What is Silvopasture?

In brief

The deliberate combination of trees, forage and grazing animals on the same ground, so that all three support one another.

Silvopasture is the deliberate combination of three things on the same ground: trees, forage, and grazing animals. The word joins the Latin silva, wood, with pasture. What makes it more than trees standing in a field is intent: the trees are chosen and managed for what they give the animals and the soil, and the grazing is managed for what it does to the trees and the undergrowth.

It is one of the five practices that the agroforestry literature recognises, together with alley cropping, windbreaks, riparian forest buffers and forest farming. In Europe it is by far the largest of them. Across the European Union, silvopastoral systems account for roughly four fifths of all agroforestry land, and in Italy they cover the great majority of it as well, placing the country fourth in Europe by silvopastoral area.

The exchange is concrete. Trees drop acorns, pods and leaves that animals eat. Their canopy lowers summer temperatures on the ground, which matters more each decade. Their roots hold a slope and lift water and nutrients from depths that grass cannot reach. In return, grazing keeps the shrub layer from closing, which in a Mediterranean summer means it keeps fuel from accumulating. Manure returns nutrients where they fell.

The best known European versions have their own names. The Spanish dehesa and the Portuguese montado are both silvopastoral systems built on holm oak and cork oak, with grazing, periodic cropping and cork harvest in the same landscape. They are among the most species-rich agricultural landscapes in Europe, and they are entirely human-made.

European agricultural law has caught up with this. The rules on permanent grassland explicitly allow shrubs and trees that can be grazed to remain part of the eligible area, which is what makes wooded pasture fundable rather than penalised.

How Terra Humana understands it

Silvopasture describes the ground Terra Humana works on, whether or not the foundation keeps animals.

Sardinia holds close to half of all sheep in Italy, roughly 2.7 million of them, spread across some 15,000 farms as of the end of 2024. The average Sardinian flock is more than three times the national average. That is not a detail of statistics, it is the shape of the island: the landscape we describe as Mediterranean countryside is a grazed one, and the trees in it stand where grazing let them stand.

The official landscape survey of the Ogliastra, our own district, says this plainly. It records that stocking densities rose sharply over the last century, and it names overgrazing, together with fire and unsuitable tillage, among the reasons the original cork and holm oak cover was lost. It then recommends reducing herds and regulating grazing.

We take both halves of that seriously. Grazing is not the enemy of a wooded Mediterranean landscape, it is one of the forces that made it. Too much of it, unregulated, is what strips it bare. The difference is management, not presence.

This is also why silvopasture and reconciliation ecology belong together. A grazed woodland is the textbook case of biodiversity inside a working landscape: nobody withdraws, the land keeps producing, and it still holds more life than a bare pasture or a closed plantation would.

Sa Medada

What this looks like at Sa Medada

At Sa Medada, too, the silvopastoral heritage is on record: just under 2,000 of the 18,725 square metres are listed in the land register as pascolo arborato, wooded pasture, and the rest is olive grove. So the question of how trees and grazing come back into balance is not abstract for us. It sits on a specific parcel.