What is Agroforestry?

In brief

A land-use system that deliberately combines trees and shrubs with crops or livestock on the same plot.

Agroforestry is a land-use system in which trees and shrubs are grown intentionally alongside crops, pasture or livestock on the same area of land. Rather than separating forestry from farming, it treats woody perennials as a working part of the agricultural system. The trees provide shade, wind protection, leaf litter and root structure; the crops or animals benefit from the improved microclimate and soil, while the farmer harvests from several layers at once.

Agroforestry is usually grouped into a few broad forms. Silvoarable systems combine trees with annual or perennial crops, often in alleys. Silvopastoral systems combine trees with grazing animals. Forest gardens, or food forests, stack many species into vertical layers that imitate the structure of a young woodland. What these forms share is the deliberate use of ecological interactions (nutrient cycling, shade, biological pest control) to reduce external inputs and spread risk across many outputs.

The approach is ancient in practice and relatively young as a formal discipline. Traditional farming across the Mediterranean, the tropics and temperate Europe has long mixed trees with fields and herds. Modern agroforestry systematises that knowledge and studies it, measuring how tree cover affects yield, water retention, biodiversity and soil carbon.

How Terra Humana understands agroforestry

For Terra Humana, agroforestry is not only a farming technique but an expression of the foundation's core idea: that people and land recover together. We see the tree as the organising element of a healthy landscape: the structure around which soil, water and community reassemble. In this view a field planted with trees is a step toward restoring a degraded place rather than merely a more efficient farm.

We favour designs that build living systems over time instead of maximising a single harvest. That means valuing slow processes (soil formation, canopy development, the return of insects and birds) as real outcomes. It also means honesty: an agroforestry system takes years to mature, and we describe our plots as work in progress rather than finished models.

Agroforestry in practice

Terra Humana's principal site is Sa Medada in Jerzu, in the Ogliastra region of Sardinia, where Project Eden serves as the foundation's first and most important undertaking. The land is being developed as a living laboratory for syntropic agroforestry, permaculture and ecological research on the island's characteristic dry, stony, mineral-rich soils.

The working method combines fast-growing pioneer trees, fruit-bearing species and long-lived trees such as olives, planted together so that the early canopy shelters the ground and prepares conditions for the species that follow. This staged planting draws directly on ecological succession, letting each phase of growth improve the soil for the next.

Much of this remains in an early, developmental stage. Rather than present a completed system, Terra Humana treats Sa Medada as an evolving demonstration of how tree-based agriculture can regenerate a Mediterranean landscape, and documents both its progress and its setbacks as part of the work.

Sa Medada

What this looks like at Sa Medada

At Sa Medada near Jerzu the tree layer is already there: the land register records most of the 1.87 hectares as olive grove and a small part as wooded pasture. Planted nitrogen fixers such as Tephrosia, Leucaena and coral tree now join it. The aim is a layered agroforestry system in which the old olives stay.

More about Project Eden

Plants in this entry

Frequently asked

What is agroforestry?

Agroforestry is a land-use approach that combines woody perennials such as trees and shrubs with crops or animals on the same land. The aim is to let the components interact so that the whole system becomes more productive, resilient and diverse than its parts grown separately.

How does Terra Humana apply agroforestry?

At the Sa Medada site in Jerzu, Sardinia, Terra Humana is developing Project Eden as a living laboratory for tree-based farming. The design follows a syntropic model in which pioneer, fruit and long-lived trees are planted together to build soil and shade over time.