Agroforestry benefits

Sheep grazing in amongst our timber trees . The trees are relatively closely spaced but still provide significant feed for the sheep

There are significant issues within agriculture. But there are solutions. One pathway is through agroforestry — adding trees into the landscape to add complexity, biodiversity and ecosystem function.

Some farmers have been doing a lot of work on modifying and refining their agricultural strategy — getting better at grazing, cover cropping, crop rotations, biological systems, etc. But farming still has this approach of “farming over here” and “nature over there.” This is what’s called “land sparing” — the idea that we do our thing here and we leave some land for the wild over there.  However, with the global population continuing to grow the ‘land over there’ for the wild is becoming increasingly compromised.

Sheep being grazed between the olive rows - so we get two income streams from the one piece of land

In agroforestry, we set out to share the farming space — integrating the processes that we want to see in the wild and regenerating agricultural landscapes: bringing trees and shrubs into the paddock for their economic and ecosystem service functions, or bringing the same approach into the forest, where appropriate. 

 At Manna Hill Estate we adopt both approaches.  We have a relatively wide spaced olive grove which enables ‘alley cropping’ - that is, producing a crop (in our case a perennial grass sward that can be grazed by sheep – but also has the potential for cereal cropping) between the rows of trees.  We also have closer spaced trees grown for timber in which we can graze the sheep between. In both cases it essentially becomes a multifunctional, productive system where the sum of the parts becomes greater than any one enterprise on its own.