Farm forestry

The focus of this paper is on managed tree resources outside the forest. It is principally concerned with trees grown on-farm by individuals and with woodlots managed by user groups as a common property resource. It excludes those situations where tree products are still harvested from unmanaged open access resources.

A feature of most systems covered by this definition, which distinguishes them from conventional forestry, is the integration of the trees into predominantly agricultural land use patterns. Other distinguishing features are the small scale, the orientation to meeting local needs and the involvement of the users in the management of the resource.

Until recently, the issues relating to management of such tree resources received remarkably little attention. The mandate of most forest services and forestry research organizations confined their attention to forest areas, and agricultural services were concerned only with those tree species which had been domesticated and adopted as agricultural crops. During the past ten to twenty years, the importance of tree products in the rural economy, and of local tree resources to supply those products, has become widely recognized with the growing attention to the place of the rural sector in the development process, environmental issues, and rising energy costs.

The management of farm and communal resources is as yet only imperfectly understood because it has attracted attention only recently. By comparison with other aspects of developing country agriculture, a severe shortage of quantitative information exists. However, experience is accumulating rapidly, and now allows us to formulate a number of propositions about some of the issues involved.