Event Date : May 17, 2024 - May 20, 2024
Event Location : Various
Celebrating the growing global community of agroforestry farms and farming.
The Agroforestry Open Weekend is a great opportunity for other farmers, campaigners, politicians, environmentalists and anyone else interested to have a look at agroforestry in action!
Thirty years’ ago planting trees in lines into a wheat field (as per Wakelyns) was regarded as eccentric and even foolish (certainly by the farming establishment). But it’s now about to become mainstream to plant agroforestry.
In its 2023 Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (the climate change policy document which tells us how the UK will reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050), the UK Government has committed to 10% of UK arable land being agroforestry by 2050 – see here.
That will be a big change in the landscape and to farming: lots of carbon dioxide sequestered and lots of new habitats. It would be even better with a higher target.
Anyway, to help make that happen, Defra (in England) is promising payments – under its new Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) subsidies scheme – of up to £849 per hectare for farmers who maintain agroforestry – see here. That’s much better than the old BPS way of paying us farmers a flat rate of about £250 per hectare pretty much regardless of what we chose to grow (or not).
Now in its 4th year, with sites open across the UK and Ireland, and the rest of the world, the Agroforestry Open Weekend had 37 open agroforestry farms last year and is hoping to exceed that in 2024. More information about the event generally is here. Visit an agroforestry site near you!
Each of those farms was open and welcoming visitors for some part of the weekend.
The ORC agroforestry team will be at Wakelyns Agroforestry in Suffolk 18-19 May and will be explaining their work at Wakelyns, including participation in AGROMIX an EU-wide project studying the long term impacts of agroforestry at 9 of the most established sites across Europe.
If you have an area of agroforestry planting and would like to join in the Agroforestry Open Weekend – see the information here about what’s involved and get in touch via info@agroforestryopenweekend.org
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