UNHIDE Agroforestry booklet 2025.09.22 - Flipbook - 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
Rydeholm farm
& forest garden
With this project we wish to draw attention to and
encourage a non-industrial agroforestry approach
that is capable of living a life of its own, side-byside with the official food production system,
being characterized by a high degree of independence from both “value chains” and economic
demands. The 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, is to equate this independence with crisis
preparedness. Consequently, this knowledge exchange has, in our daily discussions, come to be
about food security, costs for redundant systems
and the valuation of food production systems that
function independently - even in the absence of
labor, fuel, capital, value chains or skills.
3. ECONOMICS
THE REAL VALUE OF TREES
- PRICELESS RESILIENCE
Vadakste
Biodiversity
forest
Skriveri
forestrydemo
Ragares
Herb farm
Map: Sacha Nordén
As everywhere else in society, there’s a desire to
calculate short-term economic profitability in agroforestry, to justify the longer-term, intergenerational investments in work effort, knowledge gathering and money needed to establish these long-term
tree-based systems, not least since we live in a time
when we no longer count on intergenerational
continuity.
We would like to question 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 quite simplified and
misleading equation, since trees, just like humans,
cannot so easily be evaluated in terms of measurable monetary benefits. While a person’s merits
can be priceless in terms of humanism, altruistic
work or unpaid lifelong devotion for the common
good, trees obviously contribute far beyond their
yield.
During this project, a parallel was made between
economic expectations of trees and of a young
