By Amelia S C Hood, Verena Scherfranz, Rosy E Scholes, Erika Degani, Tom Staton, Alexa Varah, Lena Schaller, and Alice L Mauchline.

Read the full paper here

Agroforestry is a type of farming where trees or shrubs are planted alongside crops and/or livestock. Agroforestry can include fruit, nut, or timber trees, or trees that people do not harvest. Agroforestry is rare in temperate regions, covering only 3.3% of agricultural land in the UK and 7.5% in the EU. Compared to crop or livestock systems without trees, agroforestry can provide multiple benefits to the environment (including to wildlife, soil health, and carbon sequestration), as well as to food production and farm profitability. Despite these benefits, research has shown that many land managers find it difficult to adopt agroforestry because they don’t have enough knowledge about how to implement or manage it.

We conducted interviews and workshops with UK farmers to identify specific knowledge barriers to agroforestry adoption. Farmers ranked agroforestry knowledge areas (e.g. tree species) against perceptions (e.g. information about this is available). This helped us to identify knowledge barriers. The largest barrier to learning about agroforestry was time constraints, with farmers often working over 48 hours a week. The second largest barrier was a shortage of trustworthy information, partly because farmers thought that some agroforestry advice comes from sources with secondary agendas, such as selling their own products.

To identify solutions to these knowledge barriers, we took the interview results to a workshop with 48 participants, including farmers, policymakers, NGOs, and researchers. We discussed potential solutions and organised them into a ten-step educational agenda. This included specific suggestions, such as developing online tools for independent learning, an agroforestry accreditation to enhance trust in advice, and policy reforms to support farmer-to-farmer mentoring. Long-term demonstration farms where researchers and farmers work together to test agroforestry systems could be particularly effective for addressing knowledge and research gaps together.

This agenda for agroforestry education is relevant to policymakers, agricultural advisors and educators, and researchers and their funders. Many of the solutions are straightforward to implement and could promote agroforestry uptake quickly, whereas others require collaboration across organisations. Equipping farmers with the knowledge needed to adopt agroforestry will help us to build a more sustainable future.