Silvopasture is the idea of integrating food crops that grow high such as orchards and grapevines, but allowing grazers to graze underneath on grass. Is also often known as Agriforestry
In theory many farm areas would be capable of producing large quantities of grape vines (or other fruit) without reducing the amount of sheep that they feed on their land.
Importantly this often benefits the animals that are grazing alongside the huge quantity of fruit that can be taken each year. The food crops could be apples or pears or plums that across the farm could produce very large quantities of these fruits.
Another extremely important fact is that this can absorb many of the negative gases that cows emit, thereby hugely reducing the impacts on the natural world. Now of course you would have to be careful with what species you bred under the trees – grazers would work well, species that browse may well gnaw at the tree enough to kill it.
If this was done in the right way, this would allow millions of extra trees to be planted across the UK, both benefiting the farmers who host them and pulling carbon out of the air at the same time. This could also greatly increase the farmers income, reducing the need for monetary support for farming in the UK. It would also mean that many of the negative gases released by livestock, could be taken in by local plants. It would of course be an expensive thing to set up, but it is surely a better thing to help set up either agroforestry or silvopasture than to make the farmers permanently needing additional handouts in order to make their land earn enough money. This is the great advantage of fruiting trees – the country gets the benefits of carbon sequestration and the farmer gets the benefits of the fruit crop (something that could be very large)
