Welcome back to this ongoing series on tree planting and agroforestry. This week will be the first of a two part interview I did with Philipp Gerhardt, the founder of the website baumfeldwirtschaft.de (which translates basically to tree farming) and managing director of Deutsche Agroforst GmbH. He is considered a leading expert for keyline design in Central Europe and is active in research projects and as a lecturer in seminars. As a pioneer in agroforestry, he has developed new approaches with his team to implement modern agroforestry and water management systems. Together they develop holistic concepts for protection against drought and floods for companies or municipalities with elements from Keyline Design and regenerative agriculture, and climate-friendly forest conversion. He has advised numerous companies that are changing the landscape in the long term and are building new climate-friendly ways of doing business.
I first got to know Philipp in person while I was working with our team at Climate Farmers to organize our conference last year. I was thrilled to find him in our group of agroforestry nerds and learned so much from him in just a few days. One of my highlights from the event was getting to listen in on the conversations Philipp and Mark Shepard had about the history and evolution of forestry science, and I knew that I had to get Philipp on an episode one day.
Well it finally happened and the result was an hour and a half conversation that I’ve split into two parts in which Philipp and I explore both high level concepts of integrating trees into agricultural landscapes and the role they play in restoring the healthy function of the hydrological cycle to the land, all the way to detailed stories of case studies and projects that Philipp and I are working on.
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