UNHIDE Agroforestry - A Knowledge Exchange Latvia- Sweden 2023-25 - Report - Page 5
Lunden’s farm
Väversunda
Forest garden
Bekas
Nature
Demonstration
farm
Nature Gift
Cranberry
farm
Östergård
farm
Stora Juleboda
farm
Österlen’s arboretum
Boat in Forest
farm
With this project, we wish to draw attention to —
and encourage — a non-industrial agroforestry
approach capable of existing autonomously alongside the official food production system, being
characterized by a high degree of independence
from both value chains and economic demands.
This approach, shared by the Swedish participants
Katarina Holmdahl, Leo Sjöstrand, Jona Elfdahl,
Maja Lindström Kling, and Anders Lindén, along
with a handful of daily guest visitors, equates
independence with crisis preparedness. Consequently, this knowledge exchange has come to
revolve around food security, the costs of redundant systems, and the valuation of food produc-
Skriveri
forestrydemo
Ragares
Herb farm
Rydeholm farm
& forest garden
complex processes shaping Latvian agriculture
and forestry, and necessarily a limited understanding of the sites visited. However, it became clear
to us that we have much to learn from the Baltic
countries about maintaining self-sufficiency alongside industrial agriculture. As testimony to this,
we repeatedly encountered people selling honey,
sap, mushrooms, jam, pickled vegetables, and
hand-knitted goods at roadside stops.
Vadakste
Biodiversity
forest
Map: Sacha Nordén
tion systems that function independently — even in
the absence of labour, fuel, capital, value chains,
or specialised skills.
3. ECONOMICS
THE REAL VALUE OF TREES
— PRICELESS RESILIENCE
As elsewhere in society, there is a strong desire
to calculate short-term economic profitability in
agroforestry in order to justify long-term, intergenerational investments of labour, knowledge, and
capital required to establish tree-based systems,
particularly in a time when intergenerational continuity can no longer be taken for granted.
We would like to challenge this short-sighted approach. Calculating what apple trees, for example,
will generate in terms of income after a few years
in an alley-cropping system is a simplified and
misleading equation. Trees, like humans, cannot
