A Forest(er) Farmer’s Journey with Silvopasturing
By Brett Chedzoy
Over the years, I’ve had many enjoyable opportunities to talk about silvopasturing – mostly in an “official” capacity as an Extension educator. But I’ve never had the chance to share much on how I came to be enamored with this “grazing in Nature’s image” agroforestry system that has become the core of our family’s farms.
The story begins with a young forester (me) who shipped off to Argentina with the Peace Corps in 1992. There I was tasked with sharing my knowledge of forestry and timber harvesting with local ranchers and gauchos who had spent the previous twenty years creating large forests from scratch via planting. The Argentines liked to quip that “God gave them great soils, climate and rainfall, but forgot to add the trees”, so they saw it as their mission to complete the work. They were very successful in their endeavors, and the next step was turning trees into cash.
Interestingly, at the time of my arrival the Province of Cordoba (central Argentina) was importing ~ 90% of the lumber it used from outside the region – most from neighboring countries like Chile and Brazil. Thirty years later, the same region is now self-sufficient and exports 90% of the timber products they grow. That in itself seems like a real success story, but what I gradually came to appreciate from these tree-covered ranching operations was how well the forestry and grazing complimented each other. It was an eye-opening evolution for an idealistic young forester who was taught since forestry school infancy that: “Thou shall not graze livestock in forests!”
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Seeing the Forest for the Bees
By Kass Urban-Mead
INTRODUCTION
There have been many wonderful pieces about pollinators in The Natural Farmer, including a comprehensive Summer 2017 issue that I encourage you to return to. Today, I hope to add an unexpected corner of wild bee biology: the role of forest trees. I will combine woods and a smidgen of tree climbing with pollinator conservation to explore the often-overlooked role of trees for bees, especially on farms. For now, let’s start on the ground (pun intended!) with a review of who our wild bees are.
HONEY BEES
Until very recently, a conversation about “the bees” usually meant only Apis mellifera, or European honey bees. Beekeeping connects many of us to the magic of insect communication, sociality, and pollination habits. The European honey bee has captured the public imagination—and mine!
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The Game of Logging – A Women’s Workshop
By Elizabeth Gabriel
Game of Logging for Women attendees, listening to instruction. Photo credit, Elizabeth Gabriel
Game? It’s ironic because the last word I would use to describe anything to do with a chainsaw is “game”. While I am the kind of person who puts together new furniture or a new gadget without reading the instructions, I’m not the kind of person who uses a deadly tool without guidance and confidence. And certainly, I don’t want to play any type of game with this tool.
A few years ago I was given a Stihl chainsaw and chaps for Christmas. My partner, a forester, has taught me to use it at least four times. Each time I feel oriented to the machine, comfortable enough using it with him nearby and pleased with myself. But, each time a few months go by that I don’t use the saw and again, I am fearful to use it.
These machines can be deadly. The extremely sharp chain, with 50-100 tiny cutting teeth, is running at nearly 60mph around the bar. It’s designed to cut through wood. Our bones are much less dense than wood and our brain’s reaction time to feel the pain if the saw were to cut us is far too slow compared to the power of this machine.
I first witnessed the result of this combination – man vs. saw – when I was eight. At the annual ‘Take Your Daughter to Work Day,’ I met one of my dad’s patients, Mr. Jacobson. Mr. Jacobson, a professional arborist, was in a tree when his saw kicked back and sliced his face and neck. (Did you know, what appears to be a guard on chainsaw helmets is just there to block sawdust? It provides absolutely no protection from the saw.) To this day, I vividly remember the wound my dad had stitched on this man, that both saved his life and ran from just under his eye, down his nose, across his chin and down part of his neck. It’s a miracle Mr. Jacobson didn’t decapitate himself, and my dad has always been in disbelief that Mr. Jacobson was able to speak at all – albeit impaired – because of the damage done to his vocal cords.
Just this past summer a neighbor of mine, a somewhat overly confident 32-year-old DIYer, experienced a similar sort of miracle. (I had seen Duncan use an electric chainsaw a year earlier, and was dismayed by his lackadaisical approach. It actually turns out that electric chainsaws can be more dangerous than gas ones because they don’t bind up in Kevlar, or an equivalent material used in chainsaw chaps, and people think they’re safer because they are light and quiet). Duncan has been clearing a house site on newly acquired land for a few months and this day was no different. While his eight-and-a-half-month pregnant wife was off in the distance moving brush, Duncan was bucking up a tree in his usual way – without any safety gear other than ear protection – when his gas-powered saw kicked back. In an instant, the saw had sliced through his thigh deep enough to see the femur bone, but incredibly, did not cut through it. His wife raced him to the hospital where 49 stitches put his muscle and skin back together. (For those who don’t know, breaking, or cutting, a femur bone can be considered life-threatening and damage to this region is concerning because of its proximity to the femoral artery).
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Why Thinning Matters
By Ed Neuhauser
Figure 1. The natural range of red pine (Pinus resinosa) in the northeastern US; Source: commons.wikimedia.org.
In general, in northeastern forests, tree regeneration occurs naturally. While the regeneration may not be of desired or high-value species due to intense selective browsing by deer, under normal circumstances, an open field with nearby seed trees could result in up to 50,000 seedlings per acre, which is more than enough if we want to end up with 50 to 100 high-quality trees per acre in a mature forest 80 to 100 years later.
But what are the consequences of not being able to carry out the timely thinning and reduction of stand density that foresters would like to achieve? How does thinning—or the lack of thinning—affect the quality of the sawlogs produced, and what are the effects on the value of the products that are able to be made from those logs? Let’s examine an example from my woodlot that demonstrates the long-term benefits of thinning.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=10eGkyikT4fh6XJ0L2Z60P2EI6zyGY79N
White pine (Pinus strobus) is found throughout New York State, while red pine (Pinus resinosa) has a much more limited range in New York (Figure 1). As part of the reforestation efforts that took place in the first half of the 20th century, large numbers of conifers were planted in abandoned agricultural fields. Recognizing that open-field plantings of white pine would result in the white pine weevil (Pissodes strobi) infesting the terminal leaders of many of these young trees destroying their future lumber value, many fields were instead planted with red pines. This resulted in stands of red pine being planted far outside of its native range and preferred soils in many areas of New York.
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Agroforestry for Resilience
By Jono Neiger and Genevieve Lawlor
After more than a decade of designing regenerative landscapes, one thing is clear: interest in land-based resiliency continues to grow. What resiliency looks like depends on the client and context, but the definition remains the same. Resiliency is the ability of a person(s) or system to handle and quickly recover from adverse conditions. For the farmers we work with, resiliency increasingly means diversifying their operations with agroforestry.
Agroforestry systems vary across culture and climate, but all involve the integration of tree crops with other perennial crops, annual crops, and/or livestock. Diversifying in such a way contributes to economic resilience by not relying on a single crop or type of crop, and builds ecological resilience through the myriad benefits of trees – soil building, carbon sequestration and storage, flood control, cooling, and habitat.
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The High-Potential for Nut Crops
By Elizabeth Gabriel
The nut trees in this young planting are in rows laid out on a 1 percent slope with the goal of moving excess water passively from where it is needed least to where it is needed most – wet to dry areas in the landscape.
Provided by Carl Alberts.
Nuts are incredibly nutritious and extremely high in protein and healthy fats. The growth of a regional market for organic nuts would fill a critical gap in our regional community food system – there are very few high-protein crops produced here (besides meat). Further, nut trees have tremendous potential as a multi-purpose crop here in the Northeast and should be both cared for and valued in existing landscapes and also planted and grown out. To learn more, I spoke with a few members of The New York Nut Growers Association (NYNGA), an all-volunteer, non-profit organization that is dedicated to finding and preserving existing nut trees and also to inspiring and promoting gardeners, landowners and farmers to plant more nut trees.
Long-time member, Carl Albers, is the Chair of the English walnut project, which started just 5 years ago, is trying to identify existing English walnut cultivars that are productive trees in New York State and that produce good-tasting nuts. The group collected nuts from a dozen trees and distributed them to members for a taste and crack test. While a light kernel is critical for an international market, here in the Northeast, Carl doesn’t anticipate competing in an international market, but there is potential for a niche regional market with these nuts. The challenge is to identify English walnut trees that are adequately disease resistant and well adapted to our NYS
Climate.
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Northeastern Charcoal in the 21st Century
By Bill Taylor
Hundreds of years ago, much of the Northeast was a center for producing charcoal for smelting iron, and pits in our forests attest to that history. These days, for farming and climate, biochar is often recommended as a solution to soil fertility and a way to sequester carbon. The principle is simple: when wood burns, first the heat releases volatile gases that burn, and then the carbon itself combines with the oxygen in the air at a much higher temperature to create carbon dioxide and ash. Making biochar or charcoal (mostly carbon, with some minerals present) requires excluding air once the volatile gas phase of the burn is complete. Unlike whole wood, char takes centuries or more to break down (yielding carbon dioxide) so it is a stable way to bring carbon dioxide levels down. It provides additional habitat for soil microbes compared to that provided by humus and soil particles, and the smaller the char pieces the more this happens. The reason it is advised to inoculate char with animal waste or composting material is that if it is added raw to the soil, it will take time for the char to fill with microbes and this takes them temporarily out of circulation in the soil food web which relies on them to help plants grow. This is an overly-simplified picture of what actually goes on. The real-world result is that after initial treatment, the biochar improves productivity in the garden or farm.
Ring of Fire Biochar pit from Wilsonbiochar.com
While there are all kinds of gizmos to make biochar, I am gearing this article to those of you who make a burn pile and light it and burn to ash. Before going there, though, I will give some background on these other systems, which are useful if going to various locations with a truck to transport them but do require more preparation of the feedstock (cutting up wood or chipping it), so the energy used doing the cutting or chipping may partly or totally cancel out the higher production of char per pound of wood. Starting with the simplest, there is the choice between the Oregon Kiln or a metal ring type (“ring of fire” kiln). Here is information from the Wilson Biochar Associates in Oregon (wilsonbiochar.com): “The Ring of Fire Biochar Kiln is a metal container for burning waste wood and brush for the purpose of making biochar. The kiln consists of an inner ring composed of three sheets of mild steel that are bolted together. An outer ring of lighter gauge steel bolts onto the brackets that hold the inner ring together. The purpose of the outer ring is to serve as a heat shield that holds in heat for better efficiency. The kiln is easily moved, as none of the individual pieces weighs more than 40 pounds.” The inverted trapezoidal-shaped, single-piece “Oregon Kiln” needs equipment to move. Either kiln costs about $1,000 to purchase. If you want to make your own kiln, this very long URL has plans:
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Tapping Walnut Trees: Studies on Walnut Sap Flow
By Mike Rechlin, PhD and Kate Fotos
Tapping tree species other than sugar maple provides syrup producers the opportunity to apply their skills and use their equipment to expand into new and potentially lucrative markets. Just as bourbon barrel-aged syrup and various flavor-infused syrups are opening new markets for maple syrup, the unique tastes of alternative tree syrups, and their maple blends, are finding a place in today’s “foodie” economy.
In North America, Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) is the most tapped species besides sugar maple (Acer saccharum). When considering tapping, however, it is good to understand walnut trees are not just maples with compound leaves and big edible nuts. Walnuts have anatomical and physiological characteristics that affect both tapping and syrup making.
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Leaves of the Same Tree
By Akiva Silver
It has been said by sages of ancient times that humans are leaves of the same tree or fingers of the same hand. We see each other as different beings, but we are all physically connected from the same source. This does not go far enough. It is not just humanity, but all of creation that is one. All of existence is constantly melting and mixing into itself. At the core, we can break things down into elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and many others. Everything in the world will become stardust. The Universe does not favor one side of itself more than another. When we learn of spinning galaxies filled with billions of stars, how can we believe that one country is more important than another? Why do we even have countries at all? We are riding a living planet through space, and we are all on the same ride together. We all come from the same place and we all are headed to the same place. All of us: trees, people, rocks, water, animals. Not so long ago in history, people thought slavery was okay. It took a while for the mainstream to accept that all people are equal. It will take a while longer for people to accept that all of life is equal.
All of life wants to live and is made of the same elements. Consciousness blows through all of the beings in the Universe, whether we recognize it or not. It is a prejudice to say that our way of perception is superior to another’s. It has been proven by scientists that plants have a sense of hearing and a memory. They do not have a brain like ours, but they clearly have some form of consciousness. Plants share this world with us. They strive to express themselves and they have life stories filled with joy and tragedies. These sentient beings are built to work with us. If we can just notice, we will see that our world is filled with powerful allies: The trees of power are just some of them.
Life is eating itself everywhere, devouring bodies of plants, animals, and entire worlds. Supernovas sing out in creation and still, people will say that God doesn’t exist. They will say, “But look at all the bad stuff.” So what? The Universe is not scared of pain or awkwardness or horror or anything. The Universe lives inside you and in everything you see. Cells, atoms, electrons, mitochondria are all dancing, making noise, being.
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Hearing the Language of Trees
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
The White Pine (Pinus strobus Linnaeus) (1899), image from wikimedia.org.
The intelligence of plants has long been a theme of literature, philosophy, and Indigenous narrative. Scientific research into the chemical interactions between plant species and other living things supports the idea. In The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, writers and scientists add their personal perspectives in a rich collection of essays and poems, each dedicated to a different plant. In “White Pine,” excerpted here, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes Indigenous reverence for trees, which are “respected as unique, sovereign beings equal to or exceeding the power of humans.”
When I come beneath the pines, into that particular dappled light, time slows, and I fall under their spell. My science brain and my intuitive brain are both alight with knowing. Is it the spaciousness of the leafy vaulted ceiling? Maybe the terpenoids in pine vapors exert a psychological influence, producing an altered state of tranquil alertness. Perhaps it’s the quivering energy of electrical micro-discharge from the needles. Maybe we are humbled simply by their size. Is it the sound of boughs rising and falling, like slow breathing? There’s something there we sense, but cannot name, a feeling akin to sitting quietly in the presence of an elder. So it is, with pines. You want to slip into their circle and listen.
My favorite place to read on a summer day is leaning against the bole of a big old white pine. There’s almost always a hollow there, upholstered in a coppery brocade of pine needles with comfy armrests of the buttressed roots which hold up the pillar of pine rising two hundred feet above me. These piney points above the lake’s water are beloved in the north woods, for the sand and granite below, sun and wind above, and a view across the lake, which at this moment is dancing up white caps in the breeze. In this woodland library, I have one book on my lap and the other against my back. One written on cellulose, one written in cellulose. When I sit with white pines, I wordlessly come to know things that I didn’t know before.
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5 Keys to Establishing an Organic Orchard
By
Mulching the orchard. Photo from authors.
The joy of harvesting an apple is so many seasons in the making: After snowmelt, the blossoms are buzzing with bees, tiny fruit swelling all summer, and then harvesting that fruit, sweetness in hand, is so deeply nourishing beyond calories. In this time, when sound bites are seven seconds and media is considered social, deepening our relationships with ourselves and the world around us becomes a healing balm. Indeed, planting a few fruit trees for the seasons and generations to come may be one of the most radical acts of hope and resilience in our lives.
#1: Design for Ease & Access – of the Tree and You!
As you dream of abundance and begin designing your orchard-to-be, ask yourself these two questions, whether you plant 1 or 100 trees:
Where is the best place for a tree (or three)?
Often, as we plan where we might plant trees, we center our dreams rather than those of the tree. When we think like an apple tree, here’s where we would love to find ourselves:
Full Sun – all day, every day, all year!
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Nature’s Turn
By Judy Isacoff
Do you harbor a silent invasion of destructive jumping worms?
“The jumping worm is not yet established in much of the northern United States. The time is now to keep it from becoming the next invasive species horror story. …
The introduction of a single individual is enough to launch a jumping worm invasion.”
A few weeks ago, a chance phone call from field biologist friends in Hillsdale, NY marked the dawn of my searing awakening to a wrenching threat that – I would discover – was already growing in one of my gardens in Mt. Washington, MA and may be inhabiting land you love, too. Upon answering the telephone, I had simply asked Kathy, “How are you?” She was clearly distressed as she described digging up, killing and disposing of thousands of alien earthworms, known as jumping worms, captured over seven years in her acre and a half property: from underneath patio stones, the lawn, gardens and roadside hedges.
I hasten to offer that, once I uncovered my relatively small, confined infestation, I seized the moment. Acting with full force over a weekend, I dug and killed 200 worms from a 5 foot by 15 foot bed where I am now solarizing the earth – seeming, at present, to have stopped the spread. Understanding that prevention is the only way to manage this threat, I am writing to convey what I have learned, to urge readers to look with awareness on your grounds and, if jumping worms are present, take the actions outlined below.
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A new farmer-led seed company inspired by Pollinator Pathways and CT NOFA’s Ecotype Project
By Dina Brewster
Announcing Eco59: a new Connecticut farmer-led seed company inspired by Pollinator Pathways and CT NOFA’s Ecotype Project
Pollinator enthusiasts, regenerative gardeners, and conservationists can now find a source of locally grown, native, ecotypic wildflower seeds: a much-awaited contribution to our northeastern ecosystem. It is a good season for it: early winter holidays are the perfect time for sowing native wildflowers.
Eco59: a farmer-led seed collective, has launched its first season of sales. Catalyzed by the work of the Pollinator Pathways and CT NOFA’s Ecotype Project, a group of farmers has been working together to learn to grow a new crop – seeds of regionally appropriate wildflowers, called ecotypes, for pollinator habitat restoration. The new seed company seeks to build a “triple bottom line”: seed that is good for the pollinators and the planet, profitable for farmers, and adds to the beauty of our landscape. Profit from the sales of Eco59 goes to fund conservation work across our ecoregion.
Dina Brewster, farmer at The Hickories and a member of the Eco59 seed collective notes, “An important part of the Eco59 mission is to heal a broken landscape. The systematic displacement of people, the destruction of the environment, and the consequent loss of abundance around us are a direct result of not honoring the relationship that Indigenous people of this area had with the land. I view our work, growing ecotypic seed to restore native plants in the northeast, as a reminder of all that has been lost and all that we must work to restore.”
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The Hills Are (Too) Alive: Lymantria Among Us
By Jack Bradigan Spula
Female gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar dispar, Dorsal side. Photo by Didier Descouens, commons.wikimedia.org.
Back in the early 1990s, standing in my small Allegany County woodlot, I was ordered into the trenches. Only three miles to the north, the first wave of Lymantria dispar dispar (LDD), commonly known as the gypsy moth, infestations was crashing over the ancient glacial hilltops. Hundreds of acres of mostly hardwoods in the Rattlesnake Hill Wildlife Management Area, more than 5,000 acres, had been stripped bare. Even a casual visitor to the area couldn’t be spared this reality, not least because the epicenter of the defoliation was on a steep, south-facing hillside above a state highway.
I was getting panicky about my 17 acres. Invasive egg masses were multiplying, and it was obvious the following spring would see the hardwoods on my place — largely red and sugar maple with yellow birch, beech, cottonwood, and a smattering of black oak — getting badly chewed up. So I launched a one-person eradication campaign: scraping egg masses carefully into bags with a very dull knife, then transporting the stuff back home for ritual destruction safely indoors.
All this hit home again last year. Just west of Canandaigua Lake, in Ontario County, a frighteningly efficient LDD outbreak struck hundreds of acres. Ontario County Park, in the town of South Bristol, was the epicenter. I witnessed the initial loss of foliage — almost total in some patches — with alarm. Local news media covered the story. Individual landowners in the affected area looked mighty depressed.
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Farming & Parenting
By Elizabeth Gabriel
Kelli, Mike and their two boys inside one of their high tunnels.
Photo provided by Roots Farm.
Kelli and Mike Roberts started Roots Farm in 2009 in Tiverton RI, a certified organic diversified vegetable farm with a focus on year-round and no-till growing. Their farm and family have grown over the past decade, now with two children, six moveable high tunnels, and six employees. You can find more info at www.rootsfamilyfarm.org and on Instagram @rootsfamilyfarm
Before we get into parenting, how did you get into farming?
My husband (Mike) and I met as undergraduates at MIT, where I studied materials science & engineering, and he studied mechanical engineering. I moved out to Seattle to do my PhD in materials science, researching magnetic semiconductor materials. About 2/3rds of the way through my PhD, I had an epiphany where I realized that despite enjoying the science and research of my studies, I didn’t want to be part of developing smaller and faster devices for humanity’s ceaseless consumption. I also felt that we didn’t need higher tech to solve the problems of the world, but rather we needed appropriate tech and change from the ground up. I wanted to shift my career to something more tangible and in line with my values. While out in Seattle I had become interested in organic farms and food systems, and so after finishing my degree, Mike and I moved back east to apprentice on an organic farm in Maine. We were looking at our year on the vegetable farm as a way to learn how to grow our own food, and think more about the bigger picture of tying our life’s work into something we were passionate about. And then… we fell in love with farming. After that year in Maine, I took a postdoc research position at Cornell University, but I was restless in the office and found myself wanting to get back in the field. We would shop at the farmers market in Ithaca NY, and I was happy to be supporting local farmers, but I knew I wanted to be the person on the other side of the table, actually growing the food, not just buying and eating the food. That winter we made our business plan, and within six months we’d moved to RI (where I am from) and were renting land to start our own farm.
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Young farmers struggle with child care and health insurance
By Shoshanah Inwood, Andrea Rissing, and Florence Becot
Kat Becker feeds hundreds of people with the vegetables she grows on her Wisconsin farm, and she wants to expand. But her ability to grow her business collides with her need for affordable health insurance and child care.
She has had to make difficult choices over the years: keep her farm income low enough so her children can qualify for the state’s public health insurance, or expand the farm and buy expensive private insurance. To look after her three young children, she could hire a cheap but inexperienced babysitter, or spend a significant share of her income on child care and have peace of mind that the kids are safe from dangers on the farm.
“The stable choice for my children to have health insurance is an irrational choice for my farm business,” she said.
We’ve heard numerous stories like Kat’s in our work as social scientists supporting the next generation of farmers. Through thousands of interviews, surveys, and conversations with farmers across the country, we have documented how household expenses like access to health care and child care undercut investments that could increase food production across the United States.
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Lessons from the Land: Resilience
By Maria Merlino, Somerville MA
A Mother’s Love
Farming has helped me heal and I’m so grateful for it, so I thought I’d share some words about it.
I wasn’t a person before I started farming. Okay, sure, I had all the qualities of a person—hobbies, favorite bands, a preferred season, a skeletal system—but when I looked in the mirror I didn’t recognize my reflection. Who was this college dropout? Did I even like them? Did they have any sort of purpose, like, at all? If they did, it was unbeknownst to me. I simply didn’t know them.
I now understand that this is a symptom of trauma—personal trauma and generational trauma bequeathed to me. My seven-year eating disorder, a mother whose free spirit was crushed by compulsive heteronormativity, a grandmother who never had a chance to discover who she really was, a great-grandmother who never even wanted to have a child, a great-great grandmother who lost all but one of her children to illnesses and had to flee her home country as an adult. It can break your heart to tiny pieces if you start thinking about it for too long—the compounded suffering, each maternal generation laying the foundation for a house—my body—besieged by trauma.
It was June of 2017 when I first started volunteering on a small organic vegetable farm in Belmont, Massachusetts. Twenty-six years old and just realizing that farms not only existed but that I, a regular person, could work on one.
I was in love.
There was nothing better than taking a bus and three trains home smeared in dirt. I wanted people to ask why I was so damn dirty so that I could exclaim about post-hole diggers and summer squash and collecting eggs from real-life chickens. It felt like I had discovered a secret. Not just a secret, but the secret, and if only people would ask I could gleefully pour some soil into their hands and watch their eyes brighten.
By September I was working on a larger organic vegetable farm in Concord, Massachusetts where I finished the 2017 season. This was followed by a full-time apprenticeship on the same farm in 2018. I was buzzing from connecting with the Earth. My serotonin levels climbed higher every time I slid my hands into the ground. My confidence was stick landing intricate backflips in front of cheering crowds as I learned how to drive tractors. Staying an hour or two extra to set up irrigation as the sun slipped away was like talking to a therapist.
Farming was medicine. Physically draining, ache-inducing, sweaty medicine.
After the vegetables, came the animals. Six months on a small goat dairy in Maine showed me just how much work goes into making the goat cheeses, yogurts, and other dairy delicacies that I do so love.
I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the hours in the dairy scooping curd or wrapping cheeses for farmers’ markets. Couldn’t stand machine milking goats for two and a half hours every other night. But, oh, the goats. Stealing away to the barn for ten minutes here and there to sit with these caprine creatures calmed my nerves. Their unfaltering gazes, their curiosity, their measured and rhythmical chewing as they worked at their cud—this was why I was here. The small moments where I could thank them for their gifts.
In my earlier twenties, I had suffered a short period of extreme gastrointestinal pain and goats’ milk kefir had played a significant role in healing my gut. How else could I display my gratitude than by giving them the gift of my devotion? Our gut health is vital. My gut health had been ravaged by an eating disorder. Their gifts had helped rebuild my health. I could give these goats six months of my life in return.
After the goats, I farmed for one more season, but I didn’t return to farming after that. Farming is more than a full-time job—it’s your life. And all the hours I gave to this lifestyle made me realize that I have other passions in need of my time. Even in this way has farming helped reveal parts of who I am. I am an artist and a musician and I didn’t know how badly I needed to fulfill these parts of myself until farming showed me.
The mothers on my maternal side did the best they could in a world where womens’, AFABs’, and queer spirits are squashed by capitalism. But I had to turn to our shared Mother. I needed to fill my house with her sunlight, soil, and creatures, and it was by farming that I was able to do this. I can now look at my reflection and see an artist, a nature-lover, a musician, and an armchair herbalist, amongst other things. But mostly I see myself, and I like them.
Save our Trees to Save Ourselves
By Stephen Leslie
For any generation, it can be difficult to imagine that the world of the past was so radically different than the present. Here in Vermont, with our rolling farm fields and forested mountains, the landscape appears
healthy. Because the northeast region has the built-in resilience of abundant precipitation and a temperate climate, the land has recovered to such a degree that, unless you study the land-use history, it is not manifestly evident that European settlement brought about near ecological collapse.
The human-driven devastation wrought upon the North Woods from 1750 to 1850 was the natural disaster equivalent of a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, forest fire, and flood—all rolled into one. The wholesale destruction of the ancient forest began in earnest with the Merino sheep boom of 1810 and ended with the felling of the last old-growth stands in the mid 20th century. An adult Abenaki person still alive in 1850 had witnessed their entire world undone. With the exception of tiny remnants, all the woods see now are regrowth, and in many cases, the trees have been harvested two or even three times.
It is estimated that fully one-half of Vermont’s soils have eroded away since the 18th century. Forest ecologists estimate that if you let a New England farm field go fallow, it takes a natural succession of about 120 years to re-establish a healthy soil biome, but even that will be but a pale shadow of the mature complex food web that once existed under the bowers of the ancient giants. The diverse deciduous and evergreen forests that blanketed the hills and basins of our region were a species of super-organism and the keystone species that bound all this biodiversity together were the mycorrhizal fungi. These trees could live 300-500 years and were enormous—with red oaks and hard maples at 150 feet and white pines reaching 200 feet or more. Hardwoods could have boles 9 feet in diameter. But all this biomass above ground was dwarfed by more than 60% of the total—the food web underground. For all the tons of carbon held in the trunks and branches—the real long-term stable carbon was built up over centuries in a substrata of deep humus. That is the carbon bank our farmers are still drawing on.
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