General

Applying Food Forest Growing to Farms

Beyond Garden Scale

Gardeners know too well the feeling of overwhelm when facing a new landscape. The seemingly infinite possibilities brings up the question, “Where do I start?”. Fortunately, there is a process we can use to answer that, it’s called permaculture design.

From Food Forest to Farming Dreams

Some of you might remember a special place in Holyoke Massachusetts called Paradise Lot.  This garden is still one of my favourite places in the world!  That’s right, Paradise Lot continues to attract visitors who enjoy the explosion of perennial vegetables, rare and unusual fruits, a unique story, and backyard scale permaculture in action.

Along with Eric Toensmeier, and many other friends, Paradise Lot was my first big garden design challenge. The question of “Where to start” defined our early process. Thank goodness, at the time, Eric and Dave Jacke were writing a book called “Edible Forest Gardens”, and our garden became the case study.  The garden is where I learned many key design strategies: The Problem is the Solution; Constraints Focus the Design; What Was, Plus What Is, Could Be; Watch Out for the Red Gazebo and many other principles.

I lived, breathed and ate that garden for thirteen years. During that time a new thought seed was planted. The beginnings of a vision of what a garden like this could be beyond one-tenth of an acre. This idea didn’t hold my thoughts very strongly, but it did take root. Then, by around 2012, when my wife was pregnant, and we enjoyed the bounty and success of a thriving food forest, global climate change impacted our lives.

At the end of the previous October, or what the media called “Snowtober”, an early and rare Nor’ Easter catapulted 20 inches of heavy wet snow into our neighbourhood.  Thousands of trees were damaged, the lights were out for a week, and our greenhouse was smashed by the neighbours tree. That storm, along with a never before seen local EF3 tornado the summer before, helped me focus on the carbon sequestering potential of the garden, and that these ideas needed to be applied at larger scales. Soon I learned that, in other areas of the world, agroforestry, a climate mitigation tool, is what we were doing.

 

Going Beyond The Backyard

One of the toughest decisions I had to make so far in life was leaving Paradise Lot. I didn’t leave to get away, but to move towards opportunity.  New York became the place for that early thought seed to grow into a seedling with strong potential. With a passionate hunger to understand agroforestry, we moved onto a friends’ multi-species, multi-enterprise farm. Shelterbelt Farm, where Erica Frenays’ motto is, “food for your soul, with love from our soil”, became a wonderful place to experience more broad-acre farming and gardening techniques. With a large fruit tree orchard, diverse landscapes, and a thriving sheep and cattle silvopasture system, I immersed myself.

I brought some of Paradise Lot with me in the form of ideas, and also plants. A new food forest was designed and installed within one of the small pastures near the homestead gardens. Next to one of the farms’ high-tunnels, this garden has become an experimental station, where a diverse array of edible and multi-functional plants are grown. While the garden developed, I was also becoming a flerder (flock/herder). It became clear there was an opportunity to insert my plants into the silvopasture system. I decided to start “gardening in the fields”.

Jonathan Bates, FoodForestFarm.com, second summer nursery food forest
“second summer nursery food forest”. Photograph By Jonathan Bates @ FoodForestFarm.com

 

Farms Can Be Big Gardens

The question “Where to start” reared its head once again. All this space on the farm, so many opportunities. With my permaculture design tools in my pocket I got to work. I worked with what plants and knowledge and goals I had, read the landscape, and picked a small place to start.

From my research of silvopasture for the Northeast USA, I knew of a handful of plants that grew well, could compete in pasture, and which ruminants might like to eat. I planted some of those species first, in Ericas’ intensive rotational grazing system. I observed these early plantings for a year, including grazing pressure, before expanding to more areas. Now, almost three years later, there’s a half dozen new species we’ve inserted into Ericas’ original design. The slow and steady approach seems to be working. Patterns are emerging. One pattern that has a lot of potential is the “Round Bale Nursery”

In winter, the flerd eat one hundred, 500lb (227kg) round bales dispersed throughout the pastures. This is a multi-functional approach, as it brings the food to the animals rather than confinement in a barn.  It distributes important soil building organic matter where it belongs, and as the bale is eaten down, the remaining poop, pee and hay mulches the ground, opening up a niche for new seeds or plants.

Silvopasture
Round bale feeder in winter silvopasture with sheep and cattle. Look at all that luscious poop! Photograph by Jonathan Bates

While observing this pattern I saw an opportunity to use the bales as nurseries for establishing new, valuable, pasture adapted plants. The early tests show promise, at the very least, with good flerd rotation design, eventually something will take, and new eco-agricultural relationships will occur. These relationships will be good for pollinators, farm animals, the soil, and the farmers bottom line.

I mention bottom line because unlike backyard gardeners, working farms have taxes, labour and other expenses to pay. Profit is a layer most farms need to consider when creating or shifting the farm design. In this particular case, I have embedded myself into the experimental layer, and come as a low cost collaborator, using my curiosity, knowledge and own business goals. I help drive the farm innovation towards growing more diverse in-field feeds that are carbon sequestering, insect attracting, appropriately placed and mostly native.

 

Future Opportunities

One of the challenges of establishing agroforestry is balancing costs and yields. The model I’m suggesting here is slower, but it spreads the cost out over time, allows for experimentation and mistakes, with the outcome of showing which yields work well for our particular situation and site, thus potentially saving money down the line. As these “Farm Gardens” expand and become nodes that merge, I envision entire fields fully planted, feeding the soil, wildlife, farm animals, and us. I look forward to continuing to share this experience with you as the process unfolds.

 

WEBINAR: Beyond Garden Scale: Applying Food Forest Growing to Farms

Join me, Jonathan Bates, author and co-designer of the internationally renowned edible forest garden, Paradise Lot, for a one hour learning webinar as we dive into applying our gardening skills to larger acre projects. Whether we’re converting expansive lawns, large homesteads, or hundreds of acres, this webinar is for you. We will cover: site design techniques; enterprise budgets; cold climate plant species; reducing overwhelm; sharing mistakes; growing healthy soil; library of resources, and more!

Purchase a ticket on our website: https://www.foodforestfarm.com/shop/beyond-garden-scale

Jonathan Bates

As an ecological designer Jonathan’s been co-creating farms and gardens for two decades. He’s a contributing author of the award winning book "Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre, and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City”, and owns and operates Food Forest Farm a source for regenerative education and useful and edible plants. A passionate advocate for good farming practices, he’s currently on the board of several organizations including: Groundswell Center for Food and Farming; Apios Institute; and the Perennial Agriculture Institute. He lives and works at Shelterbelt Farm with his family in Brooktondale, NY.

2 Comments

  1. Good article but impossible to read while the strip add at the top keeps coming in and out and pushing the text up and down. Gave it away without finishing.

    1. Hi Bev, I am not able to replicate the problem you mention. Are you able to send me a screen grab of the issue you are seeing?

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