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Agroforestry goes beyond simply growing trees next to crops. It represents a holistic farming approach that harmonises agriculture and forestry, promoting ecosystem health by safeguarding soil and waterways, boosting biodiversity, capturing and storing carbon, and improving air and water quality and reducing the risk of flooding.

In the nineteenth century, trees were a typical character of British agricultural landscapes. A recent report from the Woodland Trust states that since 1850 we have lost 50% of trees which used to occupy arable land, and that excludes the loss of hedgerows and orchards. It is this loss over the last 174 years that has caused the UK’s biodiversity levels to plummet, not to mention the effect on soil degradation and erosion. With population growth showing no signs of abating, and the impact of climate change increasing, we must rethink our approach to land use and stop treating agriculture and forestry as separate disciplines.

Despite the multiple well documented benefits of having trees near and within farmed landscapes, only 3% of arable land in the UK currently employs agroforestry methods. Agroforestry not only includes traditional practices such as farm hedgerows, parkland and heritage orchard grazing but also innovative systems such as alley cropping where agricultural crops are cultivated alongside a long-term tree crop, allowing for annual income generation during the maturation period of the tree.

The government’s support of agroforestry to date has been passive. To realise the opportunities of agroforestry we need public policy reform, long-term funding and land management plans with ambitious targets. Today, an incredible 70% of the UK is farmland. What an enormous opportunity this presents for the government and the farming community to come together to transform the nation into a sustainable and resilient landscape by adopting more restorative management systems.