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Project Background
Trees for Health are developing a 3-acre agroforestry project at Higher Farm, Beeson, South Devon in partnership with Underwood Discovery Centre (UDC). Higher Farm is an organic working farm and UDC is an environmental education centre hosting events for school children, the local community and visitors. UDC is within the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) whose team is exploring different ways in which communities perceive landscape change. The AONB is a partner in the project with a view to running events and walks.

Agroforestry is gaining wider recognition within the farming sector although to some extent is still experimental and innovative. It is defined as “the growing of both trees and agricultural/ horticultural crops on the same piece of land”. The interactions between the trees and crops provide benefits that are not found in conventional forestry or agriculture which largely focuses on mono-cropping. Alongside producing food and other useful products, agroforestry also aims to “protect, conserve, diversify and sustain vital economic, environmental, human and natural resources”. (Source www.agroforestry.co.uk)

In tropical countries ‘home farms’, where trees grow alongside crops, are common traditional food growing systems, essentially agroforestry. They provide much of the foods, medicines, materials, fuel, dyes etc that are central to self-sufficiency within families and communities. Temperate agroforestry was inspired by this and pioneered in the 1960s by Robert Hart. Similarly Discover Forest Foods was inspired by a visit from a Ugandan farmer who came to the Underwood Discovery Centre with the ‘Send a Cow’ organisation in 2011. The farmer Charles told us and 600 school children how he grows pineapples alongside bananas, peanuts with papaya, beans and pumpkins, and many more combinations. He farms 3 acres from which he manages to feed his family and trade within the local community. Manual labour is the workforce, not machines and oil.
With this inspiration, we decided to grow mixed crops on a 3 acre field and to see how much food we could provide for local villages, as the wider farm did generations ago. We designed the site using agroforestry principles, taking into consideration natural factors and conditions including plant interactions, sun, shade, wind, soil, slope etc.

Two growing systems were part of the design: forest gardening and alley cropping. A forest garden is the temperate equivalent of tropical home gardens, mimicking how nature works. So a third of our site will be forest garden, designed to emulate the structure and function of a natural forest but using plants that produce edible or other useful products. Forest gardens provide the same ecosystem ‘services’ found in woodland such as shade, leaf litter, beneficial plant interactions, resistance to disease, wildlife habitat, soil stabilisation, nutrient retention and water retention. The range of plants in the canopy, mid, ground cover and underground layers mean that forest gardens are considerably more diverse than modern agricultural systems. They have also been shown to be more productive. Alley cropping comprises rows of trees/shrubs with beds of annual and/ or perennial crops in between. Again these systems elsewhere have shown higher yields as a result of shelter effects and beneficial plant interactions.