Farm Forestry

Farm forestry is the practice of growing trees on farmland, and it sits at the meeting point of agriculture and forestry. The idea is simple: a farmer's land can do more than grow crops — it can also grow trees, and those trees can serve the farmer in more ways than one.

The term applies specifically to the process under which farmers raise trees for both commercial and non-commercial purposes on their own farm lands. So the defining feature is that the trees are grown by farmers, on their own fields, and the purpose can be either to earn money or to meet household and farm needs.

To encourage this, forest departments of various states distribute seedlings of trees free of cost to small and medium farmers. This is a deliberate policy push — by removing the cost of planting material, the government makes it easier for smaller landholders to take up tree growing, which they might otherwise avoid.

For non-commercial farm forestry, the book lists several specific types of land that can be used for raising trees:

• margins of agricultural fields
• grasslands and pastures
• land around homes
• land around cow sheds …