Unhide Agroforestry 2023-25

UNHIDE AGROFORESTRY is a collaboration between Agroforestry Sweden, represented by Maja Lindström Kling & Anders Lindén, Latvian Permaculture Association & MEŽA PROJEKTI with support from Erasmus+. It includes 2 road trips to unhide inspiring practicies of agroforestry (and plots with agroforestry elements) in Sweden & Latvia 2023-25.

The project is disseminated from the Swedish side with the film "I'm a Tree" (below), a booklet (front page below, link comming soon) and presentations at the Urban Food & farming Week at Botildenborg, Malmö, to agroecology students at SLU, Alnarp and during the yearly Nut Network Day at Holma folkhögskola 2024-25.

I'm a Tree

"I'm a Tree, what do I need?" is a film portrait of the Latvian forest owner and forester Agnis Graudulis, who for several years collected seeds of sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa), walnut (Juglans regia) and much more in Nordic and Baltic countries, with the aim to get as broad genetic diversity as possible, and has since built a 50 hectar Food forest system with great dedication of labor to the plantings, nature-based solutions to water management, and biodiversity. Runningtime 20 min. Photography, editing, production: Maja Lindström Kling.

A booklet

In May 2024 we launched “Unhide Agroforestry”, a knowledge exchange between
Permaculture Latvia, Latvia’s state Forestry Institute Silava and Agroforestry Sweden in the form of two week-long road trips in each country. The project arose from Permaculture Latvia’s intent to gather knowledge and educate experts who would raise awareness of and advocate for the benefits of (re)introducing agroforestry in Latvia. Agroforestry Sweden, at the same time, was open to international collaborations to learn from experiences from systems abroad. In the application process that followed, Ilze Mežniece, board chairman of Permaculture Latvia, became our anchor leading us to an accepted proposal. The project is funded by Erasmus+. 

PRICELESS RESILIENCE
Pre-industrial agroforestry has lived a life of its own side-by-side with the official food production systems and is therefore characterized by a high degree of independence from both “value chains” and economic demands. For us, Anders Lindén and Maja Lindström Kling, organizers of the Swedish road-trip and authors of this booklet, this knowledge exchange with Latvia has 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. The Swedish approach to the project is to equate this independence with crisis preparedness. An independence, detached from and unaffected by crisis. Even if the risk of all food-producing systems collapsing is low, the result would be a catastrophe. For farmers and at agricultural universities and institutions, efficiency is a leading ideal. But how rational is it to put all your eggs in the basket of industrial agriculture, which we know depletes soils and biodiversity and is so heavily dependent on the optimal functionality of so many other industrial systems? We believe a cost-benefit analysis would justify having a completely independent system in place, even if that system is inferior in economic competition.

The work with this booklet is still in progress. Comming in Mars 2025.