AFINET News

A total of 28 stakeholders attended the 2nd RAIN meeting, more than 1/3 of them being practitioners (farmers/foresters).

The second RAIN meeting of the AFINET project was held on 18 January 2018 at the Institute of Agro-Environmental and Forest Biology (IBAF) of the National Research Council (CNR), Porano (TR).

Spanish RAIN met together for the second time on January 16^th. The meeting was held in Touro (A Coruña, Galicia, NW Spain) and was attended by around 45 agroforestry actors as practitioners, policy makers, researchers and producer’s associations.

After several weeks of intense dissemination of the 2nd PT RAIN meeting, a total of 36 RAIN members attended the 2nd Portuguese meeting, that took place on the 30^th of January, at Instituto Superior de Agronomia (ISA) in Lisbon.

Around 60 people attended the meeting, which included a visit to a burned cork tree stand área (on the summer of 2017).

During this gathering, partners and Innovation Brokers discussed relevant subjects concerning the development of the project and participated in four workshop sessions focusing in the most relevant bottlenecks and challenges regarding agroforestry that arose amongst nine involved regions to decide the best ways to approach them.

The day started with presentations covering the influence of trees on animal behaviour, the practicalities and economics of combining grazing animals with trees and grants and support available. Andrew then led us on a farm walk including a visit to his new wood pasture planting designed for stock grazing and shelter throughout the season.

The day centred around Tolly’s recently planted agroforestry system which has been integrated into his organic vegetable production system. Established in 2015, six single tree rows, a mixture of trees for fruit, timber and coppice products, have been planted with 20m wide cropping alleys in between. 

With a  group of fifty interested farmers and researchers, we visited Martin Crawford (Agroforestry Research Trust), Martyn Bragg (Shillingford Organics), Duchy Home Farm, and Iain Tolhurst (Tolhurst Organic).

The aim of the meeting was to identify major problems of wooded rural landscapes in this part of Europe, particularly it was focused on wooded pastures in the Carpathian region.