When temperatures climb into the 90s, Kathie Arnold's organic dairy cows know exactly where to go — into the shade of the black locusts and sycamores she planted five years ago.
“On a hot day, I've got them in a pasture that has some trees in it,” said the farmer from Truxton, N.Y. “So, they'll be out grazing, then they'll go in the trees for a while, then they'll come back out and graze again, and then they'll go back to the trees.”
Integrating trees with farming and livestock — whether called agroforestry, silvopasture or alley cropping — is an ancient practice that's experiencing a modern revival.
But new techniques are allowing more farmers, like Arnold and Ohio's Keavin Hill, to establish successful silvopastures from scratch, even in active pasture.
Overcoming challenges
Growing new trees in pastures is notoriously hard, but Austin Unruh, founder of Lancaster County, Pa.-based Trees for Graziers, claims a 90% success rate in new tree plantings due, in part, to techniques he helped develop.
Tree shelters are now electrified, a process that’s done by cutting a hole in the top of the shelter and connecting it with electrified polywire from an existing electrified fence. Another wire, typically aluminum, is wrapped around the tree to fully electrify it.
Another key is setting the wires high enough — typically 6 feet high — to allow livestock to graze underneath without getting zapped.
“That has made a world of a difference in terms of the management and also allowing these systems to be used without a whole lot of additional maintenance,” Unruh said. “Because if you fence out the tree from the cattle, what happens is, one, you take a significant amount of space out of production, and two, grass grows up inside that area and competes with your trees and provides cover for rodents, so you have to cut that grass back.
“That is a chore that nobody wants to do in the middle of summer. So, by using a tube and electric fencing, we can cut the maintenance needs down a lot and get better growth from the trees.”
Unruh said he’s installed trees on more than 60 farms, mostly in Pennsylvania. Most farmers, he said, want trees that provide shade and feed, so he plants fast-growing varieties such as hybrid poplar, hybrid willow or black locust, along with trees that grow slower but drop feed. These include persimmon fruit or thornless honey locusts for their high-sugar pods that drop in winter.
Some farmers see shade by the third year, enough for two head of cattle per tree.
Arnold is one of the farmers who has benefited from these new techniques. She planted three rows of trees five years ago, 80 feet apart, in a small rotational paddock on her farm. They included black locusts, honey locusts and sycamores.
Some of those trees are now 20 feet tall and provide ample shade for her 165 organic dairy cows. She’s hoping the black locusts will provide another use.
“They can provide fence posts for us because we can't use treated fence posts,” Arnold said. “And the cedar fence posts that we put in several years ago are coming to the end of their life. So, it'll be nice to have some of our own posts that we can use as these mature. Because we don't need the black locust 3 feet apart to provide shade.”
Betting big on chestnuts
Arnold's silvopasture approach focuses primarily on shade, a common approach for dairy operations. But silvopasture can also be designed with the trees themselves as the primary crop, with livestock or hay production filling the gaps.
That's the model Hill is pursuing, although on a scale that dwarfs most agroforestry projects. Hill converted more than 1,800 acres of corn and soybeans in southern Ohio and Kentucky to 200,000 chestnut trees, believed to be one of the largest single chestnut tree plantings in the world.
“It’s a lot of trees,” he said with a laugh.
His project is a partnership between him and two companies, Propogate and Agroforestry Partners, who pay him a yearly lease for the trees.
The trees, planted five years ago and owned by both companies, are expected to produce 4 million pounds of chestnuts, with the earliest commercial harvest coming in 2028. Since he is a minority partner in Agroforestry Partners, Hill expects to also earn money from chestnuts.
Until then, he’s making money in another way. The rows were planted wide enough to accommodate large haymaking equipment, and last year, he made 7,000 round and square bales that were sent to northern Ohio. This year, he’s planning to make 10,000 bales that will be trucked mostly to Virginia livestock operators.
Converting the land from row crops to trees wasn’t easy — he’s been a row crop farmer his whole life — but lack of reliable labor, especially in Kentucky, and the potential demand for chestnuts piqued his interest.
“This will double the capacity of domestic supply of chestnuts. All that was very intriguing to me,” Hill said.
Converting to hay was something he had to learn quickly. He bought a hay swather, a Case IH baler and quickly got to work.
“It’s worked out pretty well,” Hill said. “Last year was a little rough with the weather, and this year, we’re having to bush-hog a considerable amount of first cutting just because the weather we had this spring has not been conducive.”
Most of the trees and hay acres are in northern Kentucky, and about 150 acres are in Ohio where he still farms 1,600 acres of corn and soybeans. He hopes to one day do silvopasturing with animals, but time will tell.
“The trees are too young right now,” Hill said. “But down the road, that could be a possibility. We’re kind of the guinea pig for this. We’re going to get it under control before we get too much bigger.”
Pricey alternative
Whether for shade or chestnuts, though, planting new silvopasture isn’t cheap. The U.S. Forest Service estimates it can cost thousands of dollars an acre to establish new silvopastures, and that’s before adding in maintenance costs.
Unruh said his company is unique in that it provides a full service, from planting to continuous maintenance, but getting cost-share funds to do it has been a struggle.
He said his company is working with Pasa Sustainable Agriculture on a three-year study to develop a practice standard so future farmers and landowners can tap Natural Resources Conservation Service funding for silvopasture-by-addition projects.
Dylan Heagy, agroforestry program manager at Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, said one reason NRCS is hesitant to fund these projects has been the high failure rate.
“Obviously, you don't want high mortality rates, which is what made planting trees into pastures more difficult in the past,” he said. “Protecting that tree from livestock damage was a relatively daunting prospect.
“But these new techniques have made this much more workable.”
Do your homework
It’s easy to get excited about something new, but Heagy stresses the importance of doing your own research before diving in.
“My experience has been that the primary way to fail at this is to just not adequately plan, and then also not adequately budget time to get the project done,” he said.
Nelson Martin, owner of Country Sunrise Creamery in Myerstown, Pa., started planting his own silvopasture for his dairy cows six years ago, but the survival rate was initially poor, he said, because he didn’t adequately protect them.
“We had done a lot of trees ourselves already,” Martin said. “As hard as we did work on it, we just didn’t have much to show for it.”
Through a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Martin said he worked with Trees for Graziers to plant additional trees that were protected. Most of the 1,400 trees are black locusts, but about 600 are chestnuts.
Some of the biggest trees are now 20 feet tall, and they provide ample shade for the cows.
“We don’t have to bring the cows in like in the past,” Martin said. "It’s better for the cows to keep them out there longer; it saves on feed costs and manure hauling and bedding. We’re definitely thankful for where we’re at, and we’re working on the next project now.”
Resources for success
Websites like Canopy Compass, from Canopy Farm Management, can identify suitable trees based on the street address you put in.
Penn State Extension, the USDA National Agroforestry Center and Cornell Small Farms Program also have online guides for silvopasture establishment.
Unruh said the key is to start small.
“So rather than starting with saying, ‘I want to plant 100 acres of silvopasture,’ let's start with 10 trees and use 10 trees of species that are easy to work with, that are easy to grow, that are cheap,” he said. “Start with those. And then if that works, if you're able to keep those alive, then you can go on to a larger system once you have some experience.
“Take some time to familiarize yourself with what will do well based on your soil conditions, based on the aspect of the site and the slope of the site. Do that work ahead of time and give yourself the time to think it through.”