Farmer managed natural regeneration (FMNR)

What FMNR is and what it is for

Farmer managed natural regeneration, FMNR for short, brings trees back without planting them. It starts from something easy to overlook: on much cleared farmland the trees are not gone. Their roots live on underground and send up shoots every year, which are cut, grazed or burnt again. Seeds wait in the soil as well. FMNR lets a chosen part of this regrowth become trees again, through selection, pruning and protection.

The method was worked out in the Maradi region of Niger in the early 1980s by the Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo together with local farmers, after most of the seedlings he had planted had died. He called the living roots under the fields an underground forest. FMNR serves regreening in drylands and every farm that wants trees among its crops: for shade, firewood, fodder, fruit, leaf litter and shelter from wind, without nursery, transport or watering.

In permaculture terms FMNR is a lesson in the principle use small and slow solutions: one stump, one field, one season at a time, using what the land already holds. It also follows ecological succession. The plants that come back first are the ones that know the place.

How to apply it, step by step

World Vision's FMNR Hub sums the method up in five steps: find, prune, protect, grow and use. In practice it looks like this.

1. Find. Walk the field, best in the dry season when the shoots stand out. Mark the living stumps and young seedlings and note the species. Agree within the household or the village which trees are wanted, and for what: firewood, fodder, fruit, shade or soil.
2. Choose the stumps. Not every stump becomes a tree. According to the FMNR Hub, farmers in Niger leave on average about 40 trees per hectare, some as many as 150; the WOCAT entry for Maradi names 50 to 100 trees per hectare as the ideal density among cereal crops. Species with deep roots that compete little with the crops are best. For Maradi, the WOCAT entry names Faidherbia albida, Piliostigma reticulatum and Guiera senegalensis.
3. Choose the stems. On each stump keep a few of the tallest and straightest shoots; WOCAT recommends about five. Cut the rest and use it as fodder, or leave it on the ground as mulch.
4. Prune. Remove the side branches of the chosen stems up to about half their height, with a sharp tool and clean cuts. Repeat every two to six months, as the FMNR Hub and the Right Livelihood Foundation describe, so the main stems grow faster and straighter.
5. Protect. Mark the chosen stems, with paint or a strip of cloth, so that everyone can see they are to be spared. Keep grazing animals away, ideally for six months to a year according to the FMNR Hub, and guard the young trees against fire.
6. Use in rotation. Prunings give firewood from the first year. Once the trees are established, a farmer can cut one stem a year and let a new shoot grow in its place, as WOCAT describes for Niger. The stump stays alive and goes on producing.

The tools are simple: a sharpened axe or machete, a marking colour, and above all agreement among the people who use the land.

An example from the world: southern Niger

In the 1970s Niger tried to stop the loss of trees by planting. According to National Geographic, sixty million trees were planted and fewer than a fifth survived. The turn came from the fields themselves. From the 1980s onwards more and more farmers began to protect the shoots on their land instead of cutting them. In their study of 2009, Chris Reij, Gray Tappan and Melinda Smale estimated that farmers had regreened around five million hectares of southern Niger in this way; the Right Livelihood Foundation speaks of more than 200 million trees. These are estimates from comparisons of aerial photographs and satellite images with field counts, not a census. According to the agroforestry scientist Jules Bayala, quoted by Mongabay, about 95 percent of the trees came from stumps.

What made the spread possible was less the technique than a change of view. Trees on the field were no longer seen as competitors of the millet but as partners, and the method spread where people could be sure that the trees on their land would benefit them. The same study by Reij and colleagues sets the regreening of Niger beside the work of Yacouba Sawadogo in Burkina Faso, who let trees grow from the seeds in the manure of his zaï pits and protected the seedlings. According to World Vision's FMNR Hub, it has since been adopted in more than 30 countries; the Right Livelihood Foundation spoke of at least 25 in 2018.

Typical mistakes

• Clearing first. Burning a field or grubbing out the stumps before sowing destroys the underground forest that FMNR depends on.
• Too many stems, too many trees. Many stems per stump stay thin; too dense a stand shades the crops. It is easier to add trees later than to remove them.
• Stripping too high. The guidance is to remove side branches up to about half the stem height. The crown above feeds the tree.
• Protection by one person alone. A single herd of goats or one woodcutter can undo years of work. Protection holds only where neighbours agree on it.
• Impatience. The first years show shoots, not trees. Those who cut again after one season lose the head start the roots have given them.

Further in the TerraWiki

• Tony Rinaudo: the man who saw the underground forest and spread the method.
• Yacouba Sawadogo and the zaï pit: water and manure first, trees from the seed bank afterwards.
• Regreening and desertification: the larger task FMNR serves.
• Use small and slow solutions: the principle behind it.
• Ecological succession, pioneer plants and nurse trees: how regrowth prepares the ground for what follows.
• Agroforestry and silvopasture: trees, crops and animals on the same land, where grazing has to be steered so that young trees survive.
• The three ethics of permaculture: earth care, people care and fair share, here in the form of village agreements.

FMNR at Sa Medada

Sa Medada is a slope in Jerzu, in Ogliastra on the east side of Sardinia. Macchia grows on its steeper slopes, and there is an old olive grove. A review by the ecologist Juli Pausas and colleagues counts Mediterranean shrublands and oak woodlands among the ecosystems that recover well after fire; many of their woody plants sprout again, often from parts below ground, and the holm oak is one of them. That is the kind of starting material FMNR works with. Project Eden begins with pioneer plants, ground cover and holding water. It also plants: the first tree, a service tree, went into the ground in 2024 on the very hot southern flank.