Vincent de Leijster

115 Chronosequence analysis of economic performance of agroforestry coffee farms in Colombia 6 6.1 Introduction Worldwide there has been a strong tendency towards more monoculture plantations to optimize production and efficiency to meet the increasing global demands for agricultural produce (Foley et al., 2005). As a result, intensified agricultural production has increased drastically (Foley et al., 2011), alleviated poverty in rural communities on the short-term (Pingali, 2012), and supplied food to meet the increasing demand (Burney et al., 2010). However, recent studies show that specialization, intensification of agrochemical-use and simplification of vegetation structure in intensive agriculture systems result in strong negative environmental impacts (Foley et al., 2005). For example, on a global scale agricultural intensification has led to a decline in the supply of regulating and supporting ecosystem services, such as soil fertility, carbon storage, biodiversity maintenance, and pollination (IPBES, 2019). Monoculture plantations tend to be more vulnerable to climate change, as they are susceptible to droughts (Kunert and Cárdenas, 2015), changes in temperature (Jaramillo et al., 2011), and pests and diseases (Crews et al., 2018). Monoculture farming is also vulnerable to economic fluctuations, such as volatile market prices (Stroesser et al., 2018). Agroforestry arguably provides a more balanced set of ecosystem services on the farm and in the landscape (Nyanga et al., 2019), and makes agricultural landscapes more resilient (Rosa-Schleich et al., 2019). For example, a European meta-analysis showed that out of the six assessed ecosystem services, agroforestry provided better soil fertility, more erosion control and higher biodiversity in comparison to monoculture farms (Torralba et al., 2016). More specifically for coffee plantations, agroforestry is reported to be associated to higher pollination activity (Jha and Vandermeer, 2009), more pest suppression by natural enemies (Armbrecht and Gallego, 2007; Johnson et al., 2009), higher carbon stocks (Cerda et al., 2017; Jezeer et al., 2019), more favorable micro-climatic conditions (Siles et al., 2010), stronger erosion mitigation (Blanco Sepúlveda and Aguilar Carrillo, 2015), and higher biodiversity of birds and insects (Clough et al., 2011). Because of the diverse set of crops and forestry products from agroforestry (Perfecto and Vandermeer, 2015), these systems are less vulnerable to a temporary low market price of single products (Finger and Buchmann, 2015; Kassie, 2017; Stroesser et al., 2018), and may provide a more stable income. Recently proposed land restoration strategies, such as the Bonn Challenge, suggest transitioning monoculture plantations to agroforestry systems in order to rehabilitate ecosystem services (Stanturf et al., 2019). However, it is still largely unknown how this transition frommonoculture to agroforestry will affect farm profitability, and therefore rural communities, which may become a barrier for adoption (Jara-Rojas et al., 2020; Meijer et al., 2015; Schoonhoven and