Measure the harvests from your food forest

Do you own or manage a food forest? And would you like to know how much your forest yields?
You can do this through your food forest project on this website. You’ll then receive free access to the food forest monitoring tool. This allows you to measure how well your food forest is (already) performing in terms of biodiversity, for example, or how much CO2 is being stored. You can also track the economic yield from your harvest.

This data is interesting for you and for science as well!

Create a food forest project Download the field guide

What can you measure?

Four easy-to-use, scientifically validated, and free online assessment tools have been developed that benefit both the community and the scientific community.

If you have a food forest project listed on the site, you can take this test, which consists of the following sections:

  • Biodiversity (once a year in May and June)
  • Soil organisms (once a year in October)
  • Soil composition & pH (once every 5 years)
  • CO2 storage (once every 5 years)
  • Financial review (once a year, since you're doing the bookkeeping anyway)

Everyone who has registered a food forest project will receive our reminder emails twice a year (in May/June and October) to help you take measurements. After all, your data only provides truly valuable insights if you submit your measurements every year.

You can find more tips at the bottom of this page in the FAQ section.

What are the requirements for participation?

Any food forest can participate, even if your forest does not yet fully meet the Green Deal’s definition of food forests. It is therefore important that you answer the questions as honestly as possible when creating your food forest project, so that we know exactly what kind of food forest you have when we analyze the data. This ensures we are not comparing apples to oranges.

Ready to start measuring right away?

If you haven't created a profile yet, please do so first and register your food forest. Then go to "Log In." Next, you can enter your measurements via "My Account."

Download the field guide for instructions

Measuring biodiversity

You can measure biodiversity by surveying all the plants in the herbaceous layer within a selected plot once a year and recording how many of each plant you see. The field guide explains exactly how to do this. You should conduct this survey every year between May and June. An app like Plantnet can be very helpful for this, but you can also use Obsidentify or Google Lens.

In the video on the right, we explain how it works.

In this test, we measure only the annuals and perennials in the herb layer of your food forest. The overall diversity of these plants is assigned a score. In addition, a species list is compiled that is increasingly valuable to science. The list also teaches us about succession and about variation by soil type or region. After the test, you’ll receive immediate feedback on how your food forest is performing compared to similar projects.

Soil fauna survey

During the annual soil fauna days, we also count the soil fauna in the same tree plot. We then submit this data for all the food forests participating in the national survey.

The field guide explains how to take measurements, and here you'll find a handy chart listing the names of various soil organisms.

Soil composition and PH

It is especially important for new food forests to know what type of soil you are starting with and what its pH level is. We want you to repeat this test every 5 years so that we can eventually determine whether food forests help reduce the acidity of acidic soils.

The field guide also explains exactly how to measure this. We explain it in this video as well.

CO2 storage in trees

In this test, you measure the height and circumference or diameter of all trees and tall shrubs that are 130 cm or taller in the tree plot. You enter this number and receive an estimate of how much CO2 is stored in this plot during the first year. If you take another measurement in three years, you’ll find out how much your food forest contributes to the much-needed storage of carbon. How cool is that!

This video tells you more about measuring CO2 storage in trees.

Economy

We’ve decided to ask you to fill out the financial data for your food forest once a year. We’re keeping this very close to what you’d need to track for your accounting, and we’re not just interested in the weight in kilograms, but also in the hours of work and how that translates into (other forms of) economic returns.

The analyses and scientific research

If you participate in the measurements, it’s also interesting to learn more about the actual results. Of course, this will be limited in the early years, but the more we measure, the more interesting this data becomes.

Every year, we publish the results in our open data repository. And once every five years, we ask Wageningen University and Research (WUR) to conduct an analysis—as soon as a meaningful analysis can be performed. Your personal data and the exact location of the food forest will, of course, not be made public. In 2025, an ecologist from Wageningen (WUR) conducted such an analysis of all the entered data. It revealed that more than 300 species had already been found, with a shift toward more nutrient-rich systems.

Would you like to learn more about the collected data? Read more about this open data and explore the data that is already available.

If you’d like to learn more about the scientific basis and development of the tool, check out the webinars from 2020 and 2021. There you’ll find presentations on the tool’s structure, results, and the 2021 validation study. In that study, we examined the margin of error among all the laypeople who participate in scientific research.

Watch the webinar on the "Measure Your Food Forest Harvest" project (2020)

Watch the webinar on the results and economic analysis (2021)

Ready to start measuring right away?

If you haven't created a profile yet, please do so first and register your food forest. Then go to "Log In." Next, you can enter your measurements via "My Account."

Log in or create an account Download the field guide

Frequently Asked Questions About Food Forest Monitoring

You don't have to be a member to submit data, but you do need to register as a participant and post a food forest project on the site.

You can enter your measurement data by:

  • Log in to the website, then go to “My Overview” to access your food forest;
  • Kies ‘enter measurements’;
  • Select the tree plot from last time, or create a tree plot first;
  • In that case, consider implementing the biodiversity test, for example.

  1. Log in to your profile and then go to your food forest project page (https://voedseluithetbos.nl/projects/name of your food forest). You can also find your project on the food forest map.
  2. On the project page, scroll down until you get to "Compare this forest to other forests."
  3. Here you choose your soil type and year and click "Filter for results." A result looks like this:

 

You can compare 2 measurements here. Comparison of soil animals is not in here for example . Here you only see the results the Co2 measurement and the biodiversity measurement to compare with other food forests that have participated.

The economics of a food forest is a hot topic full of big opinions. In this test, we have kept it simple. Precisely because we want as many people as possible to actually complete this test. We ask about:

  • The structure of your forest: legal form, type of forest, and whether you keep livestock there, for example;
  • The harvest in kilograms per food forest layer (upper canopy layer, lower canopy layer, shrub layer, and all other layers combined);
  • The euro yield per unit area of food forest;
  • Other sources of income, and in all cases we ask whether you generate that revenue locally, regionally, or further afield;
  • Forest harvesting and maintenance, and the associated costs (in economic terms);
  • Other types of investments and expenses;
  • And, how you organise it in terms of manpower: volunteers, people with a distance to, freelancers, staff.

This way, we collect highly relevant information without burdening food forest owners with hours of work. And we sincerely hope that you—especially if you want to help demonstrate that food forests offer viable revenue models—will participate in the economic survey. You can enter data for each year your forest has existed, and you can essentially copy the information you already track for your own records. A number of testers indicated that they hadn’t been keeping these records yet, and had now set them up themselves based on this framework.

The three ecological tests are organised in so-called tree plots per hectare. If you have a food forest of 1 hectare, you only need to do each test once; if you have more, we ask you to do the tests in several places.

The biodiversity test and the soil fauna test must be conducted every year.

TheCO2 storage testcan be conducted every three to five years. It can be done more frequently, but this is not required.

You should also perform the soil composition test once every five years.

You should enter the economic test every year. We recommend that you enter it at least once a year when you close the books or prepare the financial statements.

Roughly speaking, you spend one hour per test. If you pick up theCO2 storageand Biodiversity tests together in May or June, it will take you two hours per plot in the field and one hour on the computer. The economic test also takes an hour and the soil fauna takes half an hour per plot in the field and 15 minutes on the computer. So a small part of the day in total. These are averages, but it gives you an idea.