Agroforestry Furniture Collection
Objects / With Mark Tuckey / 2024Spec
Kind: furniture
Design: Bronwen Main, with Mark Tuckey
Imagine if all construction timbers in Australia were grown in a way that regenerated degraded farm soils, improved livestock health, provided biodiversity habitat for endangered species and shaped resilient, beautiful landscapes that stitched together bioregional communities. The Making Of Material explores this possibility through a collection of furniture pieces made from agroforestry timber, designed by Bronwen Main in collaboration with Mark Tuckey and documentary short film by Grace Moore, that captures both process and philosophy.
Over 20% of agricultural land in Australia is affected by salting or other forms of degradation that compromise its use for growing crops and livestock grazing. Much of this land could be remediated by planting native trees, providing supplementary income streams for farmers in the form of valuable timbers and flowers, while providing additional benefits including reducing livestock deaths by sheltering from exposure to sun and wind, improving soil health by holding more water in the landscape and increasing biologically beneficial insect and bird populations, enhancing biodiversity and creating beautiful aesthetic environments across regional Australia.
Leading farmers in the Otway Agroforestry Network have spent 35 years testing methods for planting, managing and monitoring tree plantings interspersed with livestock agriculture. This project was about testing the quality of timber for furniture and carving a premium market pathway for the timbers, an important step in proving the business model of agroforestry to unlock more trees on farms.
Bronwen's design can be found here:
Threads
The Making of Material (documentary on the agroforestry growers
Stand Trees (the marketplace this run seeded)
Green School Chair (the same argument for Indonesian forests)
Contact
Most of our projects begin as conversations. If something here has started one, write to frank@mainfrank.com.
A collection designed by Bronwen Main in collaboration with Mark Tuckey, made from timber grown in agroforestry systems: trees planted through grazing country, where the harvest pays a farmer to keep them standing.
Photos by Lilli Waters
Documentary - The Making of Material: Featured in Melbourne Design Week 2025, the event included a screening of a thought-provoking short film directed by Grace Moore and shot by Alexander Naughton, featuring insights from Andrew Stewart, a Bob Hawke Landcare Award winner. The film reveals the importance of agroforestry and its potential impact on the future of Australian design.
Special thanks to
The Stewarts
Rowan Reid
Where to buy
Threads
Agroforestry Furniture (the project and the film)
Core thesis
Fukuoka farmed rice and citrus for decades by progressively removing interventions: no tilling, no weeding, no chemical fertiliser, no pesticides. Each subtraction forced him to understand the system well enough that it could do the work itself. Yields matched conventional farms. "Do-nothing farming" is a misnomer; it is observation-heavy, intervention-light.
What it unlocks in practice
Fukuoka is Taleb's via negativa and Lao Tzu's wu wei proven in soil over forty years. For the practice it validates the instinct to strip systems out of buildings rather than add them, and to treat the first year of occupation as observation rather than correction. There is also a literal resonance: he seeded into standing straw, and we line walls with it. The by-product of grain farming carries the whole system in both cases.
Watch out for
His method was tuned to one farm over decades. The transferable thing is the epistemology (subtract, observe, adjust), not the specific techniques.