This week I’ve been listening back to the recordings from our Perennial Farm Gathering and drawing fresh inspiration from the hundreds of people who came together in early October to chart a path forward for perennial agroforestry.
If you were there, thanks for coming! And if you weren’t there, in this podcast episode you can hear some of what you missed.
Steve Gabriel is an ecologist, farmer, educator and consultant stewarding land in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Throughout his career, Steve has taught and consulted with thousands of farmers and land stewards on a wide range of agricultural practices, including water management, agroforestry, solar, pasture and mushroom cultivation. He appeared in a recent episode of our podcast, and at the Perennial Farm Gathering, he led a session called “Why Trees Die (and what we can do to help them!)”
Transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Steve Gabriel: My career started with, “I love woods, I like trees, I want to do something with that.” But I wasn’t interested in traditional forestry, like timber management. That’s not where my passion was, but I don’t know what was. So this idea of forest farming, and agroforestry in general, just kind of piqued my interest.
One of things a teacher told me is if you think about an acre of land in the temperate climate, Mother Nature draws upon this vast seed bank, both seeds that are in the soil already and seeds coming in with the wind and water and hopefully through humans and animals as well. It’s drawing upon this massive seed bank – maybe a hundred thousand seeds per acre – to grow its forests. And out of a hundred thousand seeds, maybe ten thousand will actually germinate and try to start this process of growing a tree. And maybe a thousand of those will actually become one. And maybe only 100 or 200 of those will reach maturity and live out a full life cycle, which is several centuries we’re talking about.
So that’s how Mother Nature plants trees. And that’s a pretty low survival rate, right? We definitely want a higher success rate. And when we select, when we have our trees in a nursery, when we care for them during planting, we can greatly increase those odds. But we have to notice that by design, that’s part of the process. How do we design our agroforestry system so we have that higher success rate?