Trees on Farms

Trees on farms provide a multitude of benefits to farmers, crops, livestock, and the wider public. As farmland accounts for 70% of land in England, planting more trees on farms has vast potential to establish new non-woodland trees and increase ecosystem services and additional benefits.

The Trees Outside Woodland project has been investigating novel, flexible funding models, working with farmers and landowners to plant trees in a wide range of interventions on farmland.

This pilot is led by: Cornwall Council & Shropshire Council.

About the pilot

Through different variations of this pilot we wanted to test the most successful and cost-effective ways of establishing trees on farms to unlock the potential of this wealth of land currently underutilised for tree planting. We looked at agroforestry and orchard establishment, hedge expansion, in-field trees, and other methods.

Watch our video

In this video, you’ll hear from three very different, yet all inspiring, projects in Cornwall, West Sussex and Shropshire.

Agroforestry and orchards

Agroforestry is a type of land use where trees, livestock and/or crops are raised together, to diversify and/or increase production from the land. Planting orchards on farms also adds to the biodiversity and food production.

We wanted to investigate how to encourage landholders to increase the number of trees on their land. Agroforestry in the UK has historically been at a low level, although the evidence and momentum around it is growing.

This ongoing pilot aims to test scheme uptake levels and survival rates of trees in agroforestry and orchard systems depending on different funding approaches. We aim to:

  • Have a clear understanding of the types and levels of incentives required to encourage an uptake of agroforestry and orchard farming practices.
  • Gain an understanding of the barriers to establishing agroforestry and orchards and how they interact with other tree funding models.
  • See an increase in agroforestry and orchards being established in the four pilot areas, with agroforestry becoming more accepted as a possible means to produce food sustainably and reverse years of decline in wildlife and biodiversity.

“If you take one of my fields, you put tree alleys in, I think we’ll get the same amount of crop off it, but we’ll have 650 additional trees and the produce from them too, a beetle bank under each one, lots of interconnected habitats and hedgerows all the way around. I can’t see a downside to it.”

James Turner, Farm Manager, Downton Hall Estate, Shropshire

Veteran trees in the farmed landscape

We also wanted to explore how to ensure a stock of future veteran trees which have seen a troubling decline. Historically the UK has the largest population of ancient and veteran trees in Northern Europe1. Many of these can be found within the farmed landscape in the fields and hedgerows across the country.

It is hoped that new approaches will help to restore and maintain our farmland treescape and increase connectivity across the landscape. We aimed to:

  • Enable the accumulation of multiple small scale (less than 1ha or under 20m) infrastructure interventions, designed to establish more trees on farms. This involved a realistic assessment of what desired small scale interventions cost.  Examples are:  

  • in-field tree establishment
  • Expanded hedgerows
  • Bay enclosures along hedgerows
  • ‘Field corner’ enclosure creation
  • Planting of maiden trees within hedgerows and hedges
  • Protection of existing trees within hedgerows
  • Incentivise management practices which would result in more future veteran trees in the farmed landscape, and understand which were the most cost effective. This work included a technology inventory to understand the various means by which hedges are routinely managed, and therefore how they could be improved.  

1 Ancient and Veteran Trees: Royal Forestry Society. 

Emerging results

“I have been thinking for years about planting more trees on my farm… The funding provided through Trees Outside Woodland made up my mind to do it now.”

Shropshire farmer

The uptake has been fantastic, in the five counties we’ve been experimenting, we’ve had 93 applicants engaged and planted over 90,000 trees.

  • Flexibility and non-prescriptive grants are key: farmers liked the fact that they could be awarded grants for their own ideas, valuing their knowledge of what was appropriate for their land.
  • There is a general growing interest in agroforestry within the farming sector.
  • One to one advice from project officers has been crucial to the successful outcome of the project so far – having been described as ‘the human element’ needed to encourage and facilitate landowners.
  • Starting an agroforestry scheme or trialling a new intervention, including the time to get quotes, contractors, and submit claims for these schemes remains a challenge for landowners, alongside their everyday workload
  • There is an appetite for small scale grants, funding tree planting on areas less than 1ha or under 20m wide.

We’re still gathering data about the survival of trees in order to assess the relative success of various interventions.

Supporting information

Resources:

LandApp Agroforestry design toolkit

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Pilot 2: Subsidised Tree Scheme

This pilot looks at the best way of providing those trees and assesses the interest and their survival rates.