Bringing Trees Back into the Farm Ecosystem: A Talk with Steve Gabriel

By The Homestead Gardener, DERRICK GENTRY

The oldest task in human history,” Aldo Leopold once wrote, “is to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” One of the attractions of homesteading and gardening on a small scale is the idea that we can do even better: that we can improve the land through our use of it; that we might be able to give back to the land as much or more than we take; that it might be within our power to take land that has been spoiled by past abuse and, under the auspices of our wise and sympathetic stewardship, create the conditions for a Cinderella-like transformation. These are some of the premises/aspirations that define what is now known as “regenerative agriculture.”

Agroforestry, a thriving branch of regenerative agriculture, goes even further in its attempt to revise old assumptions and dissolve old distinctions. Agroforestry takes as its starting point the permaculture concept of the forest garden. In fact, the term “agroforestry” was coined in the 1970s, at around the same time Bill Mollison and Dave Holmgren invented the word “permaculture.” Both terms, however, are best thought of as new names for some very old practices that have been refined over centuries by cultures around the world—by the centuries-old dehesa system of woodland grazing in Spain, for example, and in the traditional (and demonstrably sustainable) forest management practices of indigenous peoples in our own region.

I was turned on to the ideas of agroforestry and woodland grazing and foraging (or “silvopasture”) by two magisterial books on the subject, both published by Chelsea Green: Silvopasture: A Guide to Managing Grazing Animals, Forage Crops, and Trees in a Temperate Farm Ecosystem  (2018) by Steve Gabriel; and Farming the Woods: An Integrated Permaculture Approach to Growing Food and Medicinals in Temperate Forests (2014) by Steve Gabriel and Ken Mudge.

Perhaps the best general account of agroforestry is to be found in the opening paragraph of Farming the Woods, which is worth quoting in full:

In the eyes of many people, the practices of forestry and farming are at odds, because in the modern world it’s often the case that agriculture involves open fields, straight rows, and machinery to grow crops, while forestry is primarily reserved for timber and firewood harvesting. Forest farming invites a remarkably different perspective: that a healthy forest can be maintained while growing a wide range of food, medicinal, and other nontimber products.  While it may seem to be an obscure practice, the long view indicates that for much of its history, humanity has lived and sustained itself from tree-based systems.  Only recently have people traded the forest for the field.

And here is Steve Gabriel, speaking as a small-scale farmer and landowner, offering a “mission statement” for the agroforestry business he co-founded with his wife in 2012:

Before we farmed almost every square inch of land in the Northeast, this used to be forested land. And the trees were old, and big, and healthy. Those forests had been around for thousands of years, and in just a few hundred years we cleared the forests and plowed and tilled and grew crops. We lost a lot of diversity. This eastern hardwood forest wants to come back, and we want to help facilitate that—while we grow forage and while we raise animals. Because we see the benefits of integrating trees and livestock and bringing trees basically back into the farm ecosystem. 

When he is not writing books and giving talks and tending to his sheep, Gabriel works for the Cornell Small Farms Program and, with his wife Elizabeth, operates Wellspring Forest Farm (now also a school) in Mecklenburg, NY.  Wellspring specializes in mushrooms, maple syrup, duck eggs, lamb, elderberry extract, and other forest products.  

I recently had the pleasure of “zooming” with Gabriel at a stolen moment near the end of the growing season.  

What follows is an edited transcript of our talk:

Let me begin with a personal question:
How has this year been at Wellspring Farm?  

It has been a very dry summer, even though it was technically not a drought like the one in 2016.  With the cool spring and the dry hot summer, it was also the worst maple syrup season. It nevertheless feels abundant.
Overall, it has been a great year.

Has the pandemic had an impact on your business? 

It has. The restaurants we had been supplying with mushrooms were not open, so we had to adapt quickly.  Early this spring, we quadrupled our CSA customers.  Within a couple of weeks, we had sold out and had to create a wait list.  The great challenge this year has actually been meeting the demand. Many small farms are selling better, but it is a direct form of selling to the customer.  That is a good development.  I believe that even a small shift to supporting local agriculture may be enough to change things for the long term.

What would you say are some of the benefits of agroforestry, as compared with open-field agriculture?

The motto of agroforestry is “productive conservation,” and one of its biggest benefits is resilience—that is to say, forest systems are generally more stable than open field systems.  Another benefit is that the practice of agroforestry gets people to value their forested land in a new way.  

Forest management, and maybe land management more generally, has long been seen as a matter of public policy — something for bureaus and state and federal governments to handle.  One thing I love about your books is that they make the complex questions about land management a matter for individual smallholders and stewardship on a small scale.  So: what advice would you give to an individual with a few acres of wooded land who would like to go about “rehabilitating” that land and making it more biodiverse, resilient, and maybe more productive.  What are some things to think about? 

One of the risks of agroforestry is not understanding the ecological stage that the land is currently at.  So the first step is to take stock. Understand what is there already. People often come in with preconceived notions about what they want to do and make happen. But in some places, the land will support ginseng or maple production, while in other places the conditions are just not right.  You need the right ecosystem. And sometimes you either have it, or you don’t.

Thinning out a crowded forest canopy, removing some of the growth, can be a helpful way of supporting what is already there.  The point is that we create the conditions for the forest to regenerate itself.  And sometimes that means thinning.

I would also say that regenerating biodiversity has to be a multi-generational effort.  The forest is not a vegetable garden:  It can take decades, even centuries to bring about changes.  We need to be humble with the time frame.

There has been an interesting effort of late to rethink how we define “invasive species” such as black locust and Japanese knotweed. I recently heard Fred Provenza, from Utah State University, say that the best way to deal with invasive species is to “love them to death” with grazing and foraging animals (and I think my goats would agree with him, certainly when it comes to black locust!)  How does agroforestry invite us to rethink invasive species in a new light?

A lot of the issue is with the term itself, which simply casts some species as “good” and others as “bad.”  There is so much focus on eradicating these species, when transitioning is a more feasible approach.

At Wellspring, we don’t want to eradicate these species, and one reason is that we rely on them as emergency fodder when we need it—during dry seasons like this one, for example, when we have been thinning out our woods and feeding our sheep with it. Many invasive species make great fodder. And non-native invasive species often have significant nutritional value for grazing and foraging animals. 

It is important to find value in these plants. Someone recently asked me about removing a stretch of overgrown honeysuckle in order to build a windbreak. My response was that the honeysuckle was a windbreak, and why expend effort to remove it when it’s serving that function already?

In your recent book on silvopasture, you claim in passing that we need “more people on the land, not fewer.” I wonder if you would elaborate on that.  

Animals do require management, and the only real way to manage them is to graze them. Very few people today do this kind of work.

Yes, it seems most people who work and tend to the land do not earn a full living from it.  They do it more or less as a hobby on the side.  You have a day job working for the Cornell Small Farms program. Do you have any thoughts on how we might incentivize more people to take up this kind of work?  

Some of the current subsidizing of large-scale agriculture definitely needs to be allocated to support small-scale agriculture. Right now, though, 95% of all farmers have off-farm income that they rely on.  

The goal of the small-scale farmer should not necessarily be that the farm is the sole source of income.  If you want to earn some of your living from farming, there is a triad of things to consider together: 1) your goals, what you are passionate about and good at; 2) the type of land you have and what it supports; 3) the markets for what you have to produce, whether they exist already or are markets that need to be built.  In that case, you have to develop these markets.  They are not given to you.

The farmers I work with are not always very good at record-keeping, etc.. They are good at farming and managing their land, but sometimes not so good at managing a business.  

No one crop will make you a millionaire.  Sometimes growing a crop to sell is not the best choice.  My grandfather grew corn during the big shift to industrial agriculture in the middle of the last century, at the beginning of the “get big or get out” period.  He decided to get out of farming and instead work as a mechanic fixing tractors.  He still grew things for fun. But he had to adapt to the times.

In your Cornell profile, you write that your wife Elizabeth has taught you to see “another dimension” to your work in agroforestry “which includes the need to address social inequities and injustice that is prevalent in our society today.” 
The events of this year have brought many of these issues to the center of the public conversation. I wonder if you could say a few words about what you see as the connection between what you do and what you write about and these larger societal concerns.

First of all, owning land is itself a huge privilege.  That coupled with the risks of going into business and getting a loan from the bank—these are challenges for anyone, but they are particular challenges for people of color.

At Wellspring, much of our profit goes back into the business.  But we also try to reinvest as much as we can in building “community wealth” and supporting others so that they can do the same thing we have done.  

Relationship building is important.  We have worked to build relationships with local indigenous peoples, for example, by donating some of our profits, and by doing such things as learning their native languages.  These people are here—they are not a history lesson, they have a presence and a future.

I come from a background in narrative writing, of telling stories, and I think it is really important to dig into history to see how we got here, to understand that story.   Working toward social justice is much like regenerating a forest.  It has to be an ongoing journey, and the problems may not be resolved in our lifetimes.  But we have to take steps.