Agro forestry is a production and livelihood system that is practiced around the world, and includes the planting of perennial trees and tree crops along with annual crops. Agroforestry is a collective name for land use systems and practices in which woody perennials are deliberately integrated with crops and/or animals on the same land management unit. The integration can be either in a spatial mixture or in a temporal sequence. There are normally both ecological and economic interactions between woody and non-woody components in agroforestry. It is an important form of production in the tropics and developing countries where such farming systems have substantial environmental and economic benefits.

There is also considerable evidence that forests and agroforestry (the planting of trees on farms) in developing countries provide substantial benefits to rural dwellers, national economies, and the environment. Trees provide a range of products for home use such as food, timber, firewood, medicines, and fodder as well as products for sale, boosting farm incomes, rural economies, and national exports. Trees on farms and in forests can also provide a range of environmental services, such as conserving biodiversity, reduced soil erosion and sedimentation in rivers and lakes, and increased soil fertility. Moreover, what is often unrecognized is that while forested area is declining in developing countries, tree cover on farms is rapidly increasing, as farmers substitute for the tree products they formerly accessed from forests and seize market opportunities for selling tree products. Agricultural land now accounts for over double the area of forested land in Africa, giving justification to the slogan that, "the future of trees is on farms.

Graduate training in Agro Forestry is approach from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating bio-physical, social and economic aspects. Although the MSU program is often focused in developing countries, students gain a firm foundation of understanding from the technical and economic perspective that can be applied anywhere.

Graduate students also have the opportunity to work along side faculty research programs that focus on a range of issues, including (1) investigating the driving forces - the biophysical and socioeconomic conditions - for agroforestry development, (2) assessing the contribution of agroforestry to agricultural production and rural livelihoods, (3) examining the spatial and temporal patterns of intercropping, (4) carbon sequestration and small holder systems for carbon markets, (5) small holder rural development and ecosystem services, (6) evaluating the effectiveness of shelterbelts in mitigating desertification and soil erosion,