UNHIDE Agroforestry booklet 2025.09.22 - Flipbook - Page 34
Rydeholm farm: Forest gardening, Sweden
Araucaria (Araucaria araucana).
remained to run competitive, conventional agriculture.
Before his return home, Anders had spent five
years studying philosophy in England, and during
this time he came in contact with agroforestry and
rewilding. This, combined with his passion for the
natural values he was taught as a child when hunting and providing wildlife habitat with his father,
led him to visualize the new identity for the farm;
biodiversity and ecosystem services equivalent to
wild, forest-like environments set as an equal goal
with the primary crop production located in the
canopy layer. “Now, three generations later, the
trees in this otherwise open landscape will have
their chance to gift us a truly sustainable agriculture”.
The long term plan is a replacement of annual
crops with tree crops - sweet chestnut and araucaria (Araucaria araucana) seeds as replace-
“ARABLE LAND IS THE
RIGHTFUL PLACE OF TREES.
TREES HAVE CREATED THE
FERTILE TOPSOILS, BUT THIS
PREPARATORY WORK IS
TAKEN FOR GRANTED IN
TODAY’S AGRICULTURE.”
- Anders Lindén
ments for cereals and hazelnut and walnut as
replacements for vegetable oil.
On three sides of the described core, 7.5 hectares of the land is, since before the takeover and
until now, leased to a neighbouring farm and
farmed with monoculture crops. Getting it back to
grow nut trees was not a possibility until recently,
as no industrial agriculture crop code for nut trees
existed in Sweden. Without such code, there was
no legal right to break up a lease, according to
