Clive Bright was buzzing last spring, despite the weather and the work.
The beef farmer was doing something he had been planning for years: preparing to plant thousands of trees on the family farm in Co Sligo. But this was not going to be an end to farming. His organic beef herd will still produce meat, but with more benefit for the land, the wildlife, the farm animals and the farm income.
Bright was inspired five years ago when he stood in a small sloped field of grass beneath towering 35-year-old ash trees in Loughgall, Co Armagh. The site on the research farm is home to an agroforestry pilot where trees and animal grazing have been combined for decades and a wealth of scientific evidence has been collected.
“As small as the size of that field is, the atmosphere under the trees was something else,” he recalls.
Prof Jim McAdam, a retired agricultural scientist, is the father of agroforestry on the island of Ireland, although he dislikes the term.
The Loughgall pilot would not exist without McAdam, whose fascination with the system protected it from institutional indifference down the years. The project was one of six plots planted across Britain and Ireland in the early 1990s.
“The [UK] department put a lot of money into it … Because we’re part of Queen’s University, we had master’s students and PhD students. We’d a whole rake of good work come out of here,” McAdam says on a stroll around the farm on a hot summer morning. The researchers kept finding evidence of a system that could work on many levels.
Then in the early 2000s, the British department “sort of said: ‘Look, Jim nobody’s interested in this’.” A few times he was told to remove the trees. Shortly after that the funding stopped. After a gap McAdam looked to the EU (this was pre-Brexit) and secured funding for measuring grass growth and soil health.
The field under these trees feels very different from the open pasture. “It feels gentle in there,” says McAdam. “It’s shelter from rain, sun and wind.”
There is plenty of grass growing underneath. Small cages are dotted around to measure grass growth. The big win of this system is an extension of the annual grazing season, which McAdam explains is “nearly four months longer”.
The researchers found they could keep animals out until November with a pasture that was drier underfoot and producing a healthy flush of autumn grass when the trees lost their leaves. Like most of the ash trees on the island, these ones are suffering from dieback disease, but they are not totally stricken. The spores live on the leaves and, because the animals have been eating the leaves when they fall, the progress of the disease seems to have slowed, McAdam says.
“If you can keep animals out of housing you only get around 6 per cent of the ammonia produced,” McAdam says. Ammonia is the result of urine and faeces combining in slurry tanks under slatted sheds when animals are indoors.
Agroforestry helps to prevent other kinds of agricultural pollution. Loughgall is about six miles from Lough Neagh, which turned to green algae sludge in 2023 as a result of nutrient run-off from farms and wastewater. Fertilisers that should have been going into growing ryegrass and crops were flowing into streams, rivers and groundwater.
Blue-green algae at Battery Harbour on Lough Neagh near Cookstown in Co Tyrone in August 2025. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA Wire
Tree roots strip out pollution, phosphates in particular, McAdam says. “Grass roots grow to 20-25cm; tree roots go a metre down. The nutrients soak through the groundwater and it’s in your Lough Neaghs and everywhere else. Here you have a network of tree roots that [are] mopping up that excess and putting it back up into the wood and into the leaves and recycling it.”
In one study, a student found twice as many earthworms in the soil under the trees as in the soil in the grassland. McAdam’s faith in this place means Loughgall has become Europe’s longest agroforestry trial.
As ever more extreme weather challenges farmers, Loughgall’s time to shine has come. On a sodden day in November 2015 it captured the interest of a visiting professor.
“We splodged up through this grass plot here and we got in under the trees and it was dry as a bone. And he always tells me that’s what changed their mind about how this could make a difference.”
Then there was the farming journalist who rang McAdam during the drought of 2018 when grass on the island of Ireland stopped growing in July and August. “He said: ‘Jim, I bet under your trees the grass is dead. And he came down and the grass was green in here. All the open pasture was brown and dusty and the grass still kept growing … The shade and shelter reduce the temperature of the sun beating on the soil.”
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German research recently found that wide spaced oak trees in grassland “were actually pumping water up during times of real drought and that was feeding the grass sward”.
This year of drought McAdam observed the grass agroforestry sites performing much the same way. “The shade from the leaves keeps the soil surface temperature a few degrees cooler, reducing moisture loss,” he explains.
Then, in 2010, forestry inspector Eugene Curran started bringing up officials from the Irish Department of Agriculture. “The South started to do something about it; that helped keep the interest in it going.”
The department now has an agroforestry scheme for farmers with the highest establishment and premium payments in Europe.
[ Looking after our hedgerows will look after our farms, nature and climateOpens in new window ]
Does he see future farms looking like this field? “I just see this as one option for looking at where trees will fit into a farm. I also see a future for corners and pockets filled with trees and I see a future where if you’re grazing in small paddocks instead of using wire, why not use small rows of trees? We’ve got good hedgerow density. Why not use that? Because there’s tremendous carbon storage in that, tremendous resilience.”
On his Sligo farm, even before planting trees this year, Bright had cut his work and costs by managing his grass so his small beef herd has grazed outside for the last three winters.
“I’m in year three of no hay, no silage. It’s so liberating. So cool,” he says of the effects of his earlier measures.
Clive Bright is planting trees to improve the sustainability of his farm in Ardsallagh, Ballymote, Co Sligo. Photograph: James Connolly
To apply for the agroforestry licence, he mapped the farm with a forester from Pro Silva Ireland, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable forestry. They designed rectangular copses of trees in some fields and single trees planted five metres apart in others. The map shows a quilt of dots and rectangles, triangles and patterns. Two large fields will be planted as native woodland.
Bright took on the preparation and fencing work on the farm near Ballymote in the spring. Fences will keep the animals out for the first decade or so and then they will be allowed to graze around the trees, using them for shelter and shade, like a living barn. Once the fencing and posting was done, a team of planters arrived and planted 11,500 trees in under a day and a half.
Bright plans to record birdsong every month at nine different locations around the fields to see what the trees will do to the bird population. Around a third of the farm will be in agroforestry, for which he will receive a €1,170 payment per hectare for the next decade.
There are just over 400 hectares of trees planted on farms across Ireland under the agroforestry scheme, with a further 480 hectares licensed and approved for planting, according to official figures. Maureen Kilgore, manager of the Irish Agroforestry Forum (of which this journalist is a volunteer member), looked recently at the last 100 licence applications. The average size per application was 5.8 hectares, with the most sites in Galway, Meath and Cork.
Maureen Kilgore at Pollards Organic Farm, Ballywilliam, Co Wexford. Photograph: Jim Campbell
Just 79 or so hectares of agroforestry existed in 2021 when the forum was established. Kilgore, who farms sheep on the north Cork and Kerry border, believes the idea of farming with trees has had a couple of key moments. The first was the legally binding commitment by the government in 2022 to reduce greenhouse gas emission from agriculture by 25 per cent by 2030.
“There is a perception that farmers are against planting trees on their farms,” Kilgore says. “But they’re against it being difficult.” There is continuing frustration with long waits for planting licences, although the licensing system is improving. There has been much off-licence planting, where farmers are planting trees without going through any schemes, Kilgore says.
Another key moment for farmers has been the weather changes: the increasing ferocity of storms, droughts and downpours. Finally there is the Department of Agriculture’s Acres scheme, with grants for hedgerows and tree planting.
Trees “bring huge value to my farm”, Kilgore says. She is prohibited from planting extensively as she is close to a meteorological station. But she has hedgerows filled with birdsong and insect life, and plenty of alder, birch and rowan. In lambing season her sheep use these for shelter.
Kilgore believes that, at some point in the future, “a field without trees will be worthless” as it will not be as productive or cost effective in a changing climate.
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