Agroforestry in the UK

“We can never have enough of Nature” - From the 1854 book “Walden”, by the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-62)

Why Does UK Farming Need Argoforestry?

Agroforestry is a sustainable land management approach capable of providing multiple environmental and economic advantages. However, adoption has been low among farmers in the United Kingdom (UK). Only 3.3% of farmland is used for agroforestry, and woodland covers just 13% of the UK, making it one of the least wooded countries in Europe (Hardaker, 2018); the EU average is 37% (Woodland Trust, 2011, quoted in Tosh & Westaway, 2021).

The UK has a significant farming sector; however, as an island nation, it relies heavily on strong international supply chains for fresh produce due to low domestic yields of fruit and vegetables. Therefore, climate change poses a threat to the country’s agriculture and food security. 

The need for the UK to implement agroforestry initiatives raises important questions about the impact and risks associated with modern food systems and the food produced and consumed through intensive farming.

Agroforestry has been defined as a land management approach that integrates trees and shrubs into various farming systems (Gupta et al., 2022; Felton et al., 2023; Roy et al., 2025) to “benefit from the resultant ecological and economic interactions” (MacDicken & Vergara, 1990, quoted in Schroeder, 1993, p.53). It is a polyculture system in which trees and shrubs are planted in the same cultivated area, either trees grown within a field (in-field) or trees and shrubs around the field (around-field), creating a sustainable landscape and producing a greater diversity of fruit, nut, and timber byproducts (Smith et al., 2012; Pritchard, 2020; Burgess et al., 2022). Farmers and landowners in both temperate and tropical regions are implementing ambitious agroforestry projects as an adaptation measure to address the unfolding climate change crisis and, at the same time, as a solution for food security due to the worsening soil degradation and water scarcity (Mbow et al., 2014; Quandt et al., 2023). 

Figure 1: In-field agroforestry in an orchard in Herefordshire, England (Webb, 2016).

Although the term “agroforestry” was conceived in 1977 by Bene et al. (1977), in May 2025, Helen Browning OBE, the Chief Executive of the UK’s Soil Association, highlighted the lack of national awareness and adoption of agroforestry forty years later: “10 years ago, people in the UK hadn’t even heard of it” (Julyan, 2025, p.3). However, silvoarable (crops) and silvopastoral (livestock) agroforestry knowledge and training are slowly gaining attention from UK farmers (Woodland Trust, 2022) for the multiple benefits to climate change mitigation, improving biodiversity, and enhancing carbon sequestration while simultaneously supporting a sustainable, resilient food production system (Waldron et al., 2017; Castle et al., 2022; Quandt et al., 2023). 

In England, though, Felton et al. (2023) report a noticeable lack of “increasing tree cover on agricultural land to any meaningful extent”. Indeed, across the UK, a mere 3.3% of farmland is used for agroforestry (Herder et al., 2017; Venn & Burbi, 2023), and woodland covers just 13% of the land area, making the country one of the least wooded in Europe (Hardaker, 2018). Yet, major environmental events such as the annual Agroforestry Show, first held in September 2023, and government-funded Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs), which include the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) to reward England’s farmers for sustainable land management, are evidence of agroforestry’s gradual growing reputation in the UK. 

As of 2023, roughly 70% (17 million hectares) of the UK is covered by farmland (DEFRA, 2024), producing 60% of the island nation’s food (Lang & McKee, 2018, e608; DEFRA, 2021) - a situation that has decreased significantly since 1984 when food sufficiency was at a record high of 78%. While the UK’s horticulture contributes billions annually to the economy, it accounts for less than 2% of farmland (House of Lords Horticultural Sector Committee, 2023). The nation grows only 16% and 53% of its fruit and vegetable supplies, respectively (Guilbert et al., 2022), and it is therefore highly dependent on imports of fresh produce from “climate-vulnerable countries” (Scheelbeek et al., 2020). This increases the vulnerability to supply chain breakdowns and risks to public health, such as malnutrition, particularly as global climate change events become more frequent and extreme (CCC, 2022; Green et al., 2022). 

Furthermore, modern socioeconomic factors in the UK of population growth, urbanisation (the country is one of the most urbanised countries in the world (Apostolopoulou & Adams, 2019)), and increasing input costs for animal feed, electricity, and fertilisers, for example (House of Lords, 2022; Franks, 2022), suggest that its food systems — a complex network involved in the production, delivery, and consumption of food (Fanzo et al., 2021; Michel, 2024) — are becoming increasingly unsustainable for providing a reliable and consistent supply. By 2050, food production needs to rise by 70% to feed the global population (Askew, 2017, quoted in Filho et al., 2022). The environmental damage caused by these energy-intensive systems, which account for approximately 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Dangour et al., 2022; McQuillan, 2024), has been compared by Holden et al. (2018) to eating food “equivalent to a fossil resource.”

As climate change intensifies, UK farmers face a future of wetter winters and hotter summers. This will further strain already limited water supplies for arable and livestock farming, disrupting growing and rearing cycles. The core considerations of food systems involve balancing environmental, nutritional, and social outcomes (Béné et al., 2019; Varzakas & Antoniadou, 2024). However, this equilibrium is disrupted by a persistent, global demand for affordable food. The negative consequences of intensive post-war (1945) farming practices — chemicals, fertilisers, animal husbandry, and mechanisation — are evident today, having degraded and polluted the land, water, and air.

Figure 2: “Agroforestry involves the integration of trees and shrubs with either crop, livestock or mixed farming” (Raskin & Osborn, 2019, p.10).

Agriculture in the UK accounts for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions (Westaway et al., 2023). Unless farmers adopt ambitious, sustainable solutions for arable and livestock management, it will continue to rise as the UK population grows (projected to reach 77 million by 2050 (ONS, 2025)). By integrating tree and shrub cover into agriculture, the increased carbon sequestration in plants and soil has the potential to reduce the UK’s emissions significantly (Kay et al., 2019; Saraev et al., 2022). The profit motive, however, drives the food systems, which are depleting natural resources to produce mass-produced, lower-cost food, known as the “cheaper food paradigm” (Benton et al., 2021), rather than higher-quality or sustainably farmed food. 

The excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides since the second half of the twentieth century to maintain production levels, combined with the modern demand for affordable food, has caused severe biodiversity loss, especially among pollinators, which are “vital for the maintenance of ecosystem health and for global food security” (Powney et al., 2019). These chemicals have significantly contaminated water supplies through agricultural runoff and have damaged soil health. Recently, however, fertiliser prices have risen sharply due to geopolitical events in Russia and Ukraine disrupting manufacturing and global supply chains (DEFRA, 2022). Intensive farming practices involving heavy machinery, monoculture, and overgrazing are linked to roughly 40% of soil degradation in the UK (Prout et al., 2020; Rust et al., 2022), reducing land productivity and increasing reliance on imports, thus raising the risk of food insecurity (Gomiero, 2016). For context, in 2019, the Environment Agency reported that 6 million hectares of land in England and Wales were at risk of soil degradation, either through compaction, which causes deterioration of soil structure (4 million ha), or erosion, where fertile topsoil is removed by air and water (2 million ha) (Environment Agency, 2019).

Soil degradation involves the contamination of soil and the loss of nutrients, reducing its ability to support life and plants, and thus “resulting in a diminished capacity of the ecosystem to provide goods and services” (FAO, 2025). Degradation can be measured by decreases in the soil’s biological (loss of organic matter), chemical (loss of nutrients), or physical (structural deterioration) qualities (Lal et al., 1997; Lal, 2001; Ferreira et al., 2022), making the soil “unrecoverable in a human lifespan” (House of Lords, 2020). It represents a major environmental concern (Boardman, 2023), as soil produces 95% of food (Pozza & Field, 2020), and disruptions to land management threaten long-term economic stability and social cohesion. As climate change worsens in the UK, causing more extreme droughts, floods, and heatwaves that have already occurred earlier this century (Harkness et al., 2020; Wheeler & Lobley, 2021), the already vulnerable agricultural sector faces potential losses and damages worth billions of pounds (Speakman, 2018).

Figure 3: Agroforestry at Glensaugh, north-east Scotland, an upland livestock research farm managed by the James Hutton Institute (The James Hutton Institute, n.d.).

Agroforestry is a core component of “regenerative agriculture” (Elevitch et al., 2018; Rajendra, 2024), offering a holistic approach to mitigate the severe environmental legacy of soil and land degradation. During the post-war mechanisation of farming, removing trees and shrubs from agricultural land was “seen as a sign of intensification and progress” (Westaway et al., 2023) to allow larger machinery to increase crop yields. Consequently, agricultural landscapes have undergone human modification, creating tidy fields of extensively pruned trees to accommodate machinery (Rackham, 1986, p.225). By removing these essential soil and canopy covers, as well as other intensive farming practices, farmers have altered their traditional relationship with the land, from relying on natural processes to cultivate and rear crops and livestock, respectively, to a system influenced by external political and market demands (Hall & Pretty, 2008; Burchardt et al., 2020). The destruction of hedgerows, considered a symbolic element of Britain’s traditional landscape, has also increased soil erosion, since they act as natural windbreaks, and decreased farmland biodiversity. Not only do hedgerows provide essential food and shelter to a plethora of UK species (Staley et al., 2023; Kratschmer et al., 2024), thereby having a “positive influence on the biodiversity of agri-ecosystems” (Graham et al, 2018), they also have the potential to act as natural flood barriers with their capacious roots penetrating water deeper underground (Wallace et al. 2021), thus reducing surface runoff (Wheater, 2006, p.2041). 

The dramatic loss of the UK’s hedgerows during the mid-20th century — beginning with the Agricultural Act 1947 and continuing with the adoption of the EU’s protectionist 1962 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post January 1973 entry (Robinson & Sutherland, 2002; Tilzey, 2021) — stemmed from economic and political incentives for farmers to attain post-war self-sufficiency and food security by creating larger fields to accommodate machinery capable of managing increased yields (Teather, 1970; Bowman & Favis-Mortlock, 1993). Consequently, by the 1990s, the UK countryside had lost half its hedgerows compared to the 1940s (Barr and Parr, 1994, quoted in Croxton et al., 2004). Although the 1997 Hedgerows Regulations — part of the UK’s Environment Act 1995 — sought to reverse the decline by prohibiting the removal of hedgerows, the losses have continued due to poor management (Staley et al., 2015) and illegal practices (Marrington, 2010, p.20). Nonetheless, as of 2024, a widely publicised mapping exercise conducted by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH, 2024) revealed that the 390,000 km hedgerows (approximately 242,000 miles) still found in England alone — albeit almost half of the the 500,000 miles in the 1940s (Pollard et al., 1974, quoted in Ratcliffe, 1984, p.83) — would be enough to circle ten times around the Earth. 

The introduction of silvoarable and silvopastoral agroforestry aims to provide a sustainable, biodiverse alternative to the post-war “productivism” of energy-intensive and industrialised farming (Almstedt et al., 2014; Venn & Burbi, 2023). The pursuit of self-sufficiency and affordable food — relying on fertilisers and mechanisation — has had a profound and unsustainable impact on the farming system and landscape. Even as early as the mid-1960s, yields had increased “more rapidly … than during any period before or since” (Brassley, 2000, p.60, quoted in Waugh, 2024), but these gains have proven detrimental over time. For example, since the 1970s, intensive farming has led to a decline of over 40% in the UK’s wildlife, essential for healthy and productive ecosystems (Hayhow et al., 2019, quoted in Waugh, 2024).

Figure 4: Hedgerows along a lane in Tirymynach, Wales. Between the 1940s and the 1990s, the UK lost half its iconic hedges due to intensive farming practices (Boaden, 2011).

The need for effective agroforestry, both crop and livestock farming, to mitigate the extremes of future climate change and feed a growing population requires meticulous planning, education and training. While agroforestry systems can be more biologically productive and sustainable than agricultural monocultures, they tend to generate financial returns more slowly. Consequently, silvoarable agroforestry remains rarely found in the UK (Newman et al., 2018, quoted in Felton et al., 2023) primarily for financial reasons: the lack of central government funding (Woodland Trust, 2018) and the assertions that the trees, although widely spaced, impede the use of machinery, which negatively impacts crop yields (Graves et al., 2017). The UK government, however, has made a statutory pledge, along with financial incentives, to increase silvoarable agroforestry by 10% as part of the country’s 2050 carbon-neutral target (DEFRA, 2023). Nevertheless, Westaway et al. (2023) believe: “The effectiveness of financial incentives to influence tree planting is dependent on the pre-existing interest and values of the farmer or landowner.” Until the profit motive is removed from farming, agroforestry, despite all its benefits for the environment and biodiversity, will continue to remain a niche approach in the UK.

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