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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/silvopasture-ancient-farm-practice-renaissance/>
"On a clear morning in April, after milking his seven cows, Tim Sauder looked
over the pasture where he had just turned the animals out to graze. Like many
dairy farms, Sauder’s fields swayed with a variety of greenery: chicory,
alfalfa and clover. But they were also full of something typically missing on
an agricultural landscape — trees. Thousands of them.
Between 2019 and 2021, Sauder planted 3,500 trees at Fiddle Creek Dairy, a
55-acre family farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife
raise cows to produce yogurt, cheese and beef. Today, young willow, hickory,
poplar, pecan and persimmon trees stud the pastures, and on a crisp spring
morning, rows of honey and black locusts, bur and cow oaks, were beginning to
leaf out, casting shadows on the long grass below.
Sauder said planting trees has always been a priority; before he filled his
pastures with them, the farm was home to a small fruit orchard as well as
riparian buffers — trees planted along the creek to prevent erosion and
safeguard water quality. But the trees that his cattle now graze beneath
represent a fundamental shift in his operation.
The Sauders are betting the farm, as it were, on silvopasture, the ancient
practice of raising animals and growing trees and pasture on the same piece of
land (silva is forest in Latin). In a silvopasture setup, farmers carefully
manage each element to benefit the other — relying on manure to fertilize
trees, for example, or fallen fruit to feed the livestock — resulting in a
system that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
It’s an old idea that’s gaining modern traction. Last year, the USDA awarded
the Nature Conservancy and multiple partner organizations a $64 million grant
to advance agroforestry — the umbrella term for agricultural practices that
incorporate trees — by providing technical and financial assistance to farmers
looking to make the switch. This year’s Farm Bill could mean another infusion
of funding as well as the expansion of existing agroforestry programs to more
explicitly include silvopasture."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
