The challenge of marketing agroforestry
Agroforestry, or the integration of trees into agricultural systems, is an innovative way to improve the sustainability (both ecological and economic) of farming. By planting lanes of trees between row crops, planting groves in cattle pastures, or planting perennial buffers along streams and on the edges of fields, farmers can curtail erosion, reduce stress from heat and wind in crops and livestock, and capture pollution before it exits the field. Unfortunately, adoption of these practices remains limited. In 2017, 1.5% of American farms reported using agroforestry in the Census of Agriculture, growing to a mere 1.7% in 2022. Financial barriers, farmer age, land ownership issues, and lack of knowledge restrict agroforestry adoption, even among growers who express an interest in the concept.
Numerous strategies have been deployed to expand agroforestry: financial incentives, land access programs, educational efforts, apprenticeships, etc. Commercialization strategies that seek to directly stimulate consumer demand for agroforestry-grown products is an increasingly popular strategy among players in perennial agriculture. Many of these efforts emphasize specific tree crops that are well-suited to agroforestry systems. Black currants, for example, perform well under shady conditions. Black walnuts leaf out late in the growing season, allowing understory crops to monopolize spring light. Some crops yield higher when paired with other species, while others offer more diverse income streams. The theory of change for many commercialization efforts is that stimulating markets for agroforestry compatible crops can accelerate the broader adoption of agroforestry among producers and propagate its environmental and social benefits.
Existing agroforestry marketing efforts tend to focus on the qualities of the crop itself, highlighting its culinary, nutritional, or novelty characteristics, instead of the actual practices that produced the product. This approach deviates from other sustainable food movements, such as the regenerative or organic movements, which bring their theories of change to the forefront in marketing efforts. The premium organic farmers charge comes from being able to convince consumers that their vision of agriculture is more healthful and sustainable than other products on the market.
This anachronism begs the question, why haven’t agroforesters centered their farming practices in advertising campaigns, packaging, or similar venues? Unlike other agricultural philosophies, agroforestry doesn’t have an obvious consumer face. Integrating trees into a production system rarely confers obvious flavor or nutritional benefit that marketers can draw upon (more on this later). Agroforestry practices can also be quite esoteric for the uninitiated. Phrases like silvopasture or alley cropping don’t conjure up a meaningful image in the consumer’s mind, much less make obvious what the benefits are. The technical nature of agroforestry makes quick and articulate communication, necessary for the notoriously limited medium that is food packaging, quite difficult to pull off. Additionally, since agroforesters are more disposed towards growing obscure crops, there isn’t much existing knowledge or experience among the consumer market for using these ingredients, furthering the communications challenge.
However, agroforestry has numerous elements that can be leveraged to differentiate our products in the marketplace and provide robust opportunities to entrepreneurs in the space.
Seeing the market for the trees
The primary differentiating quality of agroforestry systems is the presence of trees. And what a panacea that is for agroforesters! What could poll better in the court of public opinion than trees? Trees are synonymous with positive environmental outcomes. Practically every city’s Earth Day festival includes a tree planting event, and numerous green companies promise to ‘plant a tree with every purchase.’ The average consumer intrinsically understands the habitat, climate, and rehabilitative benefits of trees. This self evident goodness means that it takes little packaging or ad space to communicate what’s advantageous about tree-inclusive farming. Emphasizing agroforestry as ‘agriculture with trees’ is a great shortcut to communicating the value of these products in the minds of consumers.
One company has, in my view, utilized this strategy to great effect. The Minnesota based Regenerative Poultry Cooperative have developed a unique hazelnut silvopasture where chickens graze on plant parts and insects. The branding they’ve developed to sell their poultry is Tree-Range Farms. By focusing on the system’s tree component, they’ve effectively differentiated their product offerings from other chicken brands (even in competitive natural grocers where free-range, pasture-raised chicken is abundant). The system itself is grounded in a desire to replicate the “jungle-like” environment where chickens originate from, but if they focused on that in their marketing, consumers would either need to spend more time reading marketing materials or have pre-existing knowledge of chicken domestication and ecology to fully grasp the system’s benefits and legitimacy. But by simplifying the message to ‘Trees are great!” consumers quickly internalize the product’s value.
This sort of tree-centric and related environmental messaging could be a great way to expose consumers to obscure foods and elevate the stature of novel agroforestry crops. Using approachable messaging that links new foods to familiar and positive concepts like tree-inclusive farming, food forests, or native plants can rally interest among consumers. Shoppers may pass-over elderberries, Aronia berries, or pawpaws due to their unfamiliar appearance and names. But marketing that associates an unfamiliar food with positive traits, such as being pollinator friendly or part of a regions agrarian heritage, provides an effective entry point.
Anchoring novel crops to some sort of familiar concept is another way to make them more appealing to new customers. Waldfrucht, a common entry in the German jam and juice canon translating to ‘fruits of the forest,’ can provide a blueprint for this sort of strategy. This traditional flavor approximates wild berry or mixed berry here in the States, acting as a blend of beloved traditional European berries: red and black currants, raspberries, blackberries, and bilberries. In adapting this concept into a ‘Fruits of the Forest’ or ‘Native Midwestern Fruits’ brand, regional crops like elderberry, honeyberry, juneberry, blueberry, Aronia, and pawpaws could be introduced through this familiar mixed berry format. This approach trades on recognizability to overcome gastroskepticism, using a balance of familiar and novel fruits to alleviate consumer apprehension. A ‘Fruits of the Forest’ brand that sells jams, granolas, juices, and dried fruits could then pair this blend with eco-friendly messaging that elevates the profile of agroforestry-produced crops and build new markets. The combination of novel and familiar foods along with real environmental and social benefits provides the enterprising agroforester with a rich array of differentiating factors that can be used to target diverse market segments.
Aside from its association with various environmental benefits, trees can help improve the nutritional or flavor qualities of agroforestry grown products. Shade can trigger physiological changes in plants, some of which impart quality or nutritional improvements. In tea, for example, there’s some evidence that shade elicits increased production of flavor compounds in the leaf, and in some cultivars of blueberry anthocyanin and antioxidant contents are raised under shade. Fleshing out this data and using it to craft marketing messages can be another avenue to differentiate agroforestry products in the marketplace.
A note on certifications
A certification program could also be used to strengthen consumer demand for agroforestry crops, similar to the Certified Organic label managed by the USDA. To secure this label, farmers would be inspected and verified for using a recognized agroforestry practice. Once approved, they could then ideally sell their produce at a premium.
While using certifications to draw in consumers proved lucrative to early adopters, I question whether an agroforestry certification would work in 2026. Consumers are inundated with certification soup: Non-GMO, Gluten Free, No Seed Oils, and an assortment of regenerative labels. Marketers are asking consumers to know a lot about the health and environmental impact of their purchases through these labels, and for the average person, that’s a lot of mental load. I feel that, as this trend continues, we’ll see diminishing returns for certification labels. This may be especially true for agroforestry practices, which are fairly esoteric compared to concepts like Grass Fed beef or Non-GMO. The one place I could see a ‘Grown under Agroforestry’ certification being useful is in marketing to procurement officers at food companies, who spend more time and attention on certifications to help meet corporate sustainability goals. For a company with erosion and emissions reduction ESG goals, one could see an agroforestry certification being a way to secure more business for agroforestry practitioners.
While there are few straightforward avenues for consumer-centric marketing for agroforesters, there are several notable characteristics of agroforestry crop and livestock systems that can win attention and purchase orders. Focusing on trees and their ecological and aesthetic qualities is a promising approach for agroforesters everywhere to stake out a robust foothold in the marketplace.
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