Despite statements that it can mitigate financial risk through farm diversification, alley cropping in the United States Southeast has not been comprehensively modeled to estimate potential financial returns and risks. We used a Monte Carlo method to model stochastic financial returns to monocropping agriculture, loblolly pine plantation, and loblolly pine alley cropping in North Carolina, USA, plotting the results from 25,000 iterations to understand financial risk. Under certain scenarios and assumptions, alley cropping did have financial returns comparable to, or potentially higher than, monocropping agriculture, but did not lower overall risk, as measured by the spread of the distribution of financial returns. Pine plantations, on the other hand, did have lower risk than both alley cropping and monocropping. Alley cropping with wider 24.4-m alleys performed better than narrow 12.2-m alleys. Allowing the producer to choose a timber rotation length that optimizes financial returns generated the best financial returns for alley cropping, but this assumes perfect knowledge of the manager and is unrealistic. Current policy programs of government payments for commodity crops and cost-share for tree planting, tend to favor monocropping over alley cropping or pine plantation. A hypothetical system of payments for carbon sequestration does increase pine plantation and alley cropping financial returns, but not to the extent that commodity crop programs currently increase monocropping financial returns, and does not reduce risk significantly. Overall, on average agricultural land in North Carolina, alley cropping may be of value to certain producers, but we find those possibilities to be somewhat limited.

中文翻译：

---

在什么管理和政策情景下，胡同种植可以成为美国东南部的竞争选择？

尽管声明可以通过农场多样化来降低财务风险，但尚未对美国东南部的胡同种植进行全面建模来估计潜在的财务回报和风险。我们使用蒙特卡罗方法对美国北卡罗来纳州的单一作物农业、火炬松种植园和火炬松胡同种植的随机财务回报进行建模，绘制了 25,000 次迭代的结果以了解财务风险。在某些情景和假设下，小巷种植确实具有与单一种植农业相当或可能更高的财务回报，但并没有降低整体风险，以财务回报分布的分布衡量。另一方面，松树种植园的风险确实低于小巷种植和单一种植。胡同裁剪更宽 24。4 米的小巷比狭窄的 12.2 米的小巷表现更好。允许生产者选择可优化财务回报的木材轮作长度为胡同种植带来了最佳财务回报，但这假设经理完全了解并且不切实际。当前政府支付商品作物和植树成本分摊的政策计划倾向于单一种植而不是胡同种植或松树种植。一个假设的碳封存支付系统确实增加了松树种植园和小巷种植的经济回报，但没有达到目前商品作物计划增加单一作物经济回报的程度，并且不会显着降低风险。总体而言，在北卡罗来纳州的平均农业土地上，小巷种植可能对某些生产者有价值，