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Motivation and perception of farmers on the benefits and challenges of agroforestry in Sweden (Northern Europe)
Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Faculty of Geography, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Lviv, Ukraine.
Faculty of Geography, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Lviv, Ukraine.
Örebro University, School of Science and Technology.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8503-0118
2024 (English)In: Agroforestry Systems, ISSN 0167-4366, E-ISSN 1572-9680Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Agroforestry systems provide multiple benefits for human wellbeing and biodiversity; however, their diversity and spatial distribution has sharply declined across Europe. This study focuses on agroforestry farms in Sweden. The aim of the study was to explore farmers' motivations to start agroforestry, what benefits farmers attributed to their agroforestry farms and perceived challenges to practising agroforestry in Sweden. In total, 13 farms that practise various agroforestry forms were selected as case studies. A focus group, semi-structured interviews and field observations were used for data collection. We identified four types of agroforestry systems such as silvopasture, silvoarable, forest farming and forest gardens established on different land such as forested or agricultural land. All studied agroforestry farms were small but had complex spatial and temporal arrangements of crops, trees and animals, which were crucial to generating multiple benefits. Our results show that the multifunctionality of agroforestry systems resulted from farmers' desire to design such systems. Farmers' intentions to get foods and materials from their farms were always intentionally unified with multiple ecosystem services. We argue that agroforestry farmers are designers of multifunctional landscapes, as they deliberately organised their farming activities to get a bundle of ecosystem services belonging to all four categories-provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural. However, the complexity of agroforestry management, lack of technologies suitable for small-scale agroforestry farms, limited plant materials (including seedlings) and limited knowledge about how to do agroforestry challenged the scaling up of agroforestry practices.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer, 2024.
Keywords [en]
Agroforestry, Ecosystem services, Farmers' perspective, Multifunctional landscapes
National Category
Forest Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-112818DOI: 10.1007/s10457-024-00964-1ISI: 001187603600001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85188149302OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-112818DiVA, id: diva2:1848510
Funder
Stockholm UniversityEkhaga FoundationAvailable from: 2024-04-03 Created: 2024-04-03 Last updated: 2025-01-20Bibliographically approved

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Björklund, Johanna

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