and specialization prevails. On the specific example of agroforestry we can demonstrate the process of active policy of agricultural traditions forgetting during the industrialization but also that of their resurrection with help of contemporary multidimensional and multifunctional agricultural policy incentives.