Excerpts from Mark Krawczyk’s presentation at the 2022 Perennial Farm Gathering, drawing from Mark’s new book, “Coppice Agroforestry”. Mark provides an overview of techniques and tree crops for coppicing, or “the ancient practice of resprout silviculture” – cutting off trees to make them resprout and regrow in useful ways.
This is Jacob Grace, and you’re listening to Perennial AF, the Savannah Institute’s podcast and blog about perennial agroforestry. Today we’re listening back to another presentation from our most recent perennial farm gathering by Mark Krawczyk. That’s k-r-a-w-c-z-y-k, about coppicing and pollarding, or cutting off a tree so that it can resprout and regrow in useful ways. Coppicing and pollarding really opens up opportunities to manage trees in new ways. And by new, I guess I mean in ways that people have been doing for hundreds of years. But really it helped spark my imagination for how trees can be managed more like crops or even more like something like hay or forage. Mark has a new book out called Coppice Agroforestry. So if you want to learn more, that’s a great place to get started. But to introduce us to Coppice Agroforestry, here’s Marc Krawczyk presenting over Zoom at the 2022 Perennial Farm Gathering.
Coppicing is the deliberate and repeated management of woody plants for resprouts by harvesting all of the stems from a stump. Most hardwood/deciduous trees can be coppiced.