The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e104: Silvopasture with Steve Gabriel

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

This ep: Ruminant co-host Tristan Banwell interviews Farmer and Author Steve Gabriel about his book  Silvopasture: A Guide to Managing Grazing Animals, Forage Crops, and Trees in a Temperate Farm Ecosystem.  Bonus content (more conversation) should show up in your podcast feed, otherwise: get it at theruminant.ca  Tristan and Steve discuss what to do with tree biomass you remove from your silvopasture system, a good approach to pruning, and current gaps in the knowledge of this topic. Show sponsors: Dubois Agrinovation

This episode is supported by Dubois Ag Renovation. For irrigation supplies, hand tools, mulch films, pest control, containers, and much more, visit Dubois Ag Renovation at duboisag.com and get free shipping on orders of $200 or more. That's d-u-b-o-i-s-a-g.com. And if we can do that at the same time, and if we can do that because it's benefiting farmers, and because it's allowing their farms to be more resilient, that's really where we find this win-win-win. And so that's what is most exciting to me about silvopasture is we're not asking farmers to compromise with their needs for production. We're actually asking them to produce more, just in a different way. I'm Jordan Marr, and this is The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca

or email me, editor at theruminant.ca. I'm on Twitter at ruminantblog or find me on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. Hey folks, it's Jordan, and I'm back after a long hiatus. It's not the first time, and once again, thank you for your patience. I'm really excited to tell you that this is episode one of a batch of five episodes that I'm going to drop all at once, which is kind of a first for the show. So over the next 24 hours, you should see all five episodes popping into your feed. you should see all five episodes popping into your feed. I won't bore you with the details of why I decided to release these episodes in a batch,

but suffice to say, I think it's just gonna work a little bit better for my schedule. All right, so I don't wanna delay anymore. I wanna get right to this episode, which is about Silva Pastor, which I know very little about, which is why you're gonna hear

from my friend and colleague, Tristan. But I don't need to say more because I've already recorded an intro with Tristan. And here it is. I hope you liked the episode and I will talk to you at the end of the show. Tristan Banwell of Spray Creek Ranch in lovely Lillooet, BC. Please tell the listeners why I'm talking to you right now. Well, Jordan, you are a vegetable producer. You produce what I produce eats. I am a livestock producer. So I am definitely more qualified to interview livestock enthusiasts than you are. That's not the script we talked about, Tristan.

Please stick to the script. You want me to just tell you that you suck again? Yeah, just tell me that I suck again. Say, just repeat after me jordan what who are you this is for the recording this is for right now every word here is for the recording as we're doing it jordan you suck you suck at livestock interviews you suck at livestock interviews how did that feel tristan you know it feels unnecessarily cruel okay i'll say it i suck i i suck at livestock interviews so everybody who's listening uh tristan has um tristan is a livestock producer and he's a he's a dang good one uh and

he's he's offered um very generously to record some of the livestock theme content for the show uh and that's why he's on the he's on the phone with me right now and and i am i am very grateful so thank you no problem but let's just qualify that too uh you know i might be uh doing livestock but you know not on a tremendous scale and a small diversified farm. And there's probably some others out there who are much larger. Well, let's just agree that you're in a better position to mine some of these topics than I am as regards animal production. So Tristan, welcome on board to the extent you're going to help out a bit. I am certainly grateful and I think the listeners will be too. So with all of that said, what have you

got in store for us today for your first full-length interview that you conducted for the show? So I was able to have a chat with Steve Gabriel, a small-scale farmer in the eastern U.S. who has become an expert on silvopasture and other agroforestry related topics. So he has a couple of excellent books out, but last summer he released Silvopasture, and I think it's a really timely topic for livestock farms of all scales, because silvopasture is one of the very promising agricultural techniques to mitigate and have a positive impact on the climate, to mitigate climate change and have a positive impact on the climate, hopefully. So I was able to have a good chat with him and discuss some of the topics around silvopasture with multi-species, some of the grazing related topics, establishment of the silvopasture and some of the different

uses of the trees and shrubs in those systems. Very cool. And let's keep this short and sweet. That's a pretty good intro, the interview then in just a minute. Although I do want the listenership to know that you made my life a little more, my editing life, a little more miserable than normal by going quite long in the interview. And there was some really good stuff. So what I plan to do is I've taken a few of the clips out that will not make the interview that listeners are about to hear. And if they're real keeners, they can go and check the, check those out, uh, on the, at the site, uh, at the website,

the ruminant.ca, if they want to listen to some bonus material, uh, and probably in the show notes, I will outline what that material entails. Sounds good. I think that, um, we may be doing it it wrong if you want to keep them a little shorter maybe if you do all the livestock interviews and i do all the vegetable production interviews um that would really simplify editing because uh just in general we might have less to talk it's true it's true you're right their episodes would be a lot more streamlined um you're ever the ideas man tristan and that's what i appreciate about you so okay tr episodes would be a lot more streamlined. You're ever the ideas, man, Tristan, and that's what I appreciate about you. So, okay, Tristan, thanks. Thanks a lot.

I hope listeners like what you've produced for us. And with a little luck, you'll be back to cover some more topics in future. Sounds great. Thanks for the opportunity. So my name is Steve Gabriel and I'm a farmer and an educator. I work for the Cornell Small Farms Program and we have a farm with my wife Elizabeth in central New York. And we've been here on this land for about six years and doing a lot of different production, but primarily in the last few years focused on silvopasture. I want to set the stage before we dig in a little bit. Project Drawdown, which listeners should check out if they're not familiar, is an initiative to model and rank the most promising existing technologies for climate mitigation over the next 30-year time frame. And silvopasture ranked as the ninth most powerful solution and as the most promising

of all agricultural solutions to climate change on their list. Also managed grazing, agroforestry in general, afforestation, and regenerative agriculture are related and are also high on the list. It seems like a good time for a book about temperate climate silvopasture. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, that was the reason I got into it. And really the goal for me was to pull together what we knew about this practice in the temperate region and what we didn't know and try to

summarize that. And my sense is that we have enough to get started and do this without doing harm to the environment and to rebuild farm economies. And yeah, as you said, because we know there's more and more news about managed grazing being a positive force in sequestering carbon. But there's a lot of debate around that, the particulars of that and the details. And it really depends on the climate and what we're talking about in the world and some of the context. The short end of it is when you add trees, it's a no-brainer and what it does is it always gives you a net carbon gain. And so especially fast-growing trees and what it does is it always gives you a net carbon gain and so especially

fast growing trees and trees that accumulate carbon fast are really going to be key approaches i think in the next uh next decade here okay so i want to start off with the bones of it because this is a new concept for some listeners and then we'll get into the meat of some of the specific opportunities and techniques so first off could you simply define silvopasture for us? Yeah, sure. So it's a really combination of two words. So silvo, as in silviculture, which is the fancy word for forest management or forestry. And pasture, of course, implies grazing. And so we're combining, really at the end of the day, we're combining good forestry practices, good grazing practices, and good animal husbandry and the three of those things together and the symbiosis between them. So we don't do, we don't focus on one of those corners of the triangle as a sacrifice of any of the others.

So it's really looking for the symbiosis between those three elements in the system. And that can be really varied. And there's a lot of room for creativity and flexibility in that so what are what are some of the principles of a successful silvopasture system yeah so i'd say that the main principles are we think really cautiously about the type of animal that we're bringing into the landscape and that um the animals matched very well to the uh the stage of succession that the land is in the the goals of the farmer you know local markets all those things but also um the management of the animals really works

to heal the landscape and not to do damage to it because uh we do have remnants of a history where trees and animals have had sort of an adverse relationship where the animals have actually done damage to the trees. So we want to think really carefully about the animal selection and how we're going to move them. We need to move them. So rotational grazing is really a must in a silvopasture system. And I've worked with many farmers who haven't gotten the rotational grazing system down and then want to do silvopasture, and I encourage them to start with the rotational grazing piece and then add the trees because that alone is a learning curve

and something to consider before you add that next layer of complexity. And then I think it's really important to consider the, I guess, the value that diverse forages can provide to animals. And maybe we'll get into this interview, but if not, I'd really encourage folks to check out the work of Fred Provenza and the concept of behavior-based management. concept of behavior-based management because I think what I was most surprised about in studying silvopasture and pulling together this information was was that missing gap in my education which was about the inherent wisdom and nutritional wisdom that's that are in our grazing livestock and the ways that we think about forages we think about providing you know a meal for them and we think about providing a comfortable habitat for them. Really what we're talking about with silvopasture at the end of the day

is an ecosystem where the animal is able to gain their sustenance, is able to be better protected from the hot summer sun, snow in the winter, heavy winds. We're providing a much more comfortable existence certainly than a feedlot and even more so than an open pasture. And so the principle there is, is really to look at this as an ecosystem that, that the animals nestled into and that can gain sustenance from.

And that sustenance is not about just calories. It's not just about bulking them up, but it's actually about providing food, nutrients, and medicine. And so hopefully we'll talk about willow, but that's one of my most favorite species in silvopasture because we found it just to be such a critical species for not only the sustenance of our grazing sheep, but also for their health long-term. Right. Okay. So we have there some of the what so let's get into the why silvopasture we briefly touched at the beginning on the biosequestration potential of the system but could you elaborate on some of the other

benefits of silvopasture systems yeah so i guess for benefits um you know there's a lot of a lot of great reasons to do silvopasture. Some of the things I found as a farmer to be, I think, most important, as I mentioned before, is habitat for livestock, so shade, shelter. find ourselves increasing the acreage on our farms that we're utilizing because we start to look at the edges, the hedgerows, the overgrown lands that may have been abandoned by previous farmers as really valuable real estate because they're often already covered in woody brush. And so we can utilize those as pasture without having to clear all of the land. We can, in many cases, put the animals right to work, helping open up and clear those pastures. And then I think the biggest one that really hit home for us a couple of years ago, in 2016, we had a pretty historic drought here in central New York, one of the driest years on record.

And for us, we had just really gotten into our rotational grazing system, really refined it, of course, to then encounter this thing called climate change. And we had done our first rotation of our sheep in the spring, no problem. By the time they came back around to that first paddock, we had planned on that paddock having adequate forage for them. But because of the drought, the grass had literally not grown. In our case, with our sheep, which were the Katahdin breed, really highly adaptable, their habits of grazing are very much like goats. We were actually able to put them into the woody edges of our farm landscape and have them

sustain themselves entirely off woody brush for about 40 days. And so the biggest benefit I see is actually as we think about climate change and especially the increased amount of drought conditions and also the increased amount of heavy rain. two years ago we had the one of the driest years on record this year 2018 we had one of the wettest years on record and some of our pastures were responding similarly in that they weren't really regrowing as well when they were so saturated with water and so again the wo vegetation, these extreme drought and flood years, kind of always looks the same. The trees, the woody shrubs, the vegetation quality and quantity, they're much more resilient to these kind of conditions. And I think that's the biggest thing for a farmer from their perspective that's really critical about bringing these types of plants into the grazing system.

that's really critical about bringing these types of plants into the grazing system. Right, so that's really increasing the resiliency of the farm ecosystem by mimicking the natural systems that we know are resilient in the face of massive changes, in many cases a lot more resilient than our monocropping or much simplified agroecosystems. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, it was really instructive, again, during that hot dry year. You know, here we have our animals shading themselves, keeping themselves cool, and then being able to feast off the vegetation that was shading them. And so it was really, it was, again, for us, it was something that those edges of our farm,

those hedgerows and those scrublands, those were things that we were like, ah, someday we're going to get to those. We're going to clean them and we'll make them productive. But here they were sitting there just waiting for this moment. And it really was humbling to realize what we'd overseen. Right. Okay. Very cool. And what about some benefits to the community at large, society, our culture, and the global environment? Yeah, so I think it's important to distinguish those larger benefits. And I draw that distinction in the book because I think farmers are challenged with that kind of day-to-day reality of what they need to do to get the job done.

are challenged with that kind of day-to-day reality of what they need to do to get the job done. And I think the bigger benefits are something we always want to do, but, you know, are always hard to feel like we can sometimes put our energy to if we're just trying to make our ends meet. And so when we look at the bigger picture with silvopasture, and it's really interesting, I've had many conversations when writing the book with wildlife biologists and pollinator specialists. And what was really cool to hear is that the types of habitats they're looking for to improve the quality of habitat and the quantity of habitat for wild creatures really align well with silvopasture species and with silvopasture systems, or they could potentially align well. I spent many years before I was farming

in conservation and we were constantly trying to figure out ways to justify and fund reforesting, redeveloping habitat, planting along stream corridors, all these kind of things. And those kind of practices were hard to justify sometimes because there wasn't an economic return. And we struggle sometimes to, you know, farmers may want to do that, but they may not have the time and energy to invest. But when we see the benefit of bringing the animals in, then we can actually be restoring wildlife habitat while producing food and other materials. So I think that's a big one, the wildlife piece.

And then we can't overstress the climate piece. And I think it's, you know, again, it really is going to depend on the species we choose and the ways that we plant them. But our biggest benefit as silvopasture practitioners to the world is to say we can actually raise livestock. We can grow meat. We can have dairy. And we can do it in a way that's regenerative, that actually rebuilds and is a significant carbon sink. It's not a justification for us to just eat a lot more meat. We actually still need to reduce, especially in developing countries, our overall meat consumption.

But it doesn't mean that we can't produce those things in a way. And I think actually it's essential to produce those things in a way that's more regenerative. Because our vegetables are still mainly from tillage-based systems and that's changing too. But, you know, the more we can keep the earth in permanent cover, the more we can stimulate that grassland ecology to sequester carbon. And then if we can add the trees in, we're really creating a system that actually has the potential to really shift carbon in our global system. And I think that's great. And if we can do that at the same time, and if we can do that because it's benefiting farmers and because it's allowing their farms to be more resilient, that's really where we find this win-win-win. And so that's what

is most exciting to me about silvopasture is we're not asking farmers to compromise with their needs for production. We're actually asking them to produce more, just in a different way. Right. Oh, that's a really great narrative. And there's so much, so many different storylines in there. There was a quote in the book that I loved about this topic that you said, the benefits of creating a more complex ecology outweigh the time it takes to design, establish, and manage such a system. And we're, you know, we're talking about a really complex topic, and it can be a little overwhelming as a producer to think about diving into all this. But hearing that whole story and just knowing all the different levels of benefits that you create

by developing this type of agro ecosystem is really exciting. You mentioned in the book that often timber has been the focus of a lot of silvopasture research, I think especially what little temperate silvopasture research there is. But the benefits of shade, shelter, and animal fodder seem like huge opportunities. Can you speak a little bit more about the benefits of these to the livestock enterprise? Sure, yeah. I think that, and I don't want to say that timber isn't a potential valuable yield, but I think the emphasis has been a little heavy on that. I guess I'm a little impatient in some ways, and also with the concern for,

you know, the climate, I don't think we have time to reforest at that rate. And so, you know, nature has a whole palette of tree species that grow fast, that are really responsive and respond well to browse pressure and grazing pressure. And then it just seems so interesting to me that these species also line up as being some of the most nutritional species from a food standpoint for the animals um and certainly we could we could dive into the sort of co-evolution of some of these species with grazing herbivores out in more sort of quote-unquote wild ecosystems but it doesn't really matter for the for the moment because i think um probably the low-hanging fruit for silvopasture is really to engage with just to handle a species

that can grow really fast we can integrate them back in our grazing systems really quickly they provide food uh they they're some of the best species for shade and Shelter. So I feel like we've got the why. I want to talk and move a little bit into the how, as in how do we start doing silvopasture? So can I quote you to you real quick? Here's how you summarize the overall approach. You said, start with the most marginal pieces of land and convert these first, utilizing hardy, fast-growing trees as the basis of the work. So that just about sums it up, and I guess we're done here, right? Right, yeah.

We can just move on to something else. Yeah. So in all fairness, it's a complicated topic, and it doesn't feel like a beginner's game. You really go through a lot in the book, and a is going to need to to build up their background in a lot of these topics and your book does a great job of directing us to other resources and and laying out the framework of both the the forestry elements of it the plant science elements of it and the livestock care elements well thanks i appreciate that um that was the goal so that's great to hear you know the, the basics of forest management, the basics of tree care, the basics of grazing,

these are all things that we can learn pretty quickly and start to play with. And the question is, and I think it's important, it doesn't really matter actually what you're farming. If you're curious, if you're flexible, and if you're willing to observe and respond to how the land and the different things you're managing respond, if you're willing to be humble and recognize that you're not to observe and respond to how the land and the different things you're managing respond, and if you're willing to be humble and recognize that, you know, you're not actually in control, at best you're a good conductor of these different parts and moving them together. You know, I think we can get started and not be afraid to try things out. And that's why I encourage, you know, the more quote-un unquote marginal pieces of land. We're not starting silvopasture in the woods where we have the nicest forests that are the healthiest and the most valuable to the surrounding ecology. We're starting our silvopasture in

basically the farm dumping ground where the farmer before us was fond of dumping soil and dumping garbage. And, you know, the species in there are struggling to even make sense of that. And so we're cleaning up this space, these spaces. We can, I feel more comfortable making a few mistakes, but also, you know, often just stepping into those and using those spaces, we can experiment a bit, but we can also know that we're, we're moving things I think think, in a positive direction, and certainly not doing the same harm that we might do is kind of trialing things out on something

more mature and healthy. Right, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So when we look at different ways to start a silvopasture from the tree perspective, maybe we can start by talking about converting brush and hedgerows that you mentioned. So I can imagine that almost any temperate climate farm has some of these areas of dense brush, whether they're overgrown hedgerows along your fences, or like you're saying, literally that spot where the old 1960s cedar is parked over on its side. On our farm, we call it yonder thicket, right? We all have those. On our farm, we call it yonder thicket, right?

We all have those. So what are some ways that we can start to use those types of areas for silvopasture? So I think the first thing is always to provide access spaces with a roll of like forestry flagging tape and um you know just mark the trees that that uh have have done well despite the challenging conditions so you know we like uh the the oaks or the maples that show up in between that thicket and are poking their their tops out and we find lots of wild apples in our hedgerows that it's it's amazing how well they respond if you start to open them up a bit um some of our best apple crops are coming from those those trees um and cherries as well you know these kind of wild trees that have been left

there so kind of opening up the canopy and choosing what you're sometimes we call it forestry or crop trees so what are your, you know, that you want to save within that? And then we can kind of work our way down from the top of the canopy and think about some of the shrubs that we may want to prune back. I often thought about removing these altogether, but again, it's such a valuable potential food. And so we're more in the line of pruning things back to kind of open it up so that, and it's again, watching our animals, how do they utilize the space?

How can they get in? And, you know, if they can access something, they're going to chew it, they're going to eat it. Um, and, and, and then again, of course we have to get our fencing in there to, to move them in and move them out. So, um, it's really just a process of thinning and removing that material and opening things up. And I'm not a really big advocate of always doing that all at once. There's some cases where that makes sense and you can bring in, you know, machinery and literally just open up the space, leaving some of those canopy trees and kind of opening up the ground. But we really like to

use our animals and we'll move them into the spaces. We'll prune things and feed them right to the animals. And, you know, we have to key the key thing is that we have to open up the space enough so that you know give or take roughly 50 percent of of the sunlight shining on that space is hitting the forest floor um if we want to get grasses and forbs established in the understory so again we can kind of do this piecemeal, but that's kind of our end goal is can we bring enough light into that so that forages can exist. And so then we're really maximizing the productive capacity of that as a grazing spot. Right. Okay. Great rules of thumb in there too. Okay. So now there's, it sounds like from,

whether we're in there thinning the woods, making these decisions, or we're converting brushy areas, we're going to end up with a lot of different, on one hand, products, like potentially timber, wood, posts. And on the other hand, a lot of pruned branches, woody debris, and things that are left over after the livestock have gone through and pulled the leaves. So what kind of products are you seeing out of these types of thinning and these types of clearing? And what happens to the other non-merchantable debris? Well, that is a great question. And it's amazing how quickly you can make a pile that's sort of overwhelming. And it's really important to have a plan going in because if you just kind of make a mess, then it's like pick up sticks. It's impossible to...

There's lots of options. It's just to think about the benefits at a time and I think to balance it out with reality of life. And what I would not recommend is what we've done in some of our spots, which is not really think about it and leave a mess behind us because that mess is just always harder to clean up.

So if we want to establish forest and so forages and so pasture, at least what we should do is pile that brush in one area and say, well, that's going to break down eventually and that's fine. But I don't want to keep it kind of spread out because that becomes hard to establish forages. It becomes dangerous for animals to trip over or get stepped on. We've had some broken sheep hooves on that kind of material. So have a plan for it is the bottom line.

Right. So you could even end up hindering access to your developing silvopasture if you leave too much junk everywhere. This episode is supported by Dubois Ag Renovation. Renowned for their customer service, Dubois can be your one-stop shop for tools and supplies for the modern farm and market garden. Irrigation supplies, hand tools, pest control, mulch films, containers, and on and on. Visit them at duboisag.com and get free shipping on orders of $200 or more. As a market gardener myself, I've benefited from their huge selection and it's really easy to get someone on the phone to ask questions and build an order. That's d-u-b-o-i-s-a-g.com. Thanks to Dubois for their support. Hey there, one more note while we're talking about show support. Producing this podcast is a ton of work, so if you're enjoying it,

please consider supporting it. You can do so at theruminant.ca slash gift registry. That's theruminant.ca slash gift registry. Thanks, folks. So one question that I have in my mind is, do you find that most of these woods and most of these hedgerows, when you're working on them, are there forage species there already in the seed bank? What's the diversity of that?

Or do all these areas need to be seeded? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, you know, the seed bank in the soil is a pretty powerful thing. And I imagine similar where you are, but where we are, it wasn't too long ago that, um, there's a land that we're seeing trees on was cleared and was open land. And, and so there tends to be a persistent seed bank. That's I'd say a moderately good forage, sometimes excellent forage. Um, often it's a little deficient in legumes. So we're often putting clover in, um, which, which can be done pretty easily.

You can establish that within grasses. So I think that a lot of farms, and it is a challenge when you do these kind of clearings or opening up, the question is, do I want to see what kind of comes up naturally and manage that and maybe overseed it with some other things? and manage that and maybe overseed it with some other things? Or do I want to use this opportunity where the soil is fully disturbed to seed in something that I know is going to be good forage? And that does come down partially to cost. So if you have 10 acres of forest you just cleared, can you afford to buy the seed for that 10 acres?

Or is it just more reasonable to see what comes up? Because I think generally we could say that there's going to be good stuff coming up. And we've been so blown away with managed grazing and just what the animals do as they move into a space. They graze. They move out. It rests. It tends to just produce really nice forages. And then we say, well, you know, it's a little deficient in legume or maybe we need a little more forb species.

So we'll add those in over time. Maybe we need a little more forb species, so we'll add those in over time. Now, the danger with that is if you – and I have a friend's farm who does a dairy that I'm working with that has this problem. If you have adjacent land that has something very persistent and often called invasive around us, we're talking about swallowwort, which is this very persistent sort of woody vine that likes to grow and is very shade tolerant. We have to be really careful because if we clear the land next to that where that's established, it can move in very quickly and take a hold. And that's not going to have a good feed value. And it's actually going to exacerbate a problem. So that's the question.

And we have to be really cognizant of that because we don't want to create more work for ourselves. I'd say as a general rule, probably there's good forages in the seed bank unless we see ourselves with something nearby that we don't want in the pasture. We could probably start there, but if we can afford it, let's add some stuff into the mix. Some of that, you've already talked earlier about that hay that you feed out in some of these areas and surely you're going to also be seeing not just organic matter left behind from that but also some more uh forage seeds yeah yeah that's i don't we call that bale grazing around here and um that's that's an amazing effect especially with cattle where you can have them stand on an area, trample, eat seed, and it's worth, I used to buy cheaper hay. Now I try to invest in more expensive hay that has

clover seed in it. Right. Because the clover seed is actually best distributed by the poop and the hooves of animals. Right. And so we just see this pattern again and again when we bring that good quality hay and they feed on it. And the next year, that's a beautiful pasture with a increased amount of legume in it. So I think there's a lot of ways, again, that the animals can help us shape the habitat that we're looking for. That's great. Yeah. And we see that as well. And with those longer rest rotations in the managed grazing in the pastures, so that once you've got that clover established, it's going to be there in the pasture long enough, it can go to seed, the livestock eat that, and then they're distributing it around your farm for you. So it's really cool how the system starts

to pick up that momentum. So I want to move on to potentially the coolest and most impactful method of silvopasture conversion, in my opinion, which is bringing trees into your pastures. Of course, my first thought is, the retired farmer next door who cleared this field is never going to speak to me again, right? Or maybe for some of these intergenerational operations, this is your own grandparents, and Thanksgiving next year is going to be pretty awkward.

So I'm sure you see some of that. There's some preconceptions and biases. So I'm assuming that smoothing out those kind of ruffled feathers, it's going to help to have a solid plan. So what's important to consider before we get excited and start digging holes and sticking trees in our field? It's important to consider before we get excited and start digging holes and sticking trees in our field it's important to to mention a couple things at the outset which is one that i think our our resistance to seeing the value of trees in a farm landscape is something that's very old and embedded in agriculture and it's really in the continent of north america it's really embedded in in european settlement and colonization which brought with it the plow and brought with it this notion that high-value land was cleared land,

that the trees should be off the land. That's something that has been very persistent in settler, colonizer agriculture for a long time. So we're sort of undoing that. The other thing is I think it's important to note that from a carbon standpoint, what we've been talking about clearing woody material or thinning the woods, that's really a net carbon loss. So if your interest in silvopasture is in carbon sequestration, then planting trees is the only way that's happening. These other actions are, at least on a short-term basis, they're removing carbon from the ecosystem. That's certainly a carbon loss.

And we don't really know in the long term if that loss is offset by the gains that we have. So there's questions there to research. This is where I think that, again, it's hard to justify with any farmer, say, hey, you know, plant these trees, wait 50 years and you might make some money. But the timber markets may have changed, so, you know, we don't really know. I'm interested in those quicker returns and those quicker values so with planting trees i think what's really key is first and foremost is to plant trees like the forest plants trees um if we imagine an open field and the farmer stops mowing that they stop plowing they do whatever they stop grazing it

and they step off the land what happens yeah it's going to succeed to brush and go through in most places that we're talking about these temperate ecosystems through this natural succession into a mature forest eventually right so so the forest is is seeding into that space and those seeds are coming from the soil bank they're coming from birds flying over and pooping them they're coming from the trees that are surrounding that area that are just dropping seed in, right? And if you look at the ecology of a forest, in an acre or a hectare, you know, hundreds of thousands of seeds are planted, so to speak. And the fished forest is only 100 or 200 canopy trees in that overstory. So when we think about the math, the seed bank is generally tremendously larger than the final trees, the trees that will be there in the long term.

That would be that climax overstory. It's actually like 0.01% of the original seeds turn into those final trees. And so that principle is really important to understand because when we plant trees in the field, we often think of them as, well, I better plant these trees in their final spacing. I better plant them 20 feet apart or 40 feet apart. But that's assuming that those individual trees are going to survive and become, you know, long-term overstory trees. It's also problematic because the forest, in planting that many seeds, some proportion of the sprout into trees and the small saplings that grow up really close together, kind of crowded, create straight, tall growing trees. And so it's in principle, we want to over plant trees

and then thin them out over time. So we've been a big fan of planting at very close spacing, like three feet apart, four feet apart, five feet apart in rows. And then knowing that in five years, in 10 years, in 15 years, in 20 years, we're going to thin some of those out, and we're going to leave the ones that are sort of the best of that crop. And so that's really the way a forest would grow is plant dense and thin. Forest does it through shading each other out. Each tree shades out the others. But we can do that with harvesting or with thinning. And then the layout is really

important, especially with grazing. The pictures that I found with silvopasture is so often this even spacing between the trees like an orchard. And on our farm, we found that to be, in most cases, very impractical. Now, we do have some orchard spacing because we're planting fruit trees mostly for our own consumption. We do know friends that do orchard spacings and integrate animals, but there is a bigger challenge of protecting each individual tree. What we really like is from a lot of these species is to plant in rows, often along contour, because it makes it really easy to fence them out.

And basically the edge of our paddock is the row of trees. And then the next row of trees is the other edge of the paddock. So in that way, we can exclude a whole dozens and dozens of trees with the same fencing versus trying to exclude each individual tree. And it's just much more management and cost effective. Right. So then you've got your infrastructure that we have to think about, like fencing and water lines and things like that can almost go along. You've broken up a big field into these almost paddocks on contour that are aligned with trees and your other infrastructure, which both lines out the grazing area, but also protects the trees that are developing. Exactly.

Yeah. And the beauty of this is, you know, even 20 years ago, it was really hard to get a hold of portable fencing options that were relatively cheap. Fencing and rotational grazing meant, you know, wooden posts and barbed wire. So now we have so much cheap infrastructure that we can really be flexible with our fencing. And I think that's really what allows us to really propel these kind of ideas forward quickly and efficiently. Great. So let's see. So I would love to hear about your favorite species for silvopasture plantings. silvopasture plantings. I love this idea that you've got a bit of a palette to choose from because it is so overwhelming to think about all the different possibilities in this type of system.

But you have a few favorites and why don't you tell us what you love about those trees? Sure, thanks. Yeah, that's my favorite thing to talk about. I spent a whole nother hour. So I kind of thought about it as like taking the hundreds and hundreds of species that we could possibly work with and filtering them through some different criteria um so a couple of those criteria are you know one that had research in in being integrated into grazing systems and some kind of clear benefit to a grazing system. Another one was that they were pretty adaptable.

So I was thinking about the temperate climate very broadly. And so, you know, there might be species. For instance, the mimosa tree actually has good research in use in fodder systems, but it really is only appropriate for much warmer, you know, subtropical or pretty warm climates within that kind of larger temperate lens. Um, so I wanted trees, I could say that would work in BC, would work in New York, would work in Maine, would work in, in Alabama, you know? Um, and then another, another key criteria was, um, was for me as a farmer thinking about, are these species that I can propagate easily? Because what we've realized really quickly is as much as we want to plant hundreds of trees a year, you know, buying all that material and

even though seedling trees can be pretty cheap is, is, is really hurts our, our bottom line. So we've really realized that a tree nursery on a farm that wants to do agroforestry is probably, you know, an essential piece of farm infrastructure just like a water system is um so what are species that we can easily propagate and multiply and hundreds or thousands and if we don't plant them all guess what they become really valuable material that we can sell our nursery stock is something that's that's actually sometimes hard to find for these species um so my favorite four that kind of fit through all that sieve of criteria were willow. Any of the willows, there's 400 different species of willow, so there's a lot of variation in there.

Poplar or aspen or cottonwood, depending on where you come from. Black locust and mulberry. And so those four species, each kind of – what's really cool about them is they all kind of complement each other, and they basically mimic the forage species that we're often thinking about in pasture. So willow and poplar are kind of like grasses in that they provide a really well-balanced, kind of like the bulk of the material that an animal could take in and gain sustenance from. The difference between poplar and willow, they're closely related as trees. The difference is that willow is very high generally in condensed tannins. And the condensed tannins in willow actually offer two major benefits to our livestock.

And we're talking about ruminant livestock here because monogastrics like pigs and poultry can only utilize a small percentage of green material, but sheep, goats, and cows can do a lot more. So for those ruminant animals, willow, the condensed tannins will will both help in terms of the interior gut ecosystem um the biggest notable benefit that's been researched is in reducing parasite okay complications and then what's really cool is is animals eating condensed tannins it'll also slow down their digestion and actually reduce the methane they're giving off which is a huge concern with grazing systems as you're probably familiar with because also slow down their digestion and actually reduce the methane they're giving off, which is a huge concern with grazing systems, as you're probably familiar with, because that's

one of those greenhouse gases that might offset some of the benefits. So animals can generally eat poplar and aspen and cottonwood all day, and they can only eat so much willow because of those condensed tannins, and an animal that's familiar can actually self-regulate their intake. So that's kind of like our gases and then the the black locust is essentially our high protein like our legume right so black locust fixes nitrogen so like our clovers our alfalfas these high protein uh which help their their intake is always a little bit less than the grasses but they're really important to build healthy bones, healthy muscle, all this kind of stuff. So that's kind of where the black locust fits in.

And then the mulberry is basically like your forbs, like your flowering plants, which are essentially dense in nutrients that the animals need to kind of complete and round out the diet. need to kind of complete and round out the diet. So it's really ironic for me because I spent a lot of my early career in conservation and I was like always worried about animals eating the trees I was planting. I wanted to protect those trees from those grazing animals, you know, mostly deer. And now I'm really interested in growing as many of these as I can and then feeding them to the animals because the livestock I'm raising love them. That's our best indicator is how much they, if an animal gets loose and has an option to eat a tree, they will go for it. And there's something in that wisdom.

There's a reason they go for it. And so why not design that into the system? Right. That's a good paradigm shift, a livestock-directed paradigm shift. Yeah, exactly. So those four species I would say – and then if you dig into it, all four of those are relatively easy to propagate, really fast-growing, and they can handle kind of a level of browse intensity that maybe some of the more tender species can't. And so just with those four species, and then what's really cool is also the carbon sequestration value of those because they grow really fast, really fibrous root systems. And so I can make the argument that even if we just started with those four species, we'd have a huge benefit to our grazing systems. That's a great step forward, getting the amount of thought that you put into this and getting this little list for people to start off with. And then of course, there's, we can imagine there's 100 more

species that you could tie on and think about different productions. But this is a great start. So, okay, I, I don't think we'll spend a ton of time on this. But I want to ask a small question that opens up a huge topic. And maybe we can, you know, I know it's hard to keep this one brief, but I'm imagining most of the people who are interested in silvopasture are already starting with some livestock and they have some idea about, you know, the animals they want to incorporate into their systems. But what are some of the key considerations when you're choosing, if you don't have the luxury of already having livestock if you're choosing a breed or a species for these systems what kind of decisions are we looking at there yeah so i think um certainly a big topic but i think the big the

big take-homes are you know the the type of animals kind of the first level then the breed and then where they come from and how they've been treated up to that point when you get them in your system. So the type of animal is really important. We've talked a little bit about ruminants. And I think that we say in the book that ruminants are kind of the most silvopasture ready because we can actually produce pretty much all, if not all, of their food from a grass-based ecosystem. And of course, we can incorporate tree fodders and all these other things. So pigs and poultry really, we have to figure out a way to bring in a higher protein sources of food. The systems are not going to just provide that very quickly. Everyone likes to dream about the

future silvopasture where the nuts are falling from the sky and the pigs are fat and happy. But that's a little ways off. And also when we look historically, we have to remember that nut crops, for instance, only come generally once a year and only for like three or four weeks. So what are we going to do to those animals the rest of the season? So I think that it kind of depends on your goals. And so I think that, you know, kind of depends on your goals. And also the question is, you know, how much land do you have access to and how you want to use the animals to benefit the ecosystem.

And so pigs are great if you're trying to clear land, if you're trying to till up land and really turn over the soil, if that's a goal. But if it's an unintended consequence, it's a problem. I think poultry have such an important role to play when we start to look at, well, my main crop is actually a tree crop, like a fruit or a nut. And pigs to some degree as well that can help with pests and disease cycles and breaking those pest cycles. So if my main interest is managing a pest crop, the animals are sort of supporting that. I think pigs and poultry actually have a bigger role there. are sort of supporting that. I think pigs and poultry actually have a bigger role there. But if my main crop is the animal product, then it's kind of a different shift and a different focus.

And then, so we'll drill down then like, so that's one consideration. Then within each animal, there's different breeds. And I think the breed is so critical. There are breeds of pigs that are more inclined to graze more and root less, essentially, that can actually gain some of their sustenance from more green vegetation than other species. And generally, these are older breeds. These are smaller breeds.

They're not as bred to get fattened off of corn as quickly. So that's partially a breed characteristic. But then the third piece is, again, who is taking care of them and how before? Because I think nurture is just as important as nature. So when we were looking around for a sheep breed, the affect of the shepherd or the farmer was really important because we saw, even in the same breed, we saw a lot of difference in the sort of temperament and mothering quality and sort of resiliency of the same breed, but with different managers of that breed. And I think collective knowledge and access to breeding stock and around here,

you know, every year we're like, where are we going to get the ram this year? You know? So it's also important geographically to just make sure that other people are raising this breed near you, because if you're raising something so obscure that nobody has any of that material, you can't really diversify your, your breed. And so one of the reasons we chose Katahdin ultimately is because there were five or six other farms around us that were raising Katahdin. And so I think those things all kind of blend together. I think a good resource for folks is the American Livestock Conservancy. It's a really great website that talks specifically about breeds that are kind of being lost from a heritage perspective, but actually have some really good information about breeds that

I think fit well into the potential silvopasture system. So we get through all of this hard learning, thinking, planning, hacking, chopping, planting, grazing, and then at the end of the book you tell us, and I'll quote you again here, it's important to know that the work in silvopasture is never finished so we're in it with the long for the long haul with these systems and I was wondering if you could speak for a minute about what what does ongoing monitoring and maintenance look like in an established silvopasture system like yours as you've been working on it for about several years now? Well, you know, I don't know in some ways. I think five years is such a little speck of time in the context of even a forest, right, which could be centuries old. I think that there's,

I think the other thing is there's no sort of right answer. There's no right way this should look. And I think that we are in a period of time where we, again, have enough to sort of get started, to be dangerous, but we also need to be free to experiment and play and share our results. If we follow one template, we're not going to get to where we need to go. And so I think that it's a community effort to really do that trial and error, but do it in a way that works for the farm at the same time. We don't have the freedom to just mess around all the time, but we do have enough to say, all right, let me try this combination. Let me try planting the trees this way. Let me feed the trees to the animals in this way and

see if that works. But ultimately we all need to be trying things out and then sharing our results and comparing notes. And that's what farmers have been doing forever. I mean, any farming enterprise is ultimately lifetimes of quiet adventure, as a teacher of mine used to say. of quiet adventure, as a teacher of mine used to say. And so it's an invitation, and certainly the work's never done. And I'm learning every day when I'm talking to folks about this. I certainly – I've learned a lot from doing the research, but this is a work of hundreds of people that's in this book. And my goal is just to bring it together and learn about it.

I was naive, and I wanted to learn, and so I found this opportunity to bring it all together and share what I learned. But there's so much to learn, and I hope that the folks that are enjoying the process and share what they learn, and we can all kind of expand this, this notion together and, and succeed, you know, and success is a, is a funny word because it's hard to know when you get there. But what I see is that every year we, we have more food available for our livestock. We're better prepared on our farm for those droughts and floods that are coming. Our animals are enjoying,

there's an interesting kind of metric of how they enjoy the landscape and how they explore. I don't want every paddock on our farm to look the same way, to have the exact same amount of food. It's not pounds of dry matter per animal. It's not about a mathematical equation. It's something much more, I think, poetic than that. And to me, ultimately, the animal's experience. And at the end of the day, you know, what we harvest off of that experience is how we can see that we're succeeding, that we're changing over time. Right. So to conclude here, we've got Eric Tonsmeier, who's a senior fellow with Project Drawdown and the author of several excellent books, including The Carbon Farming Solution.

He says in the foreword of your book that your book, quote, sorely tempts him to become a silvopasture producer. And I recently heard in a video that you posted earlier this year that he is indeed starting a small silvopasture system. So I think that's evidence that your book is working when you've got Eric diving into it. And I'm sure many listeners are inspired after hearing this conversation as well. Where can someone find out more about your work and about Silvopasture in general? Yeah, so we have a website it's just civilpasturebook.com and we are doing a online course in 2019 we do do courses on our farm but also on the website is uh so a number of links to different resources so there's a number of great extension publications university publications videos things like that that folks can kind of kind of find and browse free on our website.

We try to link. So visit the website. And if you're looking for something in particular, you know, get in touch and hopefully we can help put you in the right direction. Great. And I would encourage anyone interested in grazing livestock or growing tree crops to check out your book, Silvopasture byve gabriel in addition to loads of knowledge and we touched on some of it there's great planning resources for figuring out how this is going to work on your own farm there's a bunch of interesting case studies so that you can hear about other producers who are trying it out maybe even in your area and excellent recommendations for further reading in there so steve thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today and share your knowledge. Thanks, Tristan. It was real fun. All right. So that's episode one,

four more to come, which will be coming fast and furious over the next 24 hours. I hope you like that. And I know that longtime listeners will have definitely appreciated the greater depth to Tristan's knowledge. I think there's no way I could have conducted an interview with Steve on this topic anywhere near as thoughtfully as Tristan. So Tristan, thank you so much. Everyone look forward to Tristan coming back for the odd interview down the line. And if you have something to tell me about this episode

or just comments in general, shoot me an email, editor at theruminant.ca. And please, if you like what you heard in this episode or just comments in general, shoot me an email, editor at theruminant.ca. And please, if you like what you heard in this episode or another, consider sharing it on social media. It really helps get the word out about The Ruminant. All right, I'll talk to you very soon. See ya! We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country

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