A Glimpse of Forest Farming

Stesha Warren is a classmate of mine in my first-ever agroforestry course at the University of Missouri. She and her husband Jeremy are first generation forest farmers, and while the video below is from their first year really in the business a few years ago, it's a lovely introduction to what they do. I aim to discuss forest farming more here in the future, as it's an agroforestry practice that really appeals to me. 

The Salting of Fields and Forests

Climate change deniers don't think they see the results of the environmental damage that's being done. Or, they blame it on something else. What I'm hearing often now is that "the climate's changed many times." That last one is true, although it's never been on such a large scale, caused by human activity, and so fast. The consequences of our inability to change our ways won't wipe out our species, but it's causing a lot of damage long the way.

The impact of climate change isn't coming in a generation or two. It's here right now. One way we're seeing it is in coastal forests and farms along the east coast. In ancient times if someone wanted to be certain an area would remain unpopulated after conquest, it's said that they would spread salt so that crops wouldn't grow. That's what we're collectively doing to ourselves.

First, there are the forests. Along the U.S. east coast we are seeing an expansion of "ghost forests." These are places that as recently as 10 or 15 years ago were healthy woodlands, but now are dead and dying trees. Looking out into the ocean in places you will see dead trees poking out, where once the forest stood. The following video shows the dramatic transformation taking place.

Some would likely see this and respond, "So what? It's just some woodlands. These things have happened a lot over thousands of years. That brings me to my second point, which is about farms.

Farming is a career and a way of life with a rich history in the United States. My paternal family farmed the same land for four generations. There are places here where families go back eight or more generations. That's not to say that each generation is beholden to the past. Yet, for those who choose to follow in those steps, the land is a very personal thing as well as a central source of income. This is their lives and livelihoods. Now, imagine if someone went to a farmer's land and began spreading tons of salt across the fields. Again, this is what we are doing as a people to our fellow humans through our decades of inaction to reduce the impact of climate change. 

I'm convinced we've gone past the point of no return. The global climate is changing. The ocean is rising with the melting of the polar ice caps and the expansion of the warmer water. More frequent hurricanes are pushing water from the high seas further inland than ever before. The forests and farms in the way are dying.

It's possible to save some of the woodland genetics through efforts to plant trees of the species involved further inland. As for the farms, it's either find saltwater tolerant crops and raise them, or set aside the new marshland as paid conservation land. How far any of that can go remains to be seen. 

Further Consideration of Riparian Forest Buffers

 Previously I wrote about riparian forest buffers (RFB), and in retrospect I feel certain I overstated a concern.  It is true that RFBs become wildlife cover, and some of that wildlife will be of a sort that might get into crops. However, I've realized that this is true of any patch of woods on a farm. Windbreaks, living barns, silvopasture, and so forth all provide shelter for potential pests. They also function as part of a living ecosystem and bring more positives than negatives to farmland. And, as I noted in that earlier post, hunting leases can provide a very modest extra source of revenue while keeping the wildlife under some control. 

Here's a video showing off an RFB that was created with a grant from Patagonia Burlington. It gives a good idea of what this agroforestry practice is about. 

A Very Basic Intro to Riparian Forest Buffers

An ephemeral creek in northeastern Missouri that could benefit from a riparian forest buffer. (via Adam Gonnerman CC BY 4.0)

Our creeks and streams could use more care. With that could also come some financial benefits as well. 

Growing up in the landlocked state of Missouri, all of my experience with bodies of water involved lakes, ponds, creeks, and (to a limited extent) rivers. Before my parents had air conditioning installed when I was a teenager it was customary for my mother, brothers, and I to go to the local public lake to swim almost every summer afternoon. It was the only way to really cool off. Year round I had access to a pond and a creek, though neither was for swimming. 

The creek I named 'Acorn Creek'  ran from farm to farm through pasture and woodlands before emptying into the Long Branch creek. It turns out that 'my' stream doesn't have an official name recorded anywhere. Acorn Creek begins just before a piece of property that my late father purchased in the mid-1990s. The people before him had used the creek as a dump, with plastic, glass, and even large appliances lingering up and down the stream. 

It wasn't just dumping that troubled that creek. The agricultural use around it led to good soil being washed away in it, along with fertilizer and pesticides. Still, it passed through enough woodland areas along the way to still be able to support life. It's woody perennials along with grasses and forbs that made the difference. Warm season grasses put in deep roots, holding the soil in place and filtering the water that passes through it. The same goes for trees. It's not perfect, but it leads to the stream running clear most of the way to Long Branch. 

Now, imagine making that happen intentionally. Setting aside creeks and a strip of land on either side for a planned intervention. If the sides are too steep they can be reinforced with large stones. Otherwise in layers radiating out from either side of a creek or stream there can be natural growth, trees, shrubs, forbs, and warm season grasses. No cold season grasses because they don't tend to put down as deep and reliable roots. A fence could keep out any livestock, with water being provided to them by other means. In reality, I've never really seen farmers where I'm from relying on direct access to streams to water their livestock. Usually there's a well system in place with waterers installed around the pasture. 

This mixture of woody perennials with grasses and forbs is referred to as a riparian forest buffer. They can be very beneficial for the environment, but a few objections could be raised by landowners. I'm not going to try to list them all, but here are a couple that seem particularly important to me.

First, buffers like this take land out of agricultural production. That's true enough, since crops like corn and soybeans can't be included in the buffer zone. On the other hand, the buffer itself can be productive. Nut trees can be planted, for example, providing a crop in addition to whatever else is raised on the property. Having a riparian buffer doesn't have to mean that the land is out of use. Rather, it means that the land is being put to different use.

Second, wooded land can attract wildlife, which can be pests for nearby crops. That's also true, although many farms have wooded land without farmers having particular concerns about wildlife. In fact, the wildlife can provide yet another source of income. The owner and family can certainly hunt there in the proper seasons, and the option exists to allow access to others for hunting for a fee. 

There's only so much that a riparian buffer can do. It needs to be maintained over time, though I tend to think that's not a huge demand on time. Further, it only exists where landowners put it in place. Neighboring farms likely won't have a system like this, meaning that the extent of ecological benefits will be limited to land where the buffer exists, except that of course on that land it's helping reduce further damage to the creek structure and water quality. 

Savanna Institute

The Savanna Institute is making a real effort at promoting and establishing tree farming as a viable agricultural option in the US Midwest. Check out the video below, which can serve as a high-level introduction to their work.

Bringing the Eucalyptus Under Control

The Brazilian countryside, at least in the central southern region where I lived, is beautiful. The city of Uberlandia is situation in savanna, and as you go east toward Belo Horizonte it's more prone to forests. There is agriculture everywhere, of course, but as in the United States the natural features of the various regions are still in evidence. It was in my infrequent trips between cities there that I saw eucalyptus plantations and thought them to be majestic. It turns out that there is a great deal of debate about them.

Native to Australia but now found worldwide, eucalyptus refers to a large genus of over 800 species of shrubs and tall trees. Often the ones cultivated are hybrids of two or more of these. 

What these trees have against them biologically is that they are allelopathic consumers of large amounts of water and nutrients that spread by seed. To many these are an invasive species, while to others they're very useful for producing a large amount of lumber in a relatively short period of time. There is also scientific debate about whether they really deplete subsoil moisture significantly, and regarding how long it takes for the water levels to return to normal once they are harvested. 

In the bigger picture of environmental impact they are often a replacement for older forests or jungles that represent a great deal of diversity lost. As a monoculture, what they offer to wildlife is considerably more limited than natural woodlands. What often happens in Brazil is that rainforest is cleared and put to use for traditional crops or cattle, and when the soil is depleted the eucalyptus trees come in. It seems likely that in the future most of what is now rainforest in Brazil will be soybeans, cattle, and eucalyptus. Great perhaps for our supply chain, but terrible for the natural world. 

Research has recently come forth showing that a genetically-modified variety of eucalyptus that does not produce seeds is possible, removing at least in theory concerns over it spreading outside of cultivated areas. 

Oregon State University’s Steve Strauss led an international collaboration that showed the CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technique could be used with nearly 100% efficiency to knock out LEAFY, the master gene behind flower formation.

“The flowers never developed to the point where ovules, pollen or fertile seeds were observed,” Strauss said. “And there was no detectable negative effect on tree growth or form. A field study should be the next step to take a more careful look at stability of the vegetative and floral sterility traits, but with physical gene mutation we expect high reliability over the life of the trees.”

Findings were published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

Strauss, Ph.D. student Estefania Elorriaga and research assistant Cathleen Ma teamed up with scientists at the University of Colorado, Beijing Forestry University and the University of Pretoria on the research. The greenhouse study involved a hybrid of two species, Eucalyptus grandis and E. urophylla, that is widely planted in the Southern Hemisphere; there are more than 700 species of eucalyptus, most of them native to Australia.

“Roughly 7% of the world’s forests are plantations, and 25% of that plantation area contains nonnative species and hybrids,” said Elorriaga, now a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State. “Eucalyptus is one of the most widely planted genera of forest trees, particularly the 5.7 million hectares of eucalyptus in Brazil, the 4.5 million hectares in China and 3.9 million hectares in India.”

Those plantings, the scientists note, can lead to undesirable mingling with native ecosystems. Thus eliminating those trees’ ability to sexually reproduce without affecting other characteristics would be an effective way to greatly reduce the potential for invasive spreading in areas where that is considered an important ecological or economic problem. (via Oregon State University)

This isn't a solution that will be widely-accepted, given restrictions on genetically-modified organisms in places like Brazil. It does show us a way forward, I think, in handling the other alleged negatives of eucalyptus trees. If gene modification can produce a variety that doesn't spread via seeds, then perhaps it's also possible to moderate their impact on the environment in other ways, such as water consumption and suppression of other plant life. 

Since it's highly doubtful that something as profitable as eucalyptus is going away, the better path is to make it less harmful.

The Great Green Wall Is About More Than Trees

Sometime in my childhood one of my brothers explained desertification to me. The thought of deserts spreading was equal parts fascinating and ominous to me. For people living near the Sahara Desert in Africa it's a dreadful reality, as arable farmland is overtaken by the sands. For many years, though, efforts have been underway to turn back the desert and even recover lands that were formerly taken. As CNN explains it:

The world's largest desert is growing. In the last century, the Sahara Desert expanded by more than 10%, now covering an area of more than 3.3 million square miles (8.6 million square kilometers) and spanning 11 countries in the north of Africa.

The Sahel region, a semi-arid belt that acts as a buffer zone just south of the desert, is most affected. Water, already scarce, is becoming scarcer. Soil quality is deteriorating, and a lack of vegetation is leading to food insecurity. The UN estimates roughly 135 million people who depend on these degraded lands are at risk.

But an ambitious plan, launched by the African Union in 2007, could help to hold back the hot sands and protect the Sahel communities. Within the next decade, the Great Green Wall initiative hopes to restore 100 million hectares of land between Senegal in the west and Djibouti in the east, creating a 15-kilometer-wide (9 miles) and 8,000-kilometer-long (5,000 miles) mosaic of trees, vegetation, grasslands and plants.

They also provide a map to help visualize what this means in terms of scale.

For comparison, the Great Wall of China is 13,171 miles long. If you think that makes the Great Green Wall seem more doable, keep in mind that the former was built over the course of centuries in parts by successive dynasties. What the African Union is doing is truly ambitious. 

To be clear, this isn't about simply planting trees along the edge of the desert. It's a fundamental rethinking of land and water use techniques. From a 2016 Smithsonian Magazine article:

"If all the trees that had been planted in the Sahara since the early 1980s had survived, it would look like Amazonia," adds Chris Reij, a sustainable land management specialist and senior fellow at the World Resources Institutewho has been working in Africa since 1978. "Essentially 80 percent or more of planted trees have died."

Reij, Garrity and other scientists working on the ground knew what Wade and other political leaders did not: that farmers in Niger and Burkina Faso, in particular, had discovered a cheap, effective way to regreen the Sahel. They did so by using simple water harvesting techniques and protecting trees that emerged naturally on their farms.

Slowly, the idea of a Great Green Wall has changed into a program centered around indigenous land use techniques, not planting a forest on the edge of a desert. The African Union and the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization now refer to it as "Africa’s flagship initiative to combat land degradation, desertification and drought." Incredibly, the Great Green Wall—or some form of it—appears to be working.

"We moved the vision of the Great Green Wall from one that was impractical to one that was practical," says Mohamed Bakarr, the lead environmental specialist for Global Environment Facility, the organization that examines the environmental benefit of World Bank projects. "It is not necessarily a physical wall, but rather a mosaic of land use practices that ultimately will meet the expectations of a wall. It has been transformed into a metaphorical thing."

The answer to all of the environment's problems isn't "plant more trees," as much as it would be nice to have such a simple solution. Instead, we need to reconsider how we manage the land, and work together to make it better for everyone, and especially for those yet to be born.