Food forestry

All you would like to know about food forestry

What is a food forest?

Food forests are popular in the Netherlands. Small and large-scale food forests are being planted in all provinces by....

Business models

The story about the costs and benefits of a food forest sounds almost too good to be true, especially when these costs and benefits....

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Non-native species

Among nature lovers, tempers can sometimes run high when it comes to native and non-native species in relation to wildlife management...

Historical perspective

The definition 'food forest' is a commonly used term worldwide.' It refers to agricultural ecosystems with the layered structure and diverse species of a natural forest. In a food forest, mainly perennial plants, trees and shrubs grow, providing edible or otherwise useful products. Meanwhile, the term ‘food forests’ increasingly denotes contemporary systems that are purposefully designed in the context of today's food transition from industrial mono-cultures to integrated poly-cultures...

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No timber plantation

Maybe, the notion of a food forest is so difficult to capture, due to a rather limited perception of forests. Dutch forests are largely production forests. They are all planted and usually consist of closely spaced trees of the same species, with a closed crown roof and little varied undergrowth. Before these forests have a chance to grow into a system with more layers and high biodiversity, they are already being cut down for timber production...

Food forests and biodiversity

A high biodiversity is crucial for the health and productivity of a food forest. Numerous edible and non-edible species find their habitat in the food forest, because of their supportive functions for the entire ecosystem. For example, leguminous plants, such as olive willows and alders, are planted to fix atmospheric nitrogen, which is needed throughout the ecosystem as a nutrient. Other plants, trees and shrubs can "pump up" certain minerals from deeper layers of the subsoil with their deep root systems. By allowing the leaves of these species to compost on the top layer of the soil, the minerals from deep soil layers also become available to other, less deeply rooted species...

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Design, planting and operation

The development of diverse and vital ecosystems for the production of food and other useful products has been effectively taken up in recent decades by permaculture and in the field of agroforestry. For food production, permaculture is based on several universal ecological principles, that can be derived directly from the structure and dynamics of natural ecosystems, including forests. These ecological principles provide good guidance in the design, construction and exploitation of food forests...