I had a great conversation recently with a longstanding silvopasture farmer which highlighted some of the management decisions that will need to be made with the systematic integration of trees into grazing systems. In short, as ecosystems become more complex so does management, but it also opens up whole new worlds of opportunities.
Michael Kovach runs Walnut Hill Farm in Sharpsville, Pennsylvania. His farm is a mosaic of open pasture, woods, old apple orchards, volunteer apples, planted trees, and hazelnuts spread throughout. It’s far from uniform, so management needs to adapt to the uniqueness of the landscape. There are ample trees for shade, but not everywhere, so livestock may need to graze the open areas in evening and morning, then get moved to the shade for the afternoon. Thick areas may offer little in the way of forages but provide valuable shelter in bad weather. Flat areas can be kept open for portable chicken shelters. There are endless such nuances to consider when managing such a diverse landscape.
One management nuance I particularly want to share regards the use of apples. There are hundreds of old apple trees on the farm presenting an interesting management challenge. The apples provide a tremendous amount of high-energy feed, but they drop over a long period of time—over the course of months. To follow standard prescribed grazing practices the herd would have to graze an area once every 30-50 days before moving on to the next paddock, yet in this case, most apples would be wasted and rotten long before the cattle came back around. So here the manager must decide whether to favor the forages by giving them a lengthy rest period or maximize the use of those apples by turning the cattle in every few days so the apples don’t rot. Michael has decided those apples are valuable enough that he brings the cows through for short time periods every few days, before moving them back to places where the forages are better. At the end of apple season, those areas get an extra long rest period to recover.
Being willing to practice this level of adaptive management opens up countless silvopasture opportunities that don’t exist if one sticks to a rigid rotation. Even adaptive management that only factors in the forages would fail to leverage the opportunity. Apples and pears are two species that I had long ago figured wouldn’t make sense in a rotational grazing setting since most of the fruit would perish before it’s used. Now I see that they can be valuable additions in the hands of the right operator.
Mulberries present an even more time sensitive opportunity, given that their fruits go bad quicker, but can offer valuable energy in early summer when nothing else is dropping. For cattle, perhaps establish a block of mulberry trees with very large berries (so their indelicate mouths can grab them), divide the block into three, and hit each block every three days for a short time to boost energy intake. Whether that’s practical or not will depend on the context of the operation. If one wants to raise pigs or poultry under silvopasture trees, they’ll similarly need access for the whole time the trees yield, and those forages will need long rest periods in between.
I, for one, am excited to see all the nuanced management that will come from more thoughtful growers adopting silvopasture in the years ahead. It will take sound ecological thinking, but I know that those folks dedicated to deep ecological restoration are more than up to the challenge.
Sidebar comment from Kovach:
“The problem with pitching adaptive grazing is that humans love little boxes, and it doesn’t fit well into many of the ones we’ve built around soil health. Biomimicry should drive it, and we as a species have talked ourselves into the idea that we’ve evolved smarter than nature. And we assign schedules where there can (or should) be none possible. Can you imagine a herd of bison waiting to eat apples because it hadn’t been 6 weeks since they were through there, and ate the grass under those trees? Me either!”
Michael Kovach, Walnut Hill Farm, Sharpsville, PA
