Lessons Learnt: Silvoarable agroforestry in the UK (Part 2)

As a deliverable of the EU FP7 AGFORWARD project Jo Smith and colleagues at the Organic Research Centre in the UK summarised research carried out at a UK silvoarable farm in this "Lessons Learnt" report. The report focuses on a silvoarable system at Tolhurst Organics in Berkshire, where rows of eight tree species (with an inter-row width of 20 m) were planted in March 2015 within an area used for organic vegetable production. The trees established well with only a 5% failure rate, but tree protection was needed to minimise deer damage. A focus of the study was on the biodiversity related to the tree rows, and six types of vegetation cover were examined including a long-term beetle bank, natural regeneration, and four types of legume mixtures. In the first year, the long term beetle bank had the highest number of floral species but by the second year many of the treatments had similar levels of floral species. In total, 75 different plant species were recorded over the three-year period. The report also examines the effect on ground invertebrates and earthworms. The last part of the report looks at the costs of establishing the tree rows and the opportunities for including marketable crops within the tree rows.