Cows graze a silvopasture planting at Fiddle Creek Dairy in Quarryville, Pa. The farm is part of a Chesapeake Bay Foundation study of the agroforestry practice that combines trees, forages and livestock.
LANCASTER, Pa. — When Dylan Heagy looks across his pastures, he envisions the trees that could someday be planted there.
Heagy isn’t planning to turn his Westmoreland County farm into a forest. He just wants to plant enough apples, chestnuts or hickories to supplement his income.
The crop-producing trees would also protect his cattle from summer heat stress and improve growing conditions for his forages.
“You’re strategically planting trees and bushes that are going to also be providing a yield,” Heagy said.
Heagy is pursuing agroforestry, a set of practices that integrate trees into a crop or livestock production system.
The term covers everything from growing ginseng in the woods to grazing cows in a pasture studded with saw timber.
Agroforestry intensifies production and can improve the environment. Supporters have made small but notable advancements in Pennsylvania over the past few years.
Still, agroforestry has been held back by complex management, slow economic returns, and a lack of information about how to do it profitably.
At Country Sunrise Creamery in Myerstown, Nelson Martin is getting into silvopasture — Heagy’s type of agroforestry that combines trees, forages and livestock.
Martin wants to provide shade and wind protection for his dairy cattle, but he also wants to grow his number of income streams so that multiple family members can stay involved in the operation.
“I have nine children, and I’m not going to buy a farm for each one,” he said during a Feb. 11 session at Pasa Sustainable Agriculture’s annual conference.
Supporters say agroforestry just makes ecological sense in Pennsylvania, which was once part of a vast forest that covered eastern North America.
If forests are well adapted to the state, the thinking goes, maybe farms can benefit from being forestlike.
Few places in Pennsylvania would seem to have more potential to expand agroforestry than Lancaster County. Lancaster leads the state in agricultural production but is second to last for forest cover.
“We’re No. 1 here, but it has come at a huge cost for trees,” said Lamonte Garber, watershed restoration coordinator at the Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale.
In the Mid-Atlantic, riparian buffers are the most familiar type of agroforestry, and they show why farmers might expand into other tree-related practices.
Buffers are plantings of trees and shrubs along streams that stabilize the banks, and improve habitat for both land and aquatic wildlife. But they are best known as a robust and cost-effective way to cut nutrient runoff.
As a result, buffers have been heavily promoted as part of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup.
In 2016, Pennsylvania pledged to add 95,000 acres of buffers in the next decade, a time frame that lines up with the deadline for its bay commitments.
By 2020, Lancaster County — one of the top buffer counties in the watershed — had almost 1,900 acres in place, according to the Chesapeake Riparian Forest Buffer Network.
Still, buffers are an example, and not the only one, of the federal government giving agroforesters not quite everything they’d like.
USDA’s Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program is one of the biggest funders of riparian buffers. It provides money for planting and technical advice, and then it pays rent to the landowner for keeping the land in the program.
What CREP doesn’t do is allow harvesting of any kind in the buffer, which limits a farm’s revenue opportunities.
To fill that gap, Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has promoted multifunctional buffers for the past six years.
In these buffers, the zone closest to the stream is left largely untouched, while berries, floriculture crops like pussy willow, and perennials such as switchgrass can be harvested in adjacent areas.
But even multifunctional buffers can be too small to produce a commercial quantity of a crop, said Audrey Epp Schmidt, business development director at Propagate Ventures, a company that is looking to scale agroforestry.
To make it a feasible farm enterprise, an agroforestry planting will likely have to be designed and managed as an operation in itself.
In Montgomery County, Schmidt is working with a landowner who wants to expand a small existing buffer into the wet field near the creek, which isn’t good for much but hay.
The farmer plans to replace the forage with a marketable amount of elderberries, one of the most appealing riparian buffer plants.
“We do not have enough domestic production of elderberry for how much demand there is. There’s a lot of importing,” Schmidt said. “Major opportunity, especially as folks are so excited about local production.”
Garber includes elderberries in nearly every buffer he works with, but what type of agroforestry works best on a given farm ultimately depends on the landowner’s goals.
Plantings, he said, can provide specialty crops, syrup, bee habitat, a deer hunting paradise, or just a beautiful landscape.
If riparian buffers are Pennsylvania’s most common form of agroforestry, silvopasture is the practice best positioned for a jump in popularity.
Silvopasture involves grazing livestock in a grassland with trees, so it’s not tied to a stream corridor.
And silvopasture is particularly versatile, accommodating any type of livestock and capable of producing timber and a range of tree crops.
Though the term “silvopasture” sounds newfangled, the concept has a long and global history, said Austin Unruh, a consultant who is pioneering silvopasture in southeastern Pennsylvania.
For centuries, Spanish farmers have run cattle, sheep and hogs on the dehesa — a grassland dotted with oaks that produce acorns for the livestock, as well as cork.
In Latin America, some farmers plant trees and shrubs as browse, which keeps animals from nibbling near the ground where tropical parasites thrive.
In the United States, silvopasture is most associated with pine plantations, which are intensively managed timber operations predominantly in the South.
“It’s a means of getting more than one income from the same acreage,” Unruh said, “and you’re also able to get a shorter-term income, a shorter-term revenue from your livestock — rather than just waiting 20, 30 years for your pine to mature.”
Silvopasture can be created in two ways — by putting livestock in existing woods, or by adding rows of trees to a pasture.
Unruh and most other advocates prefer the pasture-first method because it’s simpler — and because livestock, especially pigs, can brutalize woodland ecosystems.
The problem with beginning from pasture is the trees start small and take some time to provide benefits.
Harrison Rhodes, of Rising Locust Farm in Manheim, is eager for his silvopasture trees to grow big enough to provide summer shade for his cattle. He estimates that will be six to eight years from planting.
Rhodes has a small operation and doesn’t want to drive on his pasture, so currently he moves his shade structure through the paddocks by hand.
“I can’t wait until I stop doing that,” he said.
In the meantime, Rhodes has noticed that the trees are big enough to shade some of the pasture by the time they are are three or four years old.
In the summer, cool-season grasses tend to grow better with 30% to 50% shade than when they are out in the open, Unruh said.
Tim Sauder, of Fiddle Creek Dairy in Quarryville, is implementing silvopasture in part to offset purchased feed.
His cows love the leaves and branches of willow, black locust and especially mulberry, he said.
Rhodes figures tree debris also feeds soil microbes, which is part of his ecological vision for the farm.
“I want to work and live in a beautiful environment my whole life,” Rhodes said. “There’s all these new birds coming to our farm because of the trees, and that kind of stuff really keeps me going when the farming isn’t so fun.”
To start a silvopasture operation, the farm obviously needs to get some trees.
Rhodes and Martin, the Myerstown farmer, started out buying trees on their own but have since found financial assistance.
Stroud and other organizations provide a lot of trees to farms, often at no cost.
That aid comes in handy for farmers, who otherwise might be stuck buying cheap trees with an iffy survival rate, or sturdy but pricey nursery stock.
“Trees are expensive things to make mistakes with,” Martin said.
Unruh plants trees that are 2 to 3 feet tall. Silvopasture uses fast-growing tree species, but the plantings still take about five years to show benefits, he said.
While the trees are small, they are vulnerable to voles, which can kill trees by girdling the trunk.
Garber keeps voles at bay by surrounding the tree tube with 2A modified gravel, a type of stone used as a base for patios and driveways.
That isn’t enough to protect the saplings from livestock, which can ruin the trees by trampling, eating or rubbing against them.
Martin, Rhodes and Sauder are part of a Chesapeake Bay Foundation research project that is looking at that problem.
Since 2020, the group has been studying combinations of plastic tree shelters, wire tree cages, electric fencing and barbed wire to protect the trees.
The group is measuring tree survival, tree height, soil health and cost, said Molly Cheatum, the Bay Foundation’s restoration manager in Pennsylvania.
The project still has a year and a half to go, so final results aren’t available.
But a 2013-2016 case study at Dickinson College Farm offers some insights.
The Dickinson study, which involved USDA and other partners, had some success with tree cages made with posts and wire-mesh fencing. But each cage took three people 20 minutes to build, and the structures didn’t always stop a determined Angus.
The researchers also used temporary electric fencing to protect trees in paddocks that were being grazed. The tactic worked, but it wasted some of the pasture space.
Some types of tree protection are better than others, but it might be hard to find a setup that is effective while also quick and inexpensive.
Indeed, very little about starting a silvopasture operation is quick or inexpensive. After the upfront investment in trees and fencing, the farmer will have to rely on producing livestock for years until the trees generate much that’s marketable.
That plod to profitability can be a big hurdle for cash-strapped farmers just trying to make the next loan payment.
“We have a very thin margin of survival. You can only do a few mistakes and you’re out,” Martin said.
Cost-share funding from USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service would ease farmers’ burden.
The agency already offers support in Pennsylvania for other agroforestry practices, such as alley cropping, riparian buffers and windbreak establishment.
NRCS offers support for silvopasture in most parts of the country as well. But in the Northeast, only four states — Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey — are on board.
Pennsylvania NRCS evaluated silvopasture some years ago but determined that the practice led to too much erosion on steep slopes and damage from livestock rubbing against trees.
“We found that the animals were really degrading the resource rather than enhancing it,” said Denise Coleman, NRCS’ state conservationist in Pennsylvania.
Coleman also cited concerns about compaction in preferred shady resting areas. And given the risk of livestock damage, she said the five years of an average NRCS contract isn’t long enough to be sure the trees will survive.
“It’s not a practice that is for everyone,” Coleman said. “To maintain and handle silvopasture, you have to be a very, very good manager. You’re in the top 5%.”
When NRCS puts out a standard, it should be achievable by more like 80% of farmers, she said.
Approving a standard for an NRCS practice, which allows the agency to offer funding for it, is not a casual process.
The standard is based on research, goes through a public comment period, and is published in the Federal Register.
Still, the lack of government aid in Pennsylvania has frustrated Heagy, the farmer who wants to develop silvopasture in Westmoreland County.
Heagy said he’s familiar with the criticism that silvopasture is poorly suited to Northern deciduous forests. But he thinks the opposite, saying that forests are the natural tendency of the region.
Like many silvopasture enthusiasts, Heagy plans to plant trees in a pasture rather modify a woodlot.
“That’s the simple workaround that other people have done,” he said.
The farm he rents has few trees, so he would have little choice anyway.
Cows graze a silvopasture planting at Fiddle Creek Dairy in Quarryville, Pa. The farm is part of a Chesapeake Bay Foundation study of the agroforestry practice that combines trees, forages and livestock.
Heagy isn’t alone in his frustration.
Sara Nicholas, Pasa’s policy specialist, is working on a request for Pennsylvania NRCS to open the door to silvopasture. She plans to exclude the problematic animals-in-the-woods scenario and concentrate on adding trees to pasture.
“It’s very difficult to get people really excited about a practice and not have the funding to deliver it,” Nicholas said.
Pasa is already using NRCS funding to study alley cropping, a type of agroforestry that puts other crops, rather than livestock, between rows of trees.
Another evolving way to fund silvopasture is to bypass the government and use private money.
Schmidt, from Propagate Ventures, is laying the foundation for commercial agroforestry investment in Pennsylvania and the Hudson Valley of New York.
Her company uses mapping software to design agroforestry projects to fit the landscape and bring in revenue.
The program accounts for environmental factors — like topography, weather and insect pressure — and projected markets for the products planned for the farm.
The farmer can tinker with the planting layout to gauge the profitability of different combinations of enterprises, and weather scenarios c an be adjusted based on a landowner’s risk tolerance. All of Propagate’s designs build in biodiversity strips as a pest management best practice.
The software allows landowners to balance near-term gains from fruit or livestock with long-term investments such as nuts or timber.
To help farmers understand what they are getting into, the program also provides a list of tasks that come with the chosen crops.
“I’m going to use the example of grazers. They may have never pruned a tree before,” Schmidt said.
The market for carbon credits is not developed enough for Propagate to assign dollar values to a farm’s chosen practices, but the company does estimate how much carbon the system could sequester.
Environmental friendliness could be a big selling point for silvopasture and related practices in the near future.
Pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as treeless ones, according to Project Drawdown, a climate solutio ns organization.
Propagate’s initial analysis of a farm takes three to five months and costs $3,000.
Farmers could use this detailed documentation to support a loan application from a traditional lender.
Propagate is also working to line up conservation-minded investors who understand the long-term nature of agroforestry.
Eventually the company could package projects from multiple regions into a portfolio. The strategy would manage investors’ risk while helping farmers launch new enterprises.
“That is a way to flip the script in terms of not just relying on philanthropic and government funding for getting trees on farms,” Schmidt said.
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Phil Gruber is the news editor at Lancaster Farming. He can be reached at 717-721-4427 or pgruber@lancasterfarming.com. Follow him @PhilLancFarming on Twitter.
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