UNHIDE Agroforestry booklet 2025.09.22 - Flipbook - Page 8
Väversunda berry orchard with Food forest, Sweden
Walnut tree (Juglans regia)
TOR NYBERG, A TREE LOVING
PIONEER WHO BROUGHT
AGROFORESTRY TO SWEDEN
Tor Nyberg, Anders Lindén.
VÄVERSUNDA BERRY ORCHARD is located
south of Vadstena between Omberg and lake
Tåkern. It started as an “after retirement project” by
Inger Bjugård and Tor Nyberg, now in their eighties, and has since blossomed into a business with
up to 40 employees during the summer season.
Previously, Inger had a career as a food expert
journalist and author of cookbooks. Tor worked as
a forest inspector and had a remarkable 20 year
experience from agroforestry planting projects in
East Africa with the Swedish aid agency “We-agroforestry” (Vi-skogen), operating since 1993.
For a long time Inger and Tor nurtured a dream
to one day buy the Charlottenberg farm, having
noticed the favorable growing conditions when
passing by. The farm is located on a slope, a factor
that reduces the risk of frost, partly in (the Swedish) cultivar zone 1. The site is dominated by sandy
soils. In 1996 their dream came true.
Today the farm consists of seven hectares each
of strawberry and rhubarb cultivation and eleven
hectares of cherry orchards, all irrigated with a
drip system. Harvesting is done entirely by hand
by seasonal labor from other countries, as with
most commercial berry picking in Sweden.
THE FOOD FOREST
The purpose of our visit at Väversunda was the
less commonly known 8 hectare “emergency
forest garden” with established nut trees, at walking distance from the berry orchards, planted in
parallel from the start in 1996. At our visit, Stefan
Fogelqvist at “Freja FoodForest”, who has been
managing the Väversunda food forest since 2021,
was our guide.
During Tor’s long experience with crisis prevention by planting trees in Kenya, he realised that
agroforestry was as relevant in Sweden, and this
motivated him to bring the ideas of agroforestry
home, and to learn how to apply it according to
Swedish conditions.
