Agroforestry - The Future of Farming

Welcome to our farm. We grow a wide range of crops here using a variety of methods. For example, here we have our orchard and we planted these apple trees 16 years ago and even though this region is considered totally unsuitable for top fruit, you can see our trees are doing well. We have been careful to create a supportive microclimate and to build soil fertility and our geese help us manage this area keeping the grass down and creating a nice under canopy airflow which keeps the trees healthy. We also have grazing fields in which we raise goats. We have two milking nannies, Sunshine and Polly, and three kids who are five months old. Plus, because it's nearly autumn and the nannies are coming into heat, we have a billy visiting us. This year we have Primer, a two-year-old golden guernsey. You'll notice that we've planted trees in the fields. They provide dappled shade in the summer, lift the wind patterns in the spring and the autumn and fertilize the fields in the winter when they drop their leaves. We also have vegetable gardens like this one. Some of the crops are still growing. These are winter squash but many of the vegetables have already been harvested and have been prepped for the winter storms. Things like onions, garlic and drying beans. Now this big evergreen hedge around the edge of the garden, this is important for sheltering the beds from the elements. Plus we have forest garden areas like this. Here we have cobnuts and autumn olive berries. These tree crops are combined to complement each other. The autumn olive is a nitrogen fixer and its roots will be feeding the soil, supporting these cobnuts to have a heavier crop. Having our harvest in the canopy layer means that the soil is partially shaded from the sun, which enables it to retain its water content and remain productive throughout the summer heatwave. These growing systems all fit broadly within the category of agroforestry, literally combining agriculture and forestry, so that we are able to harvest a range of crops at different levels in a way in which the trees and the plants complement. This approach by its very nature is more productive, more resilient and previously this seven and a half acres was one big field. The farmer at the time kept cheap on it. According to industry figures you could keep approximately 15 ewes of this area of land producing around 19 lambs a year, worth an estimated two thousand pounds in a good year. But this hasn't been a good year, it's been the hottest year on record and a summer drought has meant that the grass barely grew at all and most livestock farmers have already used their winter feed to keep their stock alive and now face a bleak winter with very high feed costs. Bear in mind that when this land was dedicated to sheep there was virtually no wildlife. The soil fertility was reducing every year and whenever it rained heavily the water ran off the fields in shoots because there was so little life in the soil there was no porosity. The topsoil had become compacted into a hard pan. These days the bounty of produce is remarkable. Last year we grew 23 types of vegetables, 22 different fruits plus nuts, eggs, milk and meat. Some of this went to feeding our family and our volunteers and some was sold to the wider community. The last time I did the sums on what we harvest here it came to roughly 12,000 pounds worth of food. That's six times as much as the same area would produce under conventional sheep farming. On top of that we also grow biomass fuel for heating, we harvest our own water, we harvest our own electricity plus it's teeming. To be fair perhaps it's not appropriate to compare mainstream agriculture to agroforestry homesteading. They are totally different systems after all. One is based on the economics of providing food at scale, a national and international market. The model supports the most efficient growing techniques and tends towards regional specialisation. Grain in the lowlands, sheep on the upland. The strive towards efficiency inevitably leads to shortcuts and the long-term costs that arise from ecological exploitation tend to be hidden and are passed on to future generations. All this is supported by the government in the form of subsidies and tax-free fuel for farmers. But here's the thing, the whole industry is based on the premise of a stable climate in which to operate and that is no longer true. We live in a new age of heat waves, droughts, storms and floods and monocrop fields don't perform well in those conditions. We need to completely change how we look at the landscape. We need tree cover, we need diversity, we need to move away from a system designed by economists to feed the markets the one designed by ecologists to feed local communities. The alternative is agroforestry and the thing about agroforestry is that it requires people. It doesn't really lend itself to industrialisation and big machines. It works best when people are living in the landscape able to form an intimate relationship with the natural world around them. Fortunately here in Wales we have planning policies that enable people to establish new agroforestry farms. Most notably the one planet development policy which in truth is overly bureaucratic and onerous but does at least create the opportunity to move in the right direction. In reality at the end of the day nature will decide. Nature will dictate what works and what doesn't. The thing about unsustainable systems is that they either evolve or collapse and the thing about sustainable systems is that they are nourishing and life-affirming. Thank you for watching.