Vermont Agroforestry

Amber Roots Farm

"Riparian buffer; heritage varieties of apples planted around the property by previous owner, including in pastures; working on a food forest and integrating nut trees into the existing trees already planted around the property; hoping to learn more about silvopastoral practices, and as of 2023, establishing a native and medicinal plants nursery."

 https://www.facebook.com/WillowMoonNursery/ 

Image credit: Amber Roots Farm

Bread & Butter Farm

Including silvopasture by way of legacy hedgerow management, and shelter woods.

 https://breadandbutterfarm.com/ 

Image credit: Bread and Butter Farm

Taproot Nursery

"At Taproot, we offer locally-grown fruit or nut-bearing, medicinal, and/or healthy soil-building bare-root perennials to increase the local availability of these types of plants to those interested in agroforestry, silvopasture, or those who simply want to create perennial landscapes. We are a plastic-free, low-input nursery committed to building closed-loop, on-farm fertility by partnering with endemic microorganisms, using compost teas, biochar, manure, wood chips, and by "chopping and dropping" living mulches. We never use synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, or tillage."

 https://www.taprootvt.com/ 

Image credit: Taproot Nursery

Cedar Mountain Farm

"We are engaged with NRCS-CSP and Interlace Commons in implementing silvopasture and alleycropping practices. So far we have planted trees and shrubs in our pastures. Installed a pollinator hedgerow in our market garden, maintain a riparian buffer, and protect micro wetlands. Future plans include alleycropping for fruits and nuts, and a coppice windbreak"

 https://www.cedarmountainfarm.org/ 

image credit: Dig In Vermont

Choiniere Family Farm

"We have planted riparian buffers along the river, have planted shade trees along the cattle lanes and are planning a silvopasture planting for next year"

Image credit: Choiniere Family Farm

Agricola Farm

"Tree planting is done along streams running through the farm and on pasture to provide additional shade to the animals."

Photo credit: Agricola Farm

Wild Earth Farm

"We are implementing silvopasture into our fields as well as creating wind breaks using trees and shrubs. "

 https://www.grassfedvermont.com/ 

Photo credit: Wild Earth Farm

Gallagher Close Farm

"Opening fields on our property and fencing in areas for livestock does more than create a pasture. Opening fields create a dynamic where wild animals such as deer, turkeys, and bears have food, and many breeds of wild birds have nesting opportunities. Opening fields for livestock does not mean clear cutting trees, but conscious land management that enhances hardwoods such as maple, black walnut, and cherry, allows for growth of shrubs and of edible brush." - from the Gallagher Farm website

 https://www.gallagherclosefarm.com/ 

Photo credit: Gallagher Close Farm

Valley Clayplain Forest Farm

"We have a number of different agroforestry systems/practices in place here on our small farm. This includes multi-purpose shelterbelts, mixed tree crop and berry plantings, a small amount of alley cropped vegetable production, seasonal silvopasture, and log-grown shiitake mushrooms."

 valleyclayplain.com 

Photo credit: Valley Clayplain Farm

Flag Hill Farm

"We have forest farming under maples, willows for baskets, hedgerow plantings along our tractor lane, and nut trees that we planted that also help reduce drifting snow. We have planted over 100 chestnut trees and will be planting 600 trees this spring."

 https://www.flaghillfarm.com/ 

Photo credit: Flag Hill Farm

Moonlight Mountain Farm

Moonlight Mountain farm raises sheep pastured in orchard and cultivates log-grown shiitake mushrooms under forest cover.

 https://www.moonlightmountainvt.com/ 

Photo credit: Moonlight Mountain Farm

Eleven Acre Farm

Eleven Acre Farm has an agroforestry plant and medicinal plant nursery and stewards a forest that is "naturally resplendent with medicinal herbs, nut trees, berry bushes, and more."

 https://elevenacrefarmdotcom.wordpress.com/about/ 

Photo credit: Eleven Acre Farm

East Hill Tree Farm

"We have planted trees as windbreaks, as well as for food and wood crops, and diverse woody plants to support beneficial insects and build soil. Our main economic crops are seeds and cuttings for propagation."

"We grow a wide variety of edible and useful woody species to improve the health of our landscapes and our communities. We endeavor not to plant single trees, but to establish whole ecosystems, in which people play an integral role."

 https://easthilltreefarm.com/ 

Photo credit: East Hill Tree Farm

Harrison's Homegrown Farm

Harrison's Homegrown Farm implements "riparian buffers, silvopasture, shade for grazing livestock, and windbreaks."

Photo credit: Caleb Kenna

Drift Farmstead

"At Drift Farmstead we integrate rotational forest grazing for our livestock to dine in a diverse diet as well as support carbon sequestering. We also integrate perennial bush and trees into the perimeters of our production gardens and edible landscape."

 www.driftfarmsteadvt.com 

Photo credit: Drift Farmstead

Green Robin Farms

"We believe in environmentally and socially responsible farming. At Green Robin Farms, that begins with trees — and what’s inside them, on top of them, and underneath them. Green Robin Farms is integrating maple, berries, mushrooms, and herbs into a diverse, resilient forest supporting a healthy wildlife corridor and vibrant bird population. We are focused on culinary and medicinal use and building opportunities for the wider farming and food communities. By reintroducing native plants, we strive to reduce wildcrafting pressure on endangered and rare species. Sustainability is more than a buzzword. It is a necessity for all of us. It is also an economically viable way to practice forest farming. Agroforestry is our future. It is essential for our planet, the economy, and our local community. As we experiment with methods for growing valuable native plants in the forest understory, we are developing an agroforestry model that can weather the invasive pests, diseases, and climate stressors that are the new normal. We are looking ahead to the future with our eyes in the trees and under them. And our pledge is to always grow with intention."

 https://www.greenrobinfarms.com/ 

Green Mountain Girls Farm

"We have experimental plantings of black locust planted on contours to use in a coppice system as paddock dividers and along edges of the property, and we have around100 hazels planted on edges, a few chestnuts on fence edges, and apple, plum, pear, seaberry, elders, kiwiberry planted in edges and groves and wild linden, willow, red ozur dogwood etc. which we maintain in wet zones and use for fodder in drought times. We have a rip sower and are keen to plant more trees in existing open areas even while we continue to thin in our silvopasture zones.

We have a seasonal farmstand open Wednesday - Saturday... so come visit!"

https://eatstayfarm.com/

Moonlight Mountain Farm: Finding value in forests with log-grown shiitake mushroom

On an early spring day, the sun was bright, the ground was icy, and the pasture was still covered in feet of snow. The young fruit trees poking out of their white blanket showed the faintest sign of sealed spring buds and new growth behind their wire cages, and the small pond has just thawed. Two Anatolian shepherds – immense, fluffy, and seemingly immune to the cold – patrol the land, but are eager to break for a belly rub.

This is  Moonlight Mountain Farm , the charming, homestead-scale, diversified farming operation of Kristen Getler and Nick Laskovski on 20 acres in the Roxbury Gap. The two landed here in 2019, after an earlier iteration as Dana Forest Farm. While Kristen prepared the idyllic on-site  farmstay  for new guests, Nick shared his agroforestry story.

For Nick, an interest in agroforestry was piqued early, when he was just six years old living in upstate New York. The first introduction? Mushroom logs. “My mom wanted to try growing mushrooms and saw somebody doing a course. We were living in a rental with a decent wood lot in the backyard and found some downed trees and got some plugs and spawn and just started doing it.” Young Nick was amazed to see the mushrooms growing straight out of the log and, as a first-grader entrepreneur, started selling them at his vegetable stand. “People were like, ‘where are these coming from?’ It just was a very unusual product.”

Nick carried that passion for growing mushrooms with him, but says that he “never really took it seriously until [he] got an internship at college to be the agroforestry intern at Cornell.” There, he began to study under Professor Ken Mudge, whom he describes as “an awesome resource and researcher [who] sort of organized the Northeast around helping to expand agroforestry.” The following year, Nick started as an intern at  Cornell’s MacDaniels Nut Grove , a test site for hundreds of nut trees that were planted in the 1930s by Lawrence H. MacDaniels. After lying dormant for 70 years, shrouded in thick undergrowth, Ken Mudge recruited a team of students, including Nick, to help uncover it to identify and evaluate some of the cultivars. Nick says, “we found these massive grafted nut trees that were literally two feet in diameter, with Shagbark [tops], Hickory on the bottom [as rootstock], and then like pignut [rootstock], Hickory on top, and literally two different trees just kind of like stacked on top of one another.” This diverse nut grove became the test plot for expanding agroforestry research, especially in forest farming, which is described as the cultivation of high-value crops under forest cover. Nick went on to work as the manager. Eventually, another area near Lake Placid involved in maple sugar research was added to the research program, which focused on “maple sugaring and growing mushrooms underneath a sugar bush and growing ginseng within there and kind of having this tiered approach. “

Carrying this education and passion for forest farming, after college, Nick moved to Waitsfield, Vermont, where his dad was living. Nick says, “I just expanded a mushroom operation on the property and started inoculating as many logs as I possibly could.” He tried to see if he could turn mushroom production into a job, but was working another job at the same time, with mushroom production as his “weekend side hustle.” But it was made for success: “All the restaurants were scooping up every mushroom like crazy. I think my best year I had about like $15,000 in sales, which doesn't sound like a lot of money, but it's a pretty good amount for just a weekend thing.” 

Excited about this newfound success and passionate about the possibilities of mushroom production because of the hungry market, Nick organized a way to expand awareness and knowledge of mushroom forest farming in the Northeast. He connected with UVM professor Alan Matthews and, together, they reconnected with Ken Mudge. In a UVM-Cornell collaboration, they “put together a three year SARE-funded research project around training Northeast farmers how to grow mushrooms – shiitake mushrooms primarily. It culminated with us hosting around 45 training sessions over the course of three years to hundreds of different agricultural producers, with the theme being: ‘hey, if you have a woodlot on your property, and you're looking at other ways to generate supplemental income, mushrooms might be a nice option for you.’” The SARE grant provided $150,000 for the training, involving researchers and grad students from UVM. It culminated in a publication of the  best practices manual of shiitake cultivation in the Northeast , “which is still available online, and people use it all the time.”

Nick’s work in log-grown mushroom cultivation has been impactful to developing forest farming in the northeast. Forest farming is one of the five USDA recognized practices of agroforestry, alongside silvopasture, alley cropping, windbreaks, and riparian buffers. Nick describes agroforestry as “a tiered farming approach of a higher canopy, a mid level canopy, and an understory.” He’s been passionate about agroforestry because it encompasses both a “love of not only just trying to grow things, but also increasing forests and carbon sequestration and creating a multi-dimensional approach to growing food, eating food, and not impacting the environment in a bad way.” Agroforestry, he says, is in stark contrast to the “massive mono crops and big deforestation campaigns” that dominate industrial agriculture. While he admits that maybe it’s not a blanket-approach that will feed the world, he says it’s a pretty straightforward concept that “sounds like a pretty darn good solution.” 

Nick explains that forest farming starts from a forestry perspective of considering a sustainable forest management plan that takes into account trees for timber use, but then adds other crops or uses to the forest floor, like ginseng, mushrooms, or other shade-tolerant plants. Forest farming is a step in the direction of seeing woods beyond the value of cutting down trees for timber, and instead considering, “how can we make this a sustained location to be able to do some forest thinning, but also make a value add within the forest?” 

Looking for economic value in the forest as an incentive for conservation is a tricky topic that has recently become increasingly complex with the development of carbon markets. In Nick’s work in forest farming, he says “the biggest transition from when we were talking about this 20 years ago is the potential for forests to be involved as carbon sinks, for carbon offset programs.” Certainly, this can be supportive to farmers or landowners who need an economic incentive to maintain a standing forest. But this brings up some moral questions: “does allowing somebody to pollute somewhere else make sense if they're just offsetting it with a large carbon bank somewhere?” However, he shares that forest farming can be an opportunity to find additional human benefit in a natural standing forest, allowing the ecosystem benefits to continue while also finding economic benefit. 

For Nick, this comes down to what’s important. “I think as a society, we need to grow more trees, simply; they are the biggest answer to our carbon problem.” Moonlight Mountain farm, then, is their small scale approach to demonstrating another way to find benefits in maintaining (and expanding) forests. Nick and Kristen’s agroforestry operation still includes shiitake production, and has expanded to sheep in orchard silvopasture (the grazing of animals under trees, in this case, fruit trees), and flowers. 

Since they have only been in their new spot for the past four years, Nick and Kristen are still in the process of expanding their shiitake production. ” Back in Waitsfield, they had about 5,000 logs in rotation at their peak, providing hundreds of pounds of harvest, but the operation is now at 250 logs – still a large operation, but a fraction of what it once was. This year, he hopes to get back to 1,000 logs. 

For the past few years, they’ve also added sheep to the operation. Currently, they graze pastures that are connected to the woods. The woods are somewhat overgrown now, “but the idea is to thin out those woods, use the logs from thinning for both firewood and mushroom production, and then allow the lambs to then go in and graze and use them as a tool to sort of help out the woods a little bit by clearing out the the underbrush.” They also will still graze in pasture, but the pasture is in the process of becoming an orchard. “We planted an orchard pretty soon after we moved here and have protected the young saplings from the sheep so they can graze around the orchard. The hope is that in 10 years or so, we can remove the fencing protection from the trees, and then the sheep can ultimately graze the orchard, keep it mowed down, help fertilize, and have a mutually-beneficial agroforestry relationship between sheep and fruit growing.” In the orchard, they’ve planted apples, cherries, plums, pears, and more, and will include black walnuts and other varieties in the future. The sheep operation is small scale; they kept nine sheep in the past year and plan to expand to 10 or 12 this year to be raised for meat and skins.

Ever diversified, in addition to the mushrooms, orchards, and sheep, Kristen has started a flower farm. This year, she is offering a flower CSA. The flowers are mostly field plantings, but she also integrates perennials. In the future, she may integrate shade tolerant varieties into the forest as a part of their agroforestry practices. 

But, the central crop of Moonlight Mountain Farm is still the shiitake mushrooms – Nick’s first and continued focus. Over the years, he’s grown a variety of other mushrooms: oysters, bluets, enoki, and more, both in indoor and outdoor cultivation, but he’s always come back to shiitake for a variety of reasons. For one, he says, “outdoor cultivation for me is preferred . . . to have it be as less energy intensive as possible.” This outdoor cultivation in logs is facilitated because, he says, “it’s a very natural pairing of the trees we’re living amongst: sugar maples, hop hornbeams, and beech, that are fairly prevalent in our woods that match so well with shiitake.” At the end of the day, though, Nick says he just “really appreciate[s] their flavor.” 

Even with all the benefits of shiitake, he also thinks shiitake production makes a lot of economic sense. “Shiitakes have really good marketability: they dry really well and store really well. And based on this log system approach, which is very ancient, it also lends itself really well to consistent production. So whereas oysters may be more responsive to natural climate induced fruiting, shiitake has this methodology where you can take the logs, dump them in cold water, and get fairly decent harvest results within a couple of weeks. If you time that throughout the growing season, you can have a consistent harvest, which is not just nice, from an eating standpoint, but it's also nice to be able to supply in a consistent way.” They also have the added benefit of creating added value through drying; if shiitake are dried in the sun with their gills up, they actually “soak up a tremendous amount of vitamin D.” Nick says they could, potentially, really “lay it on thick” with the labels on their mushrooms: “forest-grown, organic, vitamin D enhanced, sundried, hand-picked, no fossil fuels.” 

Nick’s beautifully attributed (but not labeled as such) and consistent shiitake harvest is sold and distributed locally to a nearby community store and some restaurants. He says the quality of the product and consistent demand allows him to maintain a very short radius of distribution location. Though he admits that this distribution isn’t going to become his main income, he does feel it can be impactful even on a small scale because it can be a model for a larger scale. “If this could be replicated to a much larger scale and it meant that it was more beneficial to keep forests than to eliminate them, then that's very important to me. I mean, it's about doing that here.” 

Since Moonlight Mountain Farm is still small scale, Nick also works a full time job. Part of this, he says, is that there’s “not many good examples of some really big agroforestry project in the Northeast, where they've got it all dialed in, and it's demonstrating the way everything should be.” In his ideal world, Nick says, “if I could just be out in the woods moving logs around and making a little bit more than minimum wage, so I could support our family, which would be a lot more than minimum wage, then that's ultimately what I'd love to be doing.” Until then, though, Nick works in the renewable energy world as a wind energy developer because “people have a much higher demand for energy than shiitake.” The two worlds of renewable energy and agroforestry are colliding, though. Nick says that the buzzword in solar and wind energy development is “agro-voltaics” – exploring how to productively use land under solar panels or wind turbines. This mimics the forest farming conversation in that it’s seeking to utilize a shaded environment for agriculture. 

While Nick would rather be full time agroforestry with a side interest in renewable energy instead, one big barrier to that being the case is the challenge of scaling up production. Some of the largest log-grown shiitake operations in the world currently are in China and Japan, and partially, this is because “in Japan, they’ve engineered certain devices that allow one person to inoculate many logs using automation.” This kind of automation could seriously expand the potential of mushroom producers to grow more with less labor inputs because the inoculation is the most labor-intensive part of mushroom growing. The catch is that the machines to do so are $7-10,000 – a high cost for entry that is unfeasible to most small-scale mushroom producers. 

However, Nick has found a community-centered approach to his labor challenges: Shiitake Palooza. “[It’s] just big assembly lines of fun with beer and food.” Shiitake Palooza acts as a collaborative labor effort, a community event, and an educational experience. Nick and Kristen invite their community to come inoculate mushroom logs, setting up stations for an assembly line from drilling, to plugging with spawn, to moving logs to their final resting place. They sweeten the deal with food, beer, and music to make it a fun community event, and also teach people about how to inoculate mushroom logs. He says that others have been inspired and that Shiitake Palooza has “spawned” other mushroom inoculation parties. “It's amazing, the amount of work you can get done with that many more people. And it’s the kind of thing that you can't put too many people on – the more people the merrier.”

Though Shiitake Palooza is a fun, community-centered event, Nick does see that to expand mushroom cultivation more broadly in the Northeast, investing in machinery that can automate the mushroom log process could really support the expansion of mushroom production in Vermont. “If I can find a SARE grant to convince somebody to get an automatic or semi-automatic inoculation machine and do a proving process as to why something like that could revolutionize the amount of shiitake that could be grown here based on the fact that not everybody wants to throw a Shiitake Palooza . . .” Nick’s idea touches on the unique possibility of agroforestry to tap into more shared or co-operative models for managing and distribution in agroforestry; because work is less consistent than annual agriculture and sometimes has more niche products that require processing, connecting agroforestry farmers to one another for sharing machinery, facilities, or distribution could alleviate some of the challenges that agroforestry farmers are facing.

Looking to the future of agroforestry, Nick hopes that more people will adopt agroforestry to protect existing forests and plant more trees, something we desperately need. “I think as a society, we need to grow more trees. I mean, they are the biggest answer to our carbon problem.” On a more promising lens, though, Nick notes that Vermont is already well suited to agroforestry in the sense that “maple syrup sugaring operations are really the basis of good forest management, [so] expanding that to include one or two other things like animals pasturing in the same woods or shiitake being grown in those woods, or whatever else, is not that much more of a reach.” Though people might be unfamiliar with the term or the practices, he thinks that understanding agroforestry will be supported because “in reality, this is something that’s already here.”

Flag Hill Farm: Agroforestry, the hard cider renaissance, and fruitful experimentation

Sabra Ewing and Sebastian Lousada are the founders and stewards of  Flag Hill Farm  in Vershire, Vermont, a “better than organic” solar powered vintage cidery and agroforestry farm. From their cozy living room, Sebastian and Sabra shared stories of paving the way for a craft apple cider renaissance, long-term tree crop experiments, silvopasture, and stewarding bird habitats during their 40+ years of agroforestry work.

Sabra and Sebastian met at the College of the Atlantic in Maine, but each were drawn to farming from their early years of gardening and skills that would later become key aspects of their profession. Sabra grew in Cape Cod, earning the nickname of “farmer” for her backyard garden work and exploration of wild edible foods. For highschool, Sabra attended the  Mountain School  (about two miles as the crow flies from Flag Hill Farm) where she and her classmates raised all their own food, attended biweekly farm workshops, and developed new skills like spinning yarn from sheep’s wool. While Sabra focused more on botany and solar architecture in her college education, she highlights that she’s “always been somebody who is attracted to animals and plants.” 

Sebastian grew up in London gardening on his family’s rented land. He had an early interest in planting fruit trees, but without secure tenure of the land, he was restricted to gardening and beekeeping. He also started making wine at the young age of 12 because he “liked the fermentation more than the drink.” After moving to the States for college, Sebastian was ready to own land, reflecting that “it would be amazing to actually have land you could plant, that you’d be holding on to.”

The two spent some of their college years picking apples on a conventional apple orchard, sometimes leaving covered in a “white dust” from all the herbicides, pesticides and fungicides that were sprayed, including cancer-causing alar. The takeaway from this experience in brief: Sabra said, “so we knew we wanted to be organic.” Sebastian and Sabra eventually settled on Flag Hill Farm, a 250-acre hilltop at 2100 feet above sea level with shallow soils, severe snows, and “no flat land, which one becomes more aware of over time.” Their first actions on moving to the land that they envisioned to be their homestead? Sabra planted 50 fruit trees, before they’d even built a house.

About five years later, they aimed to plant a “very small but commercial size orchard that had a saleable crop to it.” In this plot, they’ve planted plums, apples, cherries, hazelnuts, peaches, nectarines, apricots, kiwis, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, pawpaw, beach plums, nannyberries, black walnut, buartnuts. Really, as Sabra said, “everything you can think of,” and probably a few more that you didn’t think of (kiwis in Vermont!?) Their long list of plantings is sprinkled in with various updates of what remains: the kiwis are delicious, the blackberries didn’t work, the apricots needed cross-pollination and it wasn’t quite worth it. Of the 65 chestnuts planted soon after, about 50 didn’t survive. As Sebastian summarized, “we've definitely tried a lot of different things over time.” 

Not only have Sabra and Sebastian experimented with different varieties, but they’ve also experimented with different techniques and the development of new varieties, generating a whole lot of learning to share back. After seeing some Dr. Seuss-esque peach trees at the house of Professor Meador who developed the   Reliance Peach , Sabra and Sebastian grew these dwarf peach trees in whiskey barrels and would move them into the barn during the winter because they were not quite hardy enough for the harsh freezes. But this turned out to be a lot of work. “We realized one year that, yes, they would survive and grow peaches, but without the heat that peaches love, they weren't reliably good. So then you're like lugging these things in and out [for little reward].” 

Another experiment has been with selecting apple trees that resist the boring beetle organically, which really impacted their apples early on. They had planted a variety of apple trees from a mix of rootstocks, so Sebastian as “an amateur scientist” says, “I got the idea of tracking how many beetles I was getting out of each tree variety, and fairly quickly discovered that one of the rootstocks was more resistant to them.” In this way, they overcame a major obstacle to growing their orchard, planting out future apple trees with the resistant rootstock.

While Sebastian and Sabra worked on developing their diverse orchard, they also harvested from the wild apple trees on their land and started making their own cider in a barrel in their first year, drawing from Sebastian’s past experience with winemaking. From there, things took off. The two would drive around the state to food co-ops and markets sharing samples of  their craft cider.  As Sabra shared, “we actually helped create the market for cider. When we started off with cider, people didn't know [about hard cider]. We would do a cider tasting in the Brattleboro Food Coop and they would pass it off to their child because they thought cider was apple juice. And we had to re-educate them all. You know, everybody knew what cider was in the early 1800s. Because everybody drank it — that was the only alcohol!” Though there’s a long cultural history of apple cider in the North East, it was in part due to Sabra and Sebastian’s efforts at Flag Hill Farm that cider became prevalent again.

But while cider has gained popularity, unfortunately, most of the products lack the quality that Sebastian and Sabra strive to achieve. They do this through emphasizing flavorful apples and a craft brewing process. Sabra said, “I do think we make some of the best cider. So our whole orientation was low yield. Because there's only so much flavor that can go into any individual fruit. . . our fruit, it's about a third the size of a grocery store apple.” Due to its quality, their product has been recognized by Bon Appetit, Boston Magazine, and Martha Stewart herself.

For about 15 years, Sabra and Sebastian kept up this ma-and-pa distribution, traveling around the state to small stores and co-ops. Eventually, they found a distributor to take some of that burden of travel off of them. However, when they recently added a new product — an “organic, delicious, local apple balsamic vinegar” — they were shocked by the reception. From selling cider to critical acclaim, they now couldn’t find anyone to carry  their vinegar . In Sabra’s words “I cannot believe that we cannot right now get a premium local product to Burlington without doing it ourselves all over again.” Their vinegar can be found in Brooklyn and Boston, but not in Burlington. 

Sabra and Sebastian’s concern with this style of distribution speaks to their values around providing for their local community, but with a globalized economy, this faces some challenges. Sabra shared that in her ideal world, the major alcohol distribution trucks wouldn’t stop at the nearby family general stores and gas stations, and instead everybody would just drink their cider within a 10 mile radius. In that situation, Sabra says, “we could probably fill their alcohol needs.”

The global economy strikes again in adding challenges to the distribution of their wool; fast fashion and plastic-based garments have thrown off the value of quality clothing. Wool “costs $50 a pound to convert into yarn,” and yet the market value for wool is only 67 cents. The market for wool is so bad that most people in Vermont raise sheep for meat and just compost the wool. This market has impacted the species selection: it’s now hard to find breeds of sheep that have high quality fleece. Sabra raises fine wool Shetlands which “are a breeding standard in the Shetland Islands back to 1927 with super fine micron fleece.” Her latest product is a hat kit that includes wool to make a hat, a pattern, and some educational material on how the sheep are raised and how they can support regenerative agriculture. 

Yet, Sabra says, “It's very hard to convince somebody who doesn't have enough money in Vermont that they should be wearing local wool.” Despite the heat regulating, stain-resisting, moisture-wicking, and durability of wool, due to the capitalist global economy’s preference for cheap materials, cheap labor, and disposability, mass-produced clothes have low prices, and most people don’t have the income to rationalize buying alternatives. However, while a better market value and dressing the local population in wool sweaters might be the ideal, the sheep at Flag Hill Farm have a role beyond generating a soft and fluffy product. 

Sabra raises sheep for wool in silvopasture, which means the integration of grazing animals under a managed tree cover. The sheep at Flag Hill graze in the orchard, fertilizing the trees with their manure and maintaining the grass, precluding the need for mowing while also building soil. Sabra explains, “the idea is that the sheep chomps, and then the grass tries to grow again, so it puts roots down again, and so you're building up humus that way.” Unfortunately, the sheep are restricted to how many days they can spend in the orchard due to contamination risk of E coli., despite the fact that the vinegar and alcohol process eliminates the risk of this. Even still, with the time the sheep have spent in the orchard, they have noticed an improvement in the soil from the manure. Similarly, in the past, they had 100 Angora goats in the same set up. Combining pasture animals with orchards is a synergistic practice: animals provide built-in fertilization and mowing, and the trees provide shade, wind protection, and sometimes tasty treats. Sabra and Sebastian have seen the benefits first hand, and are actively expanding their silvopasture practice by adding more trees to a 20 acre pasture where the sheep rotationally graze, likely selecting for flowering trees to enhance the diets of the sheep or to add another marketable product from the same land. 

This perspective of integrating parts of their farm to generate a holistic functioning system stems from an ecological perspective that predated any conception of agroforestry. To Sebastian and Sabra, it’s been essential to a “dream of homesteading and growing [their] own food.” After sharing about the challenges of the intense climate and lack of flat land at the farm, Sabra clarified that their ecological ideas have been rooted in maintaining the beauty and diversity of the land. “We keep going on about how bad and rugged it is here, but it is actually a really, really beautiful hill farm. And so [our goal has been to] perpetuate that and keep it pretty simple, but add diversity.”

In this work to maintain and improve biodiversity on their land, Sebastian and Sabra have some of their land in Audubon management. While Sebastian admits that “this isn’t really agroforestry,” it is a part of an agroforestry-aligned perspective that looks at integrated functions of agricultural land use. Flag Hill Farm has “more rough land that’s open than [they] need” so instead of mowing it multiple times a season, they have it in a rotational mowing plan where they mow about every five years. This allows the land to stay at a point where it could easily be expanded into, whether for pasture or more orchard development, without the high cost of converting forested land and also serves to support wildlife biodiversity. Now, their land has “incredible warbler habitat” and the diversity of wildlife in the fields is “just night and day” from what it was before. 

Whether in creating new habitat for wildlife biodiversity, creating new markets for a classic Northeastern beverage, or discovering which tree varieties survive the best, Sabra and Sebastian’s work at Flag Hill Farm has generated lots of experiential knowledge. Their years of experimentation point to the inherent long-term, intergenerational nature of agroforestry. From the 15 chestnut trees that survived their initial planting, they picked the hardiest ones and planted out their seedlings to replace the ones that had died. For a tree that, depending on the variety, can take over ten years to produce nuts, improving varieties can take a whole generation. Rather than see this as an effort in futility, Sabra shared that she sees the value in it: “I think the experimentation maybe will help people out a little bit in the future to keep trying things out.” The two are also looking to the next generation of agroforestry farmers to keep up this work, but wonder about passing on the knowledge that they’ve gained. Sabra said, “we have people like Sebastian, who are scientists and have been monkeying around and learning all these things. But who are they going to share it with, and how?”

Valley Clayplain Forest Farm: Permaculture-inspired agroforestry

It was the first day of spring, and though a wintry wind whipped strongly, the snow-covered and sun-drenched valley still felt warm for the season. Accompanied by two energetic dogs close at heel, Mark Krawczyk passed through the high tunnel, settled a fresh log on a table, and began drilling holes. With a nifty handheld device, he filled each drilled hole with mushroom spawn and a small foam cap in one swift motion. Today, this action was just for demonstration, but plugging mushroom logs is one of Mark’s main winter activities at  Valley Clayplain Forest Farm . Come spring, inoculated logs from the previous year will be soaked in water stimulating a flush of shiitake mushrooms in the next week or two. With more than 1200 logs, this enables Mark to harvest mushrooms throughout the growing season, a welcome complement to a growing black currant production and diversified food-producing shelterbelt. 

Earlier, Mark shared his agroforestry story from the sunny living room couch of his shockingly warm passive-solar heated home. Mark grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, without “any realland based experience.” It wasn’t until his first year of college at UVM in an Environmental Studies class that he became aware of environmental issues and was inspired to work to address them. He says, “that was this very activating experience for me, just because I was astonished at the reality of the state of affairs globally. And there were a bunch of self-sufficiency and reskilling kinds of programs that they had there. So I started going down that track.”

This path brought Mark to an exploration of alternative living. Mark traveled to  Auroville  in India, said to be the largest intentional community in the world and an “experiment in human unity and transformation of consciousness.” Here, Mark first learned about  permaculture design . Mark says, “permaculture really spoke to me, and I started pursuing that. But I had very little experience with growing food, or just any kind of land interaction, building, craft, and things. So when I finished school, I basically just did work trades and internships, and found people that were doing things I was interested in and tried to learn from them.” From this applied education, he was ready to put his learning into practice on his own homestead. 

Mark moved back to Vermont inspired by a homesteading vision. Eight years later (in 2012), he found the place he and his family now call home. Mark bought the land and met his future wife, Ammy, three months later. As he says, “we've been able to build this from the ground up together.” Valley Clayplain Forest Farm, named so because it describes the natural community once ubiquitious throughout the Champlain Valley, has been a practice in “building a long standing relationship with a piece of the earth, trying to be a producer, while supporting community needs.” 

From the start, though, Mark was committed to agroforestry. “We didn't come into this wanting to be farmers in the “farming” sense, but we wanted to try to both meet our needs as much as possible and also look for some enterprises so that we can be here and feed people. It had kind of become the life dream. Landing here, the vision was to create this three dimensional food foresty landscape.” For Mark, agroforestry “was the only way I was interested in doing it. . . if you're interested in growing perennials at all, it's like, unless you're completely ignoring the opportunities in between, it becomes agroforestry to a degree. So partly, it was just personal interest and a drive to do that. And then also, it's a bit of a byproduct of the specific crops.” Furthermore, adopting agroforestry was also about the multitude of benefits of having trees on the land. Valley Clayplain Forest Farm is “very exposed . . . so there's a lot of benefits to having trees just for wind protection, and also for screening from the road, and then there's firewood and craft materials and food. And there’s the accrual of biomass and diversifying the land.” 

Mark originally discovered agroforestry through permaculture design. Mark shared that “agroforestry always seemed to [him] to be just the farm scale expression of what a lot of people think of as permaculture.” Since permaculture is more of a holistic vision that leverages “design to create culture that can be sustained in perpetuity,” when it looks to agriculture, it emphasizes the use of perennial plants. Essentially, “permaculture’s vision of food production is agroforestry” because of its inclusion of perennials, trees, shrubs, and animals. 

However, the permaculture vision of agriculture and agroforestry do differ in some ways. One of Mark’s mentors, Colorado-based Jerome Osentowski, was an early promoter of forest gardening and food forests and drew heavily from experiences with agroforestry in Central America. “A lot of people think the permaculture vision of agroforestry is a working forest full of all kinds of useful plants that aren’t necessarily in rows, [but is] more of a discovery process in the garden. And to me, agroforestry is usually more linear. It's better suited to mechanization.” In addition to the five USDA-recognized agroforestry practices (silvopasture, alley cropping, wind breaks, riparian buffers, and forest farming), Mark considers a few other practices as agroforestry, too. Home gardens, for example, are “usually smaller scale, and much more complex, but because of that, they don’t lend themselves well to scale.”

Mark was always interested in adopting a permaculture-style agroforestry system, but though the “vision’s been consistent, it's also evolved.” True to his permaculture background, Mark has been engaged in observing the landscape and how different species have interacted and thrived (or not) to shape the practices. As he says, “it wasn't necessarily that we started here and decided that we're gonna grow mushrooms and black currants, it was more like, we're gonna plant a lot of things and see what happens. And maybe there'll be some enterprises that emerge from it. So it was kind of a more convoluted farming story.” 

This “convoluted farming story” started out with seeing problems as an opportunity, one key permaculture principle. Valley Clayplain Farm is located directly off of Route 7 – a bustling motorway that most people might not consider to be not a part of an idyllic rural landscape. But in Mark’s permaculture perspective “it makes an easy design solution, which is just putting a [bunch] of trees on the road.” The first planting year at the farm, Mark and Ammy planted a highly diverse 30-foot wide shelterbelt alongside the highway. Always thoughtful, Mark gave three reasons for this initial planting. For one, “it's always very safe to plant along edges since you're not boxing yourself in in open spaces.” Two, trees take time to grow, so getting Route 7 to disappear as quickly as possible was a good place to start. And three, a diverse shelterbelt gave Mark the opportunity to see what species grew well on the land. Since then, every successive planting has taken these successes and challenges into account.

The following season , Mark and Ammy planted a third of an acre of berries with the idea that “berries are a faster return on investment than fruit trees or nuts.” From this planting, Mark says, “that's where the black currants kind of found us as a crop.” This installation included white, red, black, and pink currants, gooseberries, honeyberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries, all with “varying degrees of success.” The black currants “had no issues with wildlife” while rodent girdling and rabbit browse caused significant damage to many of the other young plants. Additionally, black currants, are a very nutrient-dense berry, and like other members of the Ribes genus (currants and gooseberries), are easily propagated.. 

Their focus on black currants, then, was a result of listening to the land and emphasizing what was already working well. In comparison, the “blueberries never looked as good as they did the day they arrived from the nursery.” They didn’t like the near-neutral pH soils and the rabbits broswsed them hard in the winter. Mark admits that he could have amended the soil or better protected them, but why put in so much effort when black currants would thrive with little intervention? As Mark puts it, “instead of trying to put all this energy into transforming where you are, it's probably a lot better to just find things that do well.” And once again, as an added bonus, Mark says, “they're very easy to propagate. So we never really bought any new plants except for a few new varieties.” 

Their emphasis on shiitake mushrooms also arose from a confluence of opportunity. Mark began to sustainably manage the farm’s woodlot, harvesting logs that are a perfect substrate for growing mushrooms. Also, he was excited to have something “to complement the fruit that was more protein-based.” And further, “seasonally, it often works out nicely because the wood harvest and inoculation work is in the off-season.” Mark and Ammy started producing mushroom logs around the same time as the berries and have been steadily expanding ever since. 

With such intentionally opportunistic approaches to black currants and shiitake production, new challenges arose in the harvesting and marketing of new products. Perennial plants specifically pose a unique marketing challenge. Unlike annual crops that produce a crop the very year you plant them, with berries, “you've got at least three or four years before they're at peak production, so it's hard to forecast what the yield is going to be.” At the first harvest, without knowing how much fruit will be produced, planning for wholesale sales can be challenging. But now, they have a much better handle on their seasonal production totals and can be more strategic about how much to wholesale and how much they keep for value-added products. 

A key product for Valley Clayplain Farm is a  black currant oxymel  made from raw apple cider vinegar, local honey, and fresh pressed black currant juice. Of course, production and marketing introduces its own set of challenges. For one, Mark says, “it's tough, because it's not really our vision to be juice makers.” Additionally, Mark says, “we've still got a lot of work to do to build a more reliable customer base.” So far, direct sales have been quite successful, like at the Burlington Farmers’ Market. Mark says the markets are helpful because it really helps when people are able to sample these types of unique new products. In addition to the market, they’ve built good relationships with several local restaurants and a few small wholesale accounts. And yet, Mark says they could produce more than they are currently selling.

Expanding to more markets adds unique challenges in the niche agroforestry product world. Mark says, “the other challenge with some of these things is [that since] we’re one of only a handful of folks in the area that are growing currants around here, we don't want to step on anyone's toes [by] tapping into their markets. But at the same time. . . there's 8 million mouths within a five hour drive, so there's no shortage of potential. Reaching people – that's the challenge.” Mark acknowledges that to expand and sell more of the black currant bounty, they need more marketing. For two people who grow food from their passion for permaculture and agroforestry, neither of them are inspired by that side of the operation. While at this point, they basically can sell all the shiitake they can grow, they intend to continue to improve their fresh and value-added retail and wholesale black currant sales with better marketing. “We've got a really nice foundation set for that. Hopefully, we can just keep that going.”

While marketing is the next frontier of experimentation and development, the earliest experiments are bearing fruit – in more ways than one. Already, Mark has seen the impacts of the shelterbelt that was planted back in 2013 . While they chose their land because of all the sun exposure, all that sun can get “pretty draining in the summer for people, animals and crops too.” With the shelterbelt now 10 years in, “there's pockets of respite that are starting to close in where you can go and get some protection [from the sun].” Though he’s yet to seek to quantify the benefits of trees integrated into their agricultural landscape, intuitively, they’ve helped to stabilize soils, support water infiltration, sequester carbon, provide habitat, and block sun, snow, and winds. 

Some of the most powerful impacts of this work, though, have been in Mark’s own experience of living and working on the land. In doing the work that has been Mark’s “personal vision” since he was 19 years old, he says it’s impactful “to get to see the fruits of your labor and learn and engage.” This personal experience on the land has been “the biggest yield” of the farm. 

Besides the black currant and shiitake production, they’ve also installed about two thirds of an acre of black locust that he intends to manage by coppicing – a practice of cutting down a tree to near-ground so that it will re-grow shoots from its strong, deep-rooted base. He’s recently published a book on the practice,  Coppice Agroforestry,  and also teaches workshops on the practice. He also teaches Permaculture Design courses, chair-making, and pizza-oven building. Clearly, Mark’s work in diversification extends beyond the landscape.

Mark’s passionate work in agroforestry education and his vision for transforming his own land is just one piece of a broader agricultural transformation. As Mark reminds us, too, this kind of transformation is a reclamation. “It hasn't been that long that trees have been removed from agricultural landscapes . . . [agroforestry] is the way that humans have grown food throughout time, up until perhaps 200 years ago. So it's not anything new – it's basically just a modern reinterpretation of the way that people have found of tending to a place and meeting their needs.” Planting trees into agricultural landscapes has some financial costs, but Mark says that if well designed, “the benefits far outweigh whatever complications there may be [because] there's tons of opportunities to generate additional value - both economic and ecological.” Mark’s path started in that environmental studies class years ago, learning about the world’s tragic environmental crises, and now, he’s working on being a part of that transformation. With an optimistic view, Mark says, “you know, that's kind of the benefit of being in a broken food system – there's a lot of low hanging fruit out there.”