Planning an agroforestry system always involves trade-offs.

Which tree species make sense? For which impacts? And how do you balance carbon, water, biodiversity and farmer livelihoods?

FarmTree supports organisations in designing credible, data-backed farm plans — for individual farms or uniform production systems such as cocoa or coffee agroforestry. We help balance environmental objectives with economic realities, so plans work both on paper and in practice.

Together with your team, we translate objectives into an optimised farm design, including layout, assumptions and financial projections. Results are presented in a clear business case and made available in the FarmTree Platform, where designs can be reviewed, updated and adjusted as field realities evolve.

When working at landscape scale — across cooperatives, provinces or watersheds — the key challenge is credibility. How do you aggregate farm-level data into an investment case that financiers, climate funds or governments will accept?

FarmTree helps project developers translate a limited number of representative farm plans into a robust, landscape-level investment case. Based on 2–5 sample farm designs, we model costs, returns and environmental benefits at scale — aligned with the requirements of institutions such as the Green Climate Fund.

The result is a clear economic and financial analysis, supported by transparent assumptions and dashboards that support decision-making and reporting.

After a project is designed and funded, the real work begins.

Teams move from planning to implementation — and new questions arise.

How do we explain the investment case to farmers?

How can farmers show their investment case to micro credit or other financers?

How do we track inputs, labour and outcomes in a consistent way?

And how do we respond confidently to questions from financiers, governments or carbon buyers once the project is running?

In this module, FarmTree experts and project staff collect local data, to improve the quality of the default FarmTree data. This to develop a fully localised online data set, that feed into farm planning tools.

Learn to Operate the Platform is about building the capability to plan and monitor agroforestry projects with confidence.

FarmTree supports project teams by helping them translate project assumptions into practical data routines. We work with your team to define what needs to be measured, how data is collected in the field, and how it is structured so it can be used — not just reported.

Rather than outsourcing monitoring or analysis, Learn to Operate helps organisations develop in-house capability. 

Teams learn how to record changes at farm level through simple surveys, process changes into farm carbon stock, cash flows, and other performance indicators, and assess project impact year-after-year with updated operational progress. FarmTree experts stand by for sparring and on-the-job training, as well as receiving feedback.

As a multi-national organisation, you work in different countries on different projects. How can I report on those projects with comparable metrics? 

After the Capture Project and Learn to Operate the Project Platform, your organisation is in a strong position to embark new projects, derisk interventions and plan for impact, and report to investors. 

Note that for carbon monitoring and certification, often specialised measuring and reporting services are required. FarmTree helps you to broaden the metrics you report on. Based on local data and science of course.  

The FarmTree Model is accessible through an API, allowing to integrate the FarmTree Model in your own platform.