Homestead Paradise: got barren land, boosted it at a profit

though we didn't come here looking for this at all there were three families we were looking for a way that a bunch of 20-somethings can afford land and live a good homestead life and none of us could separately so we decided to pool our resources together to be able to afford to buy a piece of property corn corn corn corn the more degraded the property the lower the price per acre it was the more remote it was you know the less it was per acre we all threw our resources in and within six months the partnership fell apart and jen and i were the last ones standing we showed up here the property was 110 acres of overgrown pasture the grass was no taller than a golf course green it looked a lot like that property across the street and what's remarkable about that property across the street is that has not changed in the past 23 years that we've been here it's been corn and beans corn and beans for 20 some odd years and it's been chemically sprayed chemically fertilized if the soil has maintained its fertility it's because they keep adding it from a bag it's probably lost a tremendous amount of organic matter and its natural native soil fertility and soil food web is gone whereas this property here we've decided to do agricultural biomimicry and to mimic the natural plant communities of the area this is you already see a difference and smell it and britain listen listen you don't hear birds out in corn fields you don't hear birds because we needed to cash flow short term and the property was mostly grass and then coming out of annual crops our highest dollar per square foot of ground with ready markets was certified organic produce and so we started with one of the agroforestry techniques called alley cropping or silvo arable and so what what alley cropping is is you grow your annual crop in a in the alley between rows of trees and what we see on either side of this field right here this is a cereal grain this is triticale and on either side of it are hazelnut shrubs and if you think about woody plants it's going to take a while before they bear you know three to five years before you get any crops off the hazelnuts so in the meantime you're cash flowing with your crop in the alleys so we started with a lot of alleys of produce and grains and then over time we've filled in all the alleys with more and more trees at a certain point in time you don't need as many annual crops for cash flow because you start to have your perennial crops coming on and so i'll show you some of those but actually what we're using this for is for a cover crop we're going to let it grow to grain and then we're going to mash it down the understory crop which is a clover crop will come through it and then we'll mash that down again it's for disking it in to build the soil activity fertilizer for next year after the whole idea of alley cropping we're going to grow a cash crop in the alleys in between rows of trees we saw grains between rows of hazelnut well this is a perennial cash crop between rows of chestnut trees and this is asparagus in the alleys here i'm finished harvesting for the season but they're still coming up and so on average on two acres of ground we harvest between a thousand pounds and a ton of asparagus a year we'll see what i what i do is you know i let it go after a while because there's about six weeks of picking so then you know i have it mowed close in the early part of the season and then those spears these will grow up what's kind of neat about the asparagus is now that we let the ferns run it's not just the asparagus that we harvest these green ferns right here this is what's storing all the energy down on the root for next spring so next spring we harvest these for about six weeks and then after six weeks we let them go and they go back to ferns they recharge the root for next year year after year after years that's what we've been doing to cash flow while the chestnut trees are growing and so instead of just planting a chestnut orchard and maintaining the trees for seven years before you get chestnuts off at losing money every single year let's harvest asparagus let's harvest grains let's harvest other vegetables in the alleys in between the chestnut trees and so then on either side we have chestnut trees and in the early years you can imagine a little chestnut tree about the size of this asparagus isn't going to yield many chestnuts and it's taken 10 plus years for these trees to to get to this size when did they start to yield some of them start to yield within the first few years you see this one right here how small it is it's already starting these will eventually cast pollen in these little things right there that's a female flower those little yellow hairs at the end of it is the stigma where the pollen grain will land on the stigma go down to pollinate the ovary and it turns into a real big spiky ball we'll probably find plenty of leftover burrs so chestnut and and you know this is what you determined was well chestnut chestnut is the cousin to the oak now in deciding what trees to plant it was a little bit of research what was the historical vegetation here a hundred years ago 500 years ago a thousand years ago six thousand years ago and so on and then imitating that in the in the plant community that i mentioned the fugacity the cherries the apples hazelnut plum raspberries blackberries grapes currants gooseberries grass and animals those are all perennial crops and so that's what we did is we designed a system with those plants as the backbone species and then we used a wide range of genetics from all across the country planted high density lots of plants and treated them with minimal care so that lots of them died because we weren't interested in the ones that couldn't tough it out we want the ones that will survive with what i call sheer total utter neglect stunned and so the ones that you see are the toughies we have probably every pest and every disease that you could imagine that you could ever have in chestnuts or hazelnuts or apples and yet these trees produce crops and because we don't spend anything on pesticides herbicides fungicides fertilizers etc our costs are virtually non-existent all we have to do is harvest them do some post-harvest handling and get the product to market if you look across the valley over there there's three big gigantic oak trees that's a legacy that's they're 60 feet apart and their branches are just barely touching there's still plenty of light shining through them so the grass grows really really well you get both grass which is good pastures for livestock and nuts on the trees and those trees are probably 200 years old maybe 300 years old those are legacy trees they've been here ever since you know this has been uh wild it was oak savannah then the fence line between our property and the next so there's oaks in the fence line there's wild plum there's wild hazelnut there's wild crab apple a raspberry blackberry grapes all the indicator species of oak savannah this was oak savannah for a long long long long long time and the signature of savannahs worldwide is the savannah biome supports more mammals than any other biome on the planet just think the serengeti for example well this region here was the serengeti of north america and the dominant herbivores here before people got here were what animal mastodons five miles down the road was where a mastodon was unearthed out of the creek and it was the mastodon that ended the conversation on whether people were here when mastodons were here because the bones had been de-boned and butchered this animal had been hunted and killed and butchered by human beings with stone tools and it was unearthed five miles down the road so this was the serengeti of the upper midwest and there would have been animals all through here deer elk mastodon nine species of ground sloth two different species of giant armadillo just a huge array of wildlife eating all this grass and one of the things that the elephants would do because mastodons were browsers they'd be eating these hazelnut bushes that are loaded with nuts that are a high protein high fat nut and when the trees would get too big they'd start breaking branches and start knocking it down so between the animals and fire that would come through periodically naturally or being set by people this was maintained as a shrubby grassland for zillions of years all we want to do is imitate what's been working since the last ice age so we use a similar range of species related species chestnut and oak if we look out through here these are mostly hazelnut shrubs that you see and if you notice they're all planted in rows so this isn't a wild savannah it's a designed agricultural system but the ecological model is the oaks event of the upper midwest and if you look out across here these rows they tilt slightly towards the ridge high in the valley there are water collecting channels that when there's a large rainfall event a little pond fills up and overflows and it brings water down the channels out to the ridges so instead of the water concentrating in the valley causing flash floods down the valley it spreads the water out to the ridges one of the water channels is right in front of us here you can see how there's just a small little divot it's about yeah one foot deep depending on the rainfall patterns of a area the soil types the infiltration rate how fast the water soaks into the soil the slope of the land how big the area is that you're catching rain off of these channels to capture and move the water have to be different sizes if you look straight down the slope you see a slightly darker green line here part of that darker green line is the fact that it's just below the water collecting channel there's more water available for the grass to grow and so it grows just a little bit more vigorously so that's the next water collecting channel this next green line i'll walk to it and so we have all different spacings between channels everywhere from 15 feet to 100 feet or so and then boom down in the channel and that's the channel right there because we're managing the water instead of having the rain come and thunderstorms we get these big thunderstorms instead of all the water running away we're collecting it in small ponds up at the heads of valleys and out at the ends of ridges there are over 40 small scale ponds we call them pocket ponds sometimes that are scattered around the farm one purpose is for distribution of water to spread the water out to allow it to soak in so we have more evenly distributed rainfall then the other reason is for amphibians this is just the end of one of our this is out on the end of a ridge and the channel is right here so this whole ridge top here as that water spreads off the crown of this ridge catches in the ditch and it comes out here and it fills this little pond here we are a mile and a half from any surface water nearby and we've got look at all the little critters you can see all the splash rings in there this is loaded with tadpole why would we want amphibians on the farm one of the reasons is because amphibians eat insects so their our insect control in our apple trees and you know chestnut trees and so on many different species of frogs toads and one of an endangered frog at least some of them have showed up to help eat my bugs oh wow it's our first set of ducks you don't get frogs and you don't get insect-eating birds living out in the middle of a soy field but this is what we're surrounded by you know zillions and zillions of acres no bird song no tadpoles no ducks nesting out there no life in the soil just number two dent corn which will provide a lot of starch but most of it's not even going to human use most of it will get fed to livestock mostly cattle takes about 10 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef so 90 of it of the food energy is lost and then you know another 10 to 15 percent is used to make ethanol for fuel to burn in our cars and if you were to eat number two dent corn exclusively there are more deficiencies in it than sufficiencies in it and you'll die of all kinds of deficiency diseases some of the some of the diseases of course are caloric excess so diabetes and obesity directly related to the fact that we're eating way too much non-nutritious empty starch and we're killing the planet to do that we're totally killing the planet that keeps us alive that makes our air keeps the water clean it keeps all these other life forms alive we're killing a planet it used to look like this and now it looks like that we can still grow food for people and systems like this and we can actually even still eat meat except that we're going to eat meat that doesn't eat things that i can eat we're going to eat beef or sheep or goats that eat grass or sticks and twigs pigs that eat acorns and bitternut hickories and yet you come over here and instantly we've got bird song [Music] there's cherries up in the tree hickory nuts chestnuts flowers galore for all of the wild pollinators grapes on the vines this place is alive the soil under our feet is soft it's actually building increasing infertility increasing in thickness what we're not doing is we're not working our buns off trying to hit some kind of economic targets that we've been told we have to hit in order to be successful and we're not doing a lot of the things that we're told that you're supposed to do because we've learned that you don't and not enough people are experimenting with a more natural method of production that imitates nature as closely as we possibly can and so what we found is our yields may be lower than others but because our expenses are so low we have enough we have enough to pay our bills these are hazelnuts on the right chestnuts on the left with elderberry and mulberry and grapes in between this is a mulberry right here one of the things that we do we're pushing the envelope of low-cost production so once we planted the trees we haven't really done anything to them you just let them grow this is a mulberry right here underneath it we've got growing some raspberries right in the row with the mulberry this is a row of elderberries then underneath in the shade of the chestnuts we really can't see them too well from here there are currents so basically what's happened here is we've designed a system that we're not hunter gatherers because we don't have to hunt for it we know everything is because we planted it there we're but we're gatherers and so in order to take care of one crop you harvest another one typically what we have harvesting of grass are animals we've had cattle here probably 15 out of the 23 years or so and then pigs every year but you know two or three years what we have around the whole entire property is a perimeter of trees that are dual purpose trees these are american black walnut primarily was planted for like a retirement timber harvest and underneath it there's lots of grass there's still enough sun they're widely spaced so they get plenty of sun they grow faster and they're widely spaced so that the sun goes through and the grass can grow vigorously we want the grass to grow vigorously because that's what the animals eat and then the animals of course are part of the fertility cycling they're urinating and defecating that's fertilizer for the trees they're doing the weed control for the trees and they're also doing a lot of pruning because they're scratching on the trees which are breaking branches off down low and black walnut what's really neat about it is the foliage and the nuts actually are somewhat of a parasiticide to help with any kind of intestinal parasites that the cattle or the pigs might get this is a system you know some people say well well what's your most important crop and it's like well no you're you're thinking about it in a way that's not helpful to understanding how this works we're managing an ecosystem here some of the benefits of viewing the ecosystem as the model and the most important thing is that if you have a year like last year where we had early warm weather in the spring all of our fruit trees are merged and floured early then we had a normal frost and we had probably close to zero fruit so because we were looking at a whole system we had other parts of the system that did okay the asparagus did okay the hazelnuts did did okay uh the chestnuts did all right and so with a with a rich diverse system you have a lot of natural pest control not a lot of natural fertility management a lot of natural disease control and it may not look all that impressive to some people because it looks a little bit odd but we've got like right here on your on your left this is a pear tree and next to it is an apple tree and there's no branches down low now i didn't i didn't prune those branches down low the cattle did probably is they they browsed all the branches off well that's actually a benefit a disease control benefit because one of the biggest diseases for apples especially is apple scab it'll also affect pear trees where a raindrop will splash on a leaf that fell last fall and the spores from the apple scab will kind of float up and if they hit a leaf then they get splashed on again they splash up and it climbs up the tree by being splashed on by rain whereas if you got three feet between the lowest branches and the ground the raindrop hits a scab spore it goes up falls down and it doesn't climb up and infect your whole tree so cattle going in here and quote unquote damaging the trees is actually helping to prevent scab grazing pigs in the apple orchard will help to remove a lot of the pests well if you have the pigs in the orchard during what's called the june drop they eat up all that fallen fruit and they digest all the insect pests that are in it so you've just short circuited in a pest cycle and both times you've had those animals manuring and adding their urine for the fertility of the system as a whole and you'll notice that the grass is growing really really tall right now do that for a couple of reasons one is it's very affordable to not mow the grass another reason is because all the ground nesting birds like meadow larks for example they're still fledging their babies you know ground nesting birds so i don't want to mow up all kinds of little birds and the grass is actually taking nutrients away from the apple trees so instead of growing vegetatively long and juicy whips that are now attractive as food for things like sucking insects like tarnished plant bugs and aphids both of which are carriers of diseases for the for the trees by having the long grass the trees grow slower less susceptible to sucking insects and the diseases that they carry while getting the birds which do what eat more bugs so as a system it makes a lot of sense well i may not get five bushels of grade a picture perfect fruit per tree but what are my costs so far in producing these apples out here nothing you know if we got the animals out here we're gaining pounds of beef and pork oh yeah then in the fall we can harvest some apples well when we harvest the apples if they've got bugs in them you throw the apples on the ground these little apples on the ground these have bugs in them so you can either rake these up with a lawn sweeper or most of the time we have pigs out here and the pigs are eating these and they pick them up all by themselves we don't have to tell them to we don't have to pay workman's comp minimum wage nothing and then come october we put them in the freezer [Music] so managed as a system we're not getting the top yields we may only get one bushel of fruit per tree with revenues instead of costs so that's infinitely more profitable it's a lower total dollars coming to the farm but your margin your rate of return is almost incalculable is your are your labor costs a lot lower yeah the labor costs are much lower we've only had to hire labor every once in a while like if we had to get a squash crop out of the field before a big frost is coming several different times i've hired folks to come in and pick hazelnuts because there's a lot of hazelnuts out here and the laborers that we've involved most of the time is cows and pigs let them do the work did you ever expect to be farmers not originally no oh there's a rainbow got it look at the over the clouds that's so pretty there i originally trained for mechanical engineering jen trained as a biochemist and then i got out of engineering into ecology instead of pursuing a career in research or academia if i wanted to dive right in and do ecological restoration myself wanted to live out in nature instead of just look at it and read about it and study it and statistically analyze it so i had read that the homestead act of 1860 was about to close the last homestead area up in alaska and so i sent away for the information it's like oh man it's like the land is 300 miles from town off the road like thousands of feet up in the mountain this is ridiculous we got a double rainbow so i thought i wouldn't do it but one year before the homestead act closed i hitchhiked up to the settlement area in the matassa mountains of alaska claimed the land came back for my sweetheart we got married and we lived out in the bush for eight years living seriously in the wild and so we were more grizzly adam type people and grizzly adams and grizzly who would you be grizzly jane [Laughter] and it was while we were living in alaska trying to procure as much food as we can because we only had part-time summer jobs which didn't earn much and we had to survive nine months on three months worth of wages so i started looking at the ecology of the area and saying well which trees shrubs bushes and vines can i get food from that type of research led me to discover the world of permaculture permanent agriculture and a design methodology based on natural systems and water management and then we interact with them what this is this is a collection of many of the savannah species this is only a 20 foot diameter circle so you could do this in your front yard have oak chestnut apple these are hazelnuts the tala tree is oak underneath it is a bush cherry there's some wild plums roses this is a korean pine which is a pine nut pine and it looks like jen's going to do the mushroom dive because this is all mulched with the sawdust mulch which is inoculated with wine cap stropharia i don't see any right now but there are the making cherries here yeah definitely grab a few of those so obviously this is just planted as a circle as a thicket so ornamental in your yard you've got flowers you've got fruit there's nuts on the trees for commercial production this is not very efficient so that's why we have everything laid out in in rows and i would like some cherries thank you man it's good though did this farm come used it looks like it's been sitting for a while well we don't really need a lot of high-tech fancy equipment because we're dealing with perennials that what you just saw this grain field here and those two grain fields there that's it for the annual crops this year we got three acres of of annual crops out of a hundred so we don't need to plow and cultivate and disk and all that kind of stuff in order to get that crop our our mainstay crops are the perennial crops they're going to be here for a thousand years there's a there's a chestnut tree on the eastern flank of mount etna in sicily that i've hung out with and touched it's four thousand years old growing out of the rock on the side of a volcano it's been burned and blowed up four thousand years old that's sustainable agriculture one of my thoughts on sustainable agriculture is if you have to plant your crop again next year that's not very sustainable whereas these crops here they're going to be here for practically forever they're actually reproducing and expanding their population we didn't have the ability to inherit this from our parents we didn't have all kinds of inherited money to pay for it we've actually paid our own way for the past 20 plus years and people who say that this technique doesn't work they're not speaking from a position of knowledge because it works it supports our family we've raised two kids here [Music] we're at the house and it's rather simple all off the shelf stuff do it yourself cause we had no choice did you build your own house or something something well we are building it that's the thing that's why they call them buildings if if you weren't building it it would be a built anybody who who like writes a book about the owner built home obviously doesn't know what they're talking about because it's a building so owner building a home it was going to be at least ten thousand dollars just to get electricity down here to the house and so that was silly because then we'd have a monthly payment as well so we might as well put more money into panels and batteries and make our own the house is off-grid jen and i have generated our own electricity since 1986. you know we did this before all of the internet we didn't have a lot of resources to look into just a couple of books and then instead of you know knowing everything you just jump right in and start building it right so this was designed passive solar so it is the proper amount of glass on the south for every latitude no matter where you are there's a optimal amount of glass to have on the sun side of the house that will allow for enough passive heating but not too much loss during the dark and in wintertime and so that's really close to the optimal amount on the south side for passive gain the downstairs is built into the hillside so it's got somewhat of that the temperature buffering by the soil the earth itself the solar thermal panels on the front here are collecting the heat from the sun and circulating it through the floor and for hot water the little photovoltaic panel in front produces just enough electricity to run the pump in the solar thermal system so there's no need for a thermostat because the pump won't come on until there's a proper amount of sunshine shining on that little solar panel and it's just coincidental that that means if that starts pumping that means that the solar panels are hot enough because there's just enough sun shining on it our water comes from the rain it's roof water catchment guttered to some rather large tanks 1500 to 3000 gallons of storage outside and then down cellar there's a 1 500 gallon cistern it's all on a pressure tank you know you just go and you turn on the tap like anybody else would and for drinking water it's run through a triple filter system activated carbon cylinder takes out the chemicals and the ultra fine ceramic filter takes out any bacteria down to like .5 microns so there's no phone or internet in the house so as far as the kids and video games and media is concerned you don't get it down here we're half a mile from the road that's partially done on purpose is that you park the car out by the road you take care of all your you know digital this that and the other thing and you got a 10 to 15 minute walk from the car to the house and you're immersed in the sounds of nature so now we don't have to join the health club because we're getting our exercise walking up and down hills and it's a meditation to walk down to the house and this area out here this has apple trees and hazelnut bushes alley cropped there's clover in there now it's a soil building year maybe produce next year and as you can see we're always planting new new nursery stock i do a lot of work with the chainsaw i cut a lot of trees down now the early years you know when everything was grass is plant plant plant plant plant and grow annual crops and asparagus cattle and pigs well then as time goes on then it's start to harvest the perennials for the apples and the chestnuts and hazelnuts develop the cracking the cleaning equipment and start replacing trees that have died and cutting trees down because they're not performing the way we want them to let's go right through here crash through some grass this system part of the system includes breeding just like nature does a lot of enhanced natural selection if you look at a tree that may put out 10 million seeds and of those 10 million seeds maybe half of them sprout so you got 5 million sprouts out of those 5 million that sprouted maybe every year a certain number die and eventually there's two or three trees that replace that original parent tree well some of those little trees that are in there were genetically magic and we never discovered them because we never went looking for them so what we do is we plant higher density they're seedlings they're not grafted they're not clones for the most part and we let pests and disease run their course and so some of these trees here they have american chestnut genetics in them and this one has chestnut blight and i know some people said oh my goodness you got to get rid of it and take care of it it's going to spread well chestnut blight is ubiquitous in the eastern part of north america if a tree is going to get chestnut blight here i want to know early on in its life because i don't want to waste you know my lifetime or a century or 4 000 years raising a tree that's susceptible to a disease when we can get something next to it that doesn't have it that big scar right there that's chestnut blight this all got infected and it girdles the tree and it sprouts from down below it and it doesn't spread oh yeah it spreads to the ones that are susceptible to it but you want that to be oh yeah i want to find out which ones are resistant to it and the ones that are resistant to it don't get it so my selection criteria are they have to have nuts really young in their life those seeds get saved and planted into new trees and then the trees that actually produce the most nuts they get more heavily represented in the gene pool so over time we concentrate early productivity in the life of the tree and heavy productivity in the life of the tree simultaneous with resistance to the chestnut blight one of the things that geneticists will tell you over and over and over again is you cannot get away with selecting from more than one trait at a time because the numbers that you play with go through the roof well hello that's what we're doing these trees right here instead of being planted at the recommended spacing of 50 trees per acre and then cross your fingers and hope you got the right ones this is planted at a density of about 4 000 stems per acre and you know if eventually after 20 years it goes down to 50 stems per acre that's fine because one of the things i want to do is get grass growing underneath it and so if you want to see the difference between so this is the high density not thinned yet and this is thinned once and look at the difference in the ground cover and the light quality we have a lot more light a lot more grass and notice underfoot there's a lot more woody debris that was chipped up when i would remove the larger trees the lower logs the fatter logs would be inoculated or some of it would be firewood it'd be inoculated with shiitake mushroom spawn or oyster mushroom spawn a savannah is more photosynthetically productive for human use and that's what we want to have we'll have plenty of nuts up top grass down below for the animals and boy when the chestnuts are falling in here you should see the deer the pigs are happy too but and so i just figured i'd take you here because there's not many places where you can go for a walk in a young chestnut forest it's actually in this field here we've grown sweet zucchini buckwheat onions carnival squash i think we grew peppers here once only part of the end of it was peppers and then pie pumpkins so this has been a vegetable field for years right where we're standing how old are these trees these trees are probably 15 years old we started with a row of chestnut trees down on the far end to my left and one up to the far right we grew in the alleys in between then as we needed fewer and fewer acres of produce we put more alleys more rows of trees in oh so this is like one of the treasures you saw at the beginning this is exactly what you saw at the beginning this is alley cropping just like at the beginning and then eventually when we don't need the alleys for produce anymore we convert it to grass graze the animals in here and get more trees do you hope that eventually everything's this thick though or is that just for testing uh this no this is right here this is part of the genetic selection process we want to find the ones that are that are heavy producing young uh and pest and disease resistant cold hardy of course too so we had 219 different named varieties of apples at one point in the apple orchard about four trees each and then we treated them with sheer total utter neglect and the ones that get diseases and die they're gone i know that they're not any good for here so that's why we need every school child you save your apple seeds you put them in the ground and you plant the little tree out in your backyard and let it survive don't spray it don't don't cultivate it don't protect it from pests or diseases or drought or flood or whatever it is some of them are going to survive and some of them are going to be fantastic but there will be new varieties of apples discovered when we start saving our seeds why do we have to wait 30 years for a university to come up with one new named variety of fruit especially when that fruit is chemically dependent on chemical fertilizers pesticides herbicides fungicides in order to survive let's find the varieties that can survive on this planet for real and so i just wanted to come in through here this is our our our only section of woods really nice and humid and moist and so um part of what we do our management and our other trees do a lot of removal of them and then inoculating them with a mushroom spawn these are inoculated with shiitake some have enoki some have box elder mushrooms other have oyster mushroom so we can eat them once upon a time i got set up to get into commercial production but because we do it outside there were issues mostly with chipmunks biting little holes in the mushroom when it's little and as it gets bigger it makes a funny looking scar on it i could make a a building a screen building to exclude the chipmunks but then i've got like a five thousand dollar investment in a screen house so now i gotta recoup my investment so i need you know a million more logs in order to pay for that investment that i first did so instead of going down that route i just decided to well let's just rot mushrooms and have mushrooms abundant all over the place when they're ready this area here this is our only section of forested area this was cut over woodland and 20 years ago maybe the trees were six inches eight inches in diameter and there were a lot of them and so we started to thin them out i don't know if you've ever planted carrots and if you don't thin the carrots out within the row and there's like a million carrots right next to each other they never get really all that big so they kind of stunt one another so there were so many trees in here that we started removing them and that was our firewood source some for building materials obviously some for mushrooms so by continually harvesting this and removing the lowest quality material the stuff that was crooked bent lots of branches or has decay in it we get higher and higher quality trees left behind but if you were to do a measurement here one of the measurements is called the basal area if you stand still and you hold your thumb 23 inches from your face you go around and every tree that's bigger than your thumb you count it i got one two three four and you count that all that up in a circle around you and then you multiply it by 10 and that gives you the basal area which is a forestry calculation that you can now use to calculate how much wood is available in this plot right here so this place right here has more wood available in it than this place that we're going to look at next door the only difference is a property line and then on this side of the line we've managed it by removing trees year after year by harvesting a yield year after year and you saw how straight and tall the trees were how many trees there were and how lush of a forest it is now if we come over to this side over here this is the same patch of forest you don't even have to do the basal area calculation you just try counting the trees there's fewer trees here but this has had nothing done to it for 23 years this person was motivated by natural values i want it to be a total natural forest i wanted to be a healthy forest so it's to be wild and free all by itself so they've done nothing to it and this is a rat's nest of invasive species what is nature what is natural what are the values that we really you know desire as human beings if you like thorns and venomous plants and stuff like that maybe this is what you want for a technique part of how ecosystems work if you go from a bare surface that bare surface will be colonized by lichens then mosses and grasses will move in it's called ecological succession or natural succession and then eventually some thorny plants and shrubbery will take over sun-loving trees will start to get established in there after the sun-loving tree phase goes by shade tolerant trees will grow underneath it that may take you know 1800 years to get to a closed canopy old growth shade tolerant forest so this is our area that's designed to be a closed canopy forest and it's gotten here by continued harvest we do a selective harvest almost every single year we're cutting trees in here so this is getting a forest by harvesting it isn't that something whereas over there it's not getting a forest but they're not harvesting it well what do you want see this that that would eventually look like this it would it just might take another 200 years or so and if this is what you want because now i can tap those maple trees i get sugar i don't need to buy sugar at the store i can tap hickory trees and get sugar or walnut trees and get sugar i can get nuts from the walnuts and from the hickories plus of course we got firewood we get cherries from the trees all kinds of building material there's a lot of use value that we can have here whereas a thorn patch next door is not necessarily all that useful of a human habitat but they're both a result of a different disturbance regime one of the things that also happened with europeans coming here too is they didn't realize that this was a managed system that the native americans have been managing it with fire for years and the grazing animals are part of it so it was humans interacting with the environment they were managing it their way with their technologies as well as nature so that's nature only this is humans and nature together well then the europeans show up they say oh this is wilderness we need to cut it down plow it up and grow oats or wheat it was a height of insanity to take something that worked over there and instead of coming here and figuring out how to adapt to here and it wasn't everybody either because actually how i learned how to manage forests is my dad's side of the family they were coppice there were coppice foresters in the uk way back until they disappear into the historic past so this is historic english coppice forestry coppice meaning you cut it down and it sprouts back so look at this tree right here it blew over in the wind it split well then i cut it with a chainsaw and cut it into fuel many trees around here especially in the savannah biome are designed to be either burned down blown down or browsed by animals and they sprout back from the roots so this right here is sprouted back from the roots so when you cut it down and it sprouts back from the roots that's coppice and so we can leave this tree it'll grow up into the hole that its parent left and it actually extends the age of the tree whereas if you plant a tree it may live 120 years get old and die whereas if you let it grow to like 50 60 years and cut it down and it sprouts back it grows 50 60 years you cut it down sprouts back you can do that for ever and ever and ever one of the reasons why the chestnut in sicily is 4 000 years old is it's been continuously cut and burned and and coppiced either naturally or by human beings forever and ever so ash cherry red maple silver maple all coppiced readily out here so some of the things that that i do here is i harvest timber i kind of look at all these different trees because there's different kinds of trees in here what i've got in this little section right here i got a really nice straight and tall fast growing that's ash tree that's probably seven to ten years from a good harvestable side for saw logs well it's not shade tolerant so if somebody grows over the top of it it'll eventually die this right here is a sugar maple it's very shade tolerant it's growing underneath these two ash trees so i don't need to cut that they're very close together but they're compatible with one on top of the other well then over here we've got this little crooked one is underneath everybody else it's an ash tree it's not shade tolerant it's gonna die you can see it's got some disease on the bark it's gonna die anyways if i do nothing so i'll go in and i'll harvest that one for firewood and then there's a hickory down below really straight and tall hickory and it's also not shade tolerant it wants more sun to produce nuts and so i'll remove that ash tree first it's going to favor this little tree right here which is a sugar maple but it's all twisty and gnarly even though that's a shade tolerant tree i know that i'm going to take that one out eventually so i've got like two different trees i'm going to harvest in the next five years and then that'll really favor this ash tree that'll really grow well and there's a lot of little trees especially hickories that they need a little bit of sun so when i harvest that ash tree all of a sudden boom there's a patch of little hickory trees and there's no place to go for light except straight up and then they'll just go and which one will make it to the canopy is the one that grows the fastest and so we'll keep removing the ones that are losing the battle and we could harvest that for years and years and years yes it's so nice to see all these you know little trees that have grown up this it was just a tiny little seedling um teen years ago just look at look at that and look at that this was the same piece of land it was treated the same 25 years ago this has been harvested continuously for 25 years are there more trees there or are there more trees there are there more useful valuable trees here you make the decision but what i wanted to show you was a coppice you know because this whole site was logged before we got here just some of the logs remaining from when this was logged still haven't rotted after 20 years haven't rotted completely so what we have here this actually was once upon a time a single tree and that red maple was growing up right in the center here and was probably when this was logged you know 25 30 plus years ago it was cut and then all these stump sprouts grew up from the bottom of the stump the stump rots away but this ring of sprouts continues to persist well then what i started doing a number of years ago was look to find which is the straightest tallest tree that takes up the least amount of space the individual stem and so i started removing other stems on the other side this one and i removed this one and if you see this tree here see the green up here and it's blocking those trees from their light so i can go ahead and take this one down and i can fit more trees in here and this one never dies it's still here and then that stump will sprout up again i can just keep removing stem after stem after stem so either this one or this one because it's taking up so much space i'll take those out next maybe leave this one even though it's crooked it kind of goes straight up the middle not necessarily the straightest but it takes up the less amount of sun space so by removing these outer ones you know i'll say one two three four and take the next ten years to remove those four trees leave this one behind open up the space then all this young stuff grows up and is a replacement for us because we release more light for it so that's kind of what i do for entertainment is anyone copying you quite a few yeah yeah when i we got started here we were the first people growing hazelnuts at a commercial scale in the state and now i think there's close to two or three hundred there's now a grower-owned company called the american hazelnut company that's been founded to process and market hazelnuts grown in the region so i'd say that that's kind of copying isn't it it's a little bit of flattery by imitation why isn't everyone the reason why everyone's doing a lot of people don't believe it a lot of people don't believe that this actually can pay and one of the things that's the biggest payoff in agricultural land is the real estate itself is the land and so instead of just having a corn field that appreciates in value over time take a corn field and turn it into a park that looks like this if i sell it somebody doesn't have to farm this you know who know who would really really like to buy this property are hunters because we had like six trophies size bucks last year on this property that was that were filmed on our webcam people pay big bucks for a hunting ground like that because this is prime deer habitat all the chestnuts they could possibly eat what's really fascinating about this most people don't realize this is edible we've got hickories we've got cherries we've got mulberries we've got apples grapes there's like 139 edible perennial species in there and that's just like a little patch in the backyard so why isn't every suburban backyard like that food yard there's mushrooms in there yeah how would you find them these are strophiers and they just grow no we inoculated them this is reproducible at scale if you want that's part of the whole point why we've wanted to wholesale our products in part to show that this is a large-scale food production system by imitating ecosystems and all of these plants are harvestable by machine it's a tree transplanter so you hook it onto the tractor and this pizza cutter slices through any sod and that little tool there cuts in and makes a slot and then on either side that metal plate opens up the slot and so you load your trees up here and you shove them into that slot is whatever the spacing is how many trees have you planted you know in this farm here probably a hundred thousand on the site right now how many we've planted is way more than that because things have diet will die through the years because that's the plan but then you know we've been saving seed and growing nursery stock for the past easily 15 years now that is a three month old hazelnut plant the hazelnut one in the ground and and then you stick that in the ground and so we'll produce a whole bunch of trees buy them at wholesale then sell them at below retail price because we sell them in bundles only because we want to encourage people planting enough three hazelnut bushes in your backyard isn't going to feed anybody you want to feed the world we need hundreds of thousands of millions of acres of this stuff so that's what we want to encourage what you think you've planted half a million no no more than that because i plant on other people's plates i've sold uh you know millions and millions of trees inedible trees we sell edible trees that's the whole point and shrubs bushes wines canes we've got some kiwis right here these are uh arctic beauty kiwi super cold harukina blinds so yeah millions millions and millions and why not it's a lot of planet out there actually union of concerned scientists did a analysis and within um one degree of the equator either way there's a hundred million square miles of of what used to be high tropical forest that was liquidated was clear-cut logged grown in annual crops for a period of years and abandoned 100 million square miles of abandoned land you hear the frogs these are actually tree frogs we are not farming this way in the future we don't have a future we've got a limited planet here as far as we know of and you saw the cornfields next door the way that we're producing our food now requires us to destroy the ecosystem that we depend on in order to grow a couple of handfuls of non-nutritious kernels of grain that we can't even digest properly makes us sick so this is an oasis in the middle of corn and beans we have to do massive ecological restoration across the whole entire planet it's even a good habitat for small people so many people think ecological restoration and like oh yeah we're gonna take land out of production so we take it take it out of production and let it go wild it's like well no let's take it out of pure corn and start with alley cropping and plant some trees and then plant some more trees but not just generic trees let's plant crop trees and there's been research out of university of missouri columbia center for agroforestry that shows that when done properly alley cropping systems silvo-wearable systems don't show any loss of productivity draw me the line between where conservation is happening where agriculture is happening is the whole thing is blurred together you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 975,847

Keywords: agroforestry, permaculture, permanent agriculture, agricultural restoration, restoration homestead, homestead, wisconsin farm, polyculture, food forest, homestead act, alaska homestead, alley cropping, oak savanna, mushroom farming, fungiculture, seed saving, farmer produced seeds, chestnut blight, mark shepard, commercial permaculture, natural pest control, perennial farming, owner built house, offgrid homestead, water management, pocket ponds, rainwater harvesting

Id: sRPP4Ilpxso

Length: 53min 9sec (3189 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/YourDentist]

Wouldn't really call team Mark Shepard "a couple". Rather a famous pioneer on par with the likes of Gabe Brown.

[u/kownieow]

They don't really talk financials here but I would think the nursery business is likely profitable. Also really curious to know what volume of beef and pork the farm can sustain and if they need additional inputs from feed.

As with all permaculture ventures, I wonder how much profit is from educational courses and how much labor is from volunteers/trainees. Should those demands dry up I would love to know how profitable the venture still is.

Love the concept! Just curious, as always, about the financials.

[u/PerilousAll]

Really interesting for the amount of diverse plantings they manage. 1-2000 pounds of asparagus from a relatively small area, selling bundles of small hazelnut trees, mushrooms in the understory of nut bearing trees. There's a lot going on there.

[u/[deleted]]

I watched that last night. Very cool, made me feel overwhelmed thinking about all that space to work with.

[u/Ooutoout]

Really great video!

[u/DavidoftheDoell]

I want to do this but in order to afford land I'd have to live somewhere really far from my friends and work, or I'd have to save up for 30 years so I could afford to live close to the city but then I'd be 60 something and less able to handle the manual labor required. I think this is the dilemma of many other young people as well. I'd like to find a solution but there are many other problems to tackle and it's hard to focus on just one.

[u/Morphecto_Solrac]

I laughed a little when he said, “listen.” Then birds in unison decide to stop chirping.

[u/maposa]

I like the channel and i find it very inspiring how he adapts to the time and how wonderful the place looks like

[u/coderini]

Really enjoyed this video. I really felt how he loved what is doing and was amazed by what he was able to create.