Arborpedia
All routes

Farming with trees

Agroforestry systems that produce food and timber from the same ground without spending the soil.

Growing·Restoration·Trees
  1. 01
    A hand-drawn property design showing concentric zones and sector arrows
    Growing№ 3516 min

    Permaculture Design: Zones, Sectors, and the Principles Behind Them

    The design framework itself — zones by visit frequency, sectors for incoming energies, and why the principles are a checklist rather than a philosophy.

  2. 02
    A mature food forest with fruit trees, berry bushes, and ground cover plants
    Growing№ 1704 min

    Designing a Food Forest

    How to stack seven layers of edible woodland that feeds you for decades while slowly shedding the chores of an annual garden.

  3. 03
    A dense syntropic planting line with banana, cassava and young timber trees at different heights
    Growing№ 4796 min

    Syntropic Agriculture: Farming by Accelerating Succession

    Ernst Götsch's system of dense stratified planting and heavy pruning, where the chainsaw is a fertility tool and succession is the crop rotation.

  4. 04
    Rows of young trees running through an arable field with a cereal crop growing between them
    Restoration№ 0085 min

    Alley Cropping: Rows of Trees, Crops Between

    Widely spaced tree rows with arable or vegetable alleys between them — the orientation, spacing, and root pruning that decide whether it works.

  5. 05
    Cattle grazing beneath widely spaced mature trees in an open pasture
    Restoration№ 4366 min

    Silvopasture: Trees, Forage, and Livestock on the Same Ground

    Deliberate integration of trees and grazing animals, why it outproduces either alone, and the establishment mistakes that kill the trees.

  6. 06
    Cattle in a small temporary paddock beside a tall rested sward behind an electric fence
    Restoration№ 3995 min

    Rotational Grazing: Rest Is the Whole Technique

    Why recovery time rather than stocking rate determines pasture health, how to read regrowth, and where holistic grazing claims outrun the evidence.

  7. 07
    Coffee bushes and young cacao growing beneath a canopy of taller shade trees
    Trees№ 0606 min

    Cacao and Coffee: The Understorey Cash Crops

    Two shade-adapted crops that built agroforestry economies — why sun-grown systems yield more and cost more, and what shade actually buys.

  8. 08
    A restoration site plan with budget spreadsheets and cost breakdowns on a table
    Restoration№ 3916 min

    Restoration Economics: What It Costs and Who Pays

    Realistic cost ranges, why maintenance is the line item that gets cut, and the funding structures that keep projects alive past year three.

Previous routePlanting an orchard from scratchNext routeDown to the water table