The latest episode of our podcast features more farmers from our Partnering for Agroforestry video series! This is a project we’ve been working on for the last year or so, looking for examples of creative partnerships that people have come up with to help make their agroforestry dreams a reality. Agroforestry takes a lot of time, money, and labor up front, and it can take years to start paying off… which can make it pretty risky to do on your own. If we want agroforestry to succeed, we’re going to need examples of agroforestry partnerships that succeed. As Dayna Burtness of Nettle Valley Farm says in our first interview:
“We don’t all have to do it alone. That’s the way of the past!”
How do you handle a partnership where one partner lives twenty minutes from the farm and the other lives two hours away? Or even more importantly, what if one partner is providing all of the money and land and a different partner is doing all of the work? These are some of the questions that Chris Smyth and Badger Johnson had to think about when they started the Southern Ohio Chestnut Company.
Maggie Taylor owns and operates Delight Flower Farm in central Illinois. Maggie worked with our agroforestry technical service program and with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (or NRCS) to get cost-share funding to add agroforestry to her fresh-cut flower CSA farm. But Maggie has also developed neighborly partnerships that are less formal, but no less important, for the success of her business.