“In Some Cases It’s Actually Not That Hard” – Silvopasture Farm Tour with Erik Hagan

This past August, Spring Green Campus Farm Director Erik Hagan led a tour of silvopasture systems at the Spring Green Campus North Farm for field day attendees. Our latest podcast episode features an edited recording of this tour. You can learn more about our upcoming farm events at https://www.savannainstitute.org/events/ 

Transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Erik Hagan: When you’re thinking about silvopasture, to me it all comes down to knowing your priority. Is your main focus your livestock grazing operation? Or your tree crops? You’ll design things differently based on which one is your priority. If you get it right, you can double your revenue on a piece of land. But it adds complexity. 

For example, here with the sheep grazing among the chestnut trees, the chestnut harvest is not going to be economically viable for years. But by year five, we’re probably going to start having enough to start selling. By year seven, eight, and nine, we’re going to start making money. But that’s a long time for this system to wait, especially when we put in the irrigation, the deer fence, the time and the labor, the tree tubes themselves. There’s a lot of infrastructure that goes into doing any orchard crop. It could be a $5,000 per acre upfront investment and roughly $2,000 acre a year of management. So by the time you do get to, say, year seven, you’re in it pretty deep. And so the whole idea with agroforestry is, can we actually start generating revenue right away while the trees get established? Or can you even maximize the system so that there are two profitable enterprises on one area unit of land? That’s the ultimate goal. 

We do know that there are challenges with that. You know, once these trees get very big, the pasture isn’t going to be as productive as it is right now, but it’s still going to be productive. It’ll be shady, it’s going to be a great place to bring animals. But right now, this field is economically carried by the livestock and the trees are kind of a sunk cost. And then over time, that will start to shift. Those trees will start carrying their own weight on a per acre basis. These trees will have a significant impact on the economics of this farm.