Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Wil Crombie/Organic Compound.
In a good example of agroforestry, hazelnut trees and tall grasses are seen growing in the chicken paddocks at the Organic Compound, a farm in Faribault, Minnesota. 

Something about connectedness is in the air these days. Those of us with aches and pains have had to learn how muscles and bones and nerves are connected in unexpected ways. And what about connections in the environment? Even ten years ago, I failed to appreciate how soil and fungus and insects connect or how forests and farms need each other.

Tom Philpott explains at Yale Environment 360 shows agroforestry leading the way to a healthier ecosystem.

“Drive through rural Minnesota in high summer and you’ll take in a view that dominates nearly the entire U.S. Midwest: an emerald sea of ripening corn and soybeans. But on a small operation called Salvatierra, 40 minutes south of Minneapolis, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin is trying something different. When he bought the land in 2020, this 18-acre patch had been devoted for decades to the region’s most prevalent crops. The soil was so depleted, Haslett-Marroquin says, he thought of it as a ‘corn and soybean desert.’ Soon after, he applied 13 tons of compost, sowed a mix of prairie grasses and rye, and planted 8,200 hazelnut saplings.

“While he won’t reap a nut harvest until 2025, the farmer and Guatemalan immigrant doesn’t have to wait to make money from the land. He also runs flocks of chickens in narrow grassy paddocks between the rows of the fledging trees, where they hunt for insects and also munch on feed made from organic corn and soybeans, which they transform into manure that fertilizes the trees and forage.

“Salvatierra is the latest addition to Tree-Range Farms, a cooperative network of 19 poultry farms cofounded in 2022 by Haslett-Marroquin. Chickens evolved from birds known as junglefowl in the forests of South Asia, he notes, and the co-op’s goal is to conjure that jungle-like habitat. Chickens crave shade and fear open spaces; trees shelter them from weather and hide them from predators. In 2021, Haslett-Marroquin’s nonprofit, Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, purchased a poultry slaughterhouse just south of the Minnesota border in Stacyville, Iowa, where farms in the Tree-Range network process their birds. You can find the meat in natural-food stores from the Twin Cities area to northern Iowa.

“By combining food-bearing trees and shrubs with poultry production, Haslett-Marroquin and his peers are practicing what is known as agroforestry — an ancient practice that intertwines annual and perennial agriculture. …

“It’s widely practiced across the globe, particularly in Southeast Asia and Central and South America. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, 43 percent of all agricultural land globally includes agroforestry features.

“Bringing trees to the region now known as the Corn Belt, known for its industrial-scale agriculture and largely devoid of perennial crops, might seem like the height of folly. On closer inspection, however, agroforestry systems like Haslett-Marroquin’s might be a crucial strategy for both preserving and revitalizing one of the globe’s most important farming regions. And while the corn-soybean duopoly that holds sway in the U.S. heartland produces mainly feed for livestock and ethanol, agroforestry can deliver a broader variety of nutrient-dense foods, like nuts and fruit, even as it diversifies farmer income away from the volatile global livestock-feed market. In recognition of this potential, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in late 2022, launched a $60 million grant program to help farmers adopt such practices. …

“Using satellite imagery, a team of University of Massachusetts researchers has calculated that a third of the land in the present-day Corn Belt has completely lost its layer of carbon-rich soil. And what’s left is washing away at least 25 times faster than it naturally replenishes. As prime topsoil vanishes, farmers become more dependent on fertilizers derived from fossil fuel.

“Not surprisingly, given those applications, the Corn Belt is also in the midst of a burgeoning water-pollution crisis, as agrichemicals and manure from crowded livestock confinements leach away from farm fields and into streams and aquifers. … As University of Washington geomorphologist David Montgomery noted in his magisterial 2007 book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, ‘With just a couple feet of soil standing between prosperity and desolation, civilizations that plow through their soil vanish.’

“Breaking up the corn and soybean rotation with trees — and freeing some farm animals from vast indoor facilities to roam between rows, where their manure can be taken up by crops — could go a long way to addressing these crises, experts say.

“Trees actually have a much longer and more robust history in the Midwestern landscape than do annual crops. Think of the Midwestern countryside before U.S. settlers arrived, and you might picture lush grasses and flowers swaying in the wind. That vision is largely accurate, but it’s incomplete. Amid the tall-grass prairies and wetlands, oak trees once dotted landscapes from the shores of Lake Michigan through swathes of present-day Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, clear down to the Mexican border. These trees didn’t clump together in dense forests with closed canopies but rather in what ecologists call savannas — patches of grassland interspersed with oaks. Within these oak savannas, which were interlaced with prairies, tree crowns covered between 10 percent and 30 percent of the ground. They were essentially a transition between the tight deciduous forests of the East and the fully open grasslands further west.”

More at e360Yale, here. The long and interesting article is by Tom Philpott, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and author of Perilous Bounty. No firewall. Donations sought.

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