The combination of farming and forests, known as agroforestry, represents a new farming niche — one that’s especially vital and vibrant in Missouri.
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
By Georgina Gustin
When most people think of farmland, they think of open fields lined with long, neat crop rows. But some farmers and researchers picture something else: trees.
The practice of combining farming and trees, known as agroforestry, has caught the attention of more farmers in recent years. And Missouri, with its ample forests and one of the country’s premier agroforestry research centers, is leading the way into the woods.
“I really do believe agroforestry has come of age,” said Gene Garrett, the former director of the University of Missouri’s Center for Agroforestry, speaking at a conference on the subject recently in Washington. “…We’ve turned a corner.”
Essentially, agroforestry allows forests and farming to work together, something that contradicts the traditional notion of cutting trees down to create farm fields. It can take a handful of forms — from a mushroom or fern farm in a shady forest to a cattle grazing operation among thinned-out trees.
Proponents say agroforestry allows small-scale farmers to earn much needed extra income by growing certain shade-loving crops in unused forests, while larger-scale farmers can use trees to mitigate the environmental costs of agriculture, from soil erosion to water pollution.
“Especially in Missouri, a lot of farms have trees,” said St. Louis resident Nicola Macpherson, owner of Ozark Forest Mushrooms, which produces mushrooms near the tiny town of Timber, about 150 miles south of St. Louis. “It’s an up-and-coming part of running a farm, not just because of environmental concerns, but so people can make some money.”
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has made components of agroforestry part of his agenda to help revitalize America. And last week, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s headquarters, the largest-ever gathering of agroforestry-focused groups came together to discuss the future of their particular brand of farming with the hope of getting more farmers involved.
“We want to come up with a national framework for agroforestry, said Andy Mason, interim director of the Agriculture Department’s National Agroforestry Center, speaking at the conference, via live Web cast. “That’s the goal.”
Neither agroforestry center — at the department or at the university — tracks practitioners, but both report a surge in inquiries and requests for information. “We’re getting more calls from extension specialists wanting guidance,” Garrett told the conference. “…There are indeed more and more individuals realizing the benefits associated with these practices.”
The Agriculture Department’s center originated with the 1990 farm bill, and the Missouri center was formed in 1998, as agricultural experts started to acknowledge that agroforestry could play an important role in improving American agriculture and agricultural lands.
“Multifunctional landscapes is another way of thinking about agroforestry,” Mason said in an interview. “So our land provides food, fuel and fiber, and also has environmental benefits. You can think about it as a practice, but you can also think about it as a system.”
In the emerging science of agroforestry, Macpherson is an old hand. Chosen as one of the keynote speakers at this week’s conference, she talked about turning a patch of dark forest in the Ozarks into a thriving mushroom business.
Nearly 20 years ago, Macpherson took a few oak logs and started the process of growing shiitake mushrooms, which involves soaking and seeding logs, then letting them sit in the right shady conditions to sprout fungi. She started with only eight logs, but today Ozark Forest Mushrooms has 18,000 logs, annually producing 15,000 pounds of mushrooms that are found at stores and restaurants throughout the area and beyond.
Macpherson has since branched into more mushroom varieties, wild greens and native forest fruits such as pawpaws and elderberries — or, as Macpherson said, “what all the pioneers used to eat ” — that are getting more popular with farmers market shoppers and some chefs.
Agroforesty is not confined to fruits and vegetables, though. The practice known as silvopasture entails grazing cattle or other animals among rows of trees, rotating the animals from area to area allowing forage to grow between the trees. The process gives the animals shade but also allows farmers to use the land in a multifunctional way — by growing food for the animals and readying them for market as the slow-growing, but more valuable, hardwood trees reach maturity for the timber or nut markets. Another agroforestry practice called alley cropping is designed so crops such as wheat or hay are planted in rows between high-value trees, allowing farmers to develop two or more sources of revenue from the same piece of land.
“We try to get as many incomes off our land as we can,” said George Owens, a farmer from northern Florida who employs silvopasture. “We make money off of timber, pine straw, hunting leases, wildlife plots, clover.”
Beyond food, however, agroforestry practices can play an important role in cleaning up, or at least alleviating, some of the negative consequences of large-scale agriculture, researchers say. Stands of trees grown on riverbanks or on open land can, for example, control soil erosion and prevent fertilizer and pesticide runoff from entering streams and larger waterways. Or, a line of trees forming a windbreak can prevent wind erosion and absorb ammonia odors from factory farms.
The environmental benefits, advocates say, can go beyond the field or stream, reaching global proportions. Garrett and others say that farmers or landowners who either have existing forests or plant them can become players in what the World Bank, in 2008, estimated is a $130 billion carbon trading market.
Through the growing carbon market, companies or entities that pollute buy carbon credits to offset their emissions. Those offsets can come from forests, with landowners selling the credits based on the acreage, species and age of the trees.
“These markets can create jobs in rural communities,” said Kathleen Merrigan, the Agriculture Department’s deputy secretary, adding, “This is critical to rural America.”
Today at the Agriculture Department’s “Rural Summit” being held in Hillsboro, farmers and officials will talk about “ecosystem market incentives,” including carbon offsets, which the agriculture secretary has cited as part of his larger plan to help farming communities.
Merrigan explained that other countries have, either historically or more recently, used agroforestry principles in farming. American farmers, though, have long ignored forests.
Until recently.
“I came to the USDA with this perspective that we have under-thought and under-utilized agroforestry as a strategy for diversification for our farmers,” Merrigan said. But now, she added, “The timing is right.”
