I’ve been very encouraged lately to see more and more conservation groups gain interest in silvopasture (in this case, specifically planting trees into pastures) as a powerful conservation tool. These include groups concerned with climate change and carbon sequestration, groups working towards improved water quality, and also folks working towards wildlife habitat restoration. This is a significant difference from several years ago when I first got started in silvopasture—when there was very little institutional support for the practice. We still have a long way to go to develop stable, reliable funding for silvopasture plantings, but we are certainly moving in the right direction.
Now that we’re at this point, I want to highlight this fact: farmers will not adopt silvopasture if it does not make sense for them. Planting any old tree in a pasture might suffice for conservation purposes and carbon sequestration, but for the tree to earn its keep on that farm it will need to make significant contributions towards the farm bottom line, with minimal downside or risk. My concern is that as more groups support silvopasture from a conservation angle, but without the nuanced understanding of the needs of farmers, important corners will be cut in favor of cost savings, resulting in low quality trees being used. If those trees ultimately do not support the bottom line of the farm or end up causing more headaches than they are worth, they will be removed and the practice as a whole will get a black eye.
Let’s take honey locusts for example. Honey locust is one of the most widely applicable trees for silvo, but can have one very significant yet preventable downside: thorns. Yes, it is undoubtedly cheaper to cost-share seedling trees without giving thought towards the long-term consequences. We can get a photo-op and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, but, if five years down the road the farmer is left with a bunch of thorny trees (half of which are males and do not yield pods). they might justifiably decide to cut the trees down rather than risk the trees becoming a nuisance.
The best honey locust trees for silvopasture are going to be all female, completely thornless, and high yielding with big, sweet, juicy pods. Those are not trees that you’re going to get through cheap seedlings from off the shelf. Such trees need to be clonally-propagated from carefully selected stock. In the long term, these trees will return more than the initial higher investment, but they will cost more to establish. This might put the interests of farmers at odds with the interests of conservation groups, since the cost of a generic seedling is going to be significantly lower than the cost of a clonally-propagated, high-quality tree, yet the conservation benefits will be the same either way. Because of this, a conservation group bringing funding to a project might not see the motivation for planting improved tree stock. Yet when we reflect for a minute, it becomes clear that if the trees do not contribute to the bottom line of the farm (or worse, cause significant management challenges), those trees will not be on the farm long enough to provide the promised conservation benefits we set out to achieve.
So how is one to solve this misalignment of incentives? That will need to be worked out on a case-by-case basis depending on the program and the farmer. But I have some suggestions. Maybe a conservation group will bring enough funding to cover 100% of the cost of establishing conservation-grade seedling trees, and the difference in cost for improved cultivars would be covered by the farmer. In another scenario, a conservation group could set a certain amount of cost-share per tree with which the farmer can go and develop their own budget.
Ultimately, I would like to see farmers have access to low-interest loans for agroforestry projects, structured in such a way that fits with the long-term return on investments for trees. This would allow farmers to cash flow their agroforestry investment while maintaining full decision-making authority for the project. Yet because of the considerable conservation benefits of agroforestry, they should get access to loans well below market rates, ideally with reduced payments for the first several years. We’re probably several years out from seeing significant interest in such loan programs until farmers gain greater confidence in the profitability of silvopasture, and hence willingness to put their own money on the barrelhead. But I do believe it is only a matter of time before silvopasture becomes common practice among farmers raising livestock on pasture. To get there, all parties including farmers, consultants, nurseries, and conservationists, need to make sure that we do our due diligence to keep quality very high, so the trees we plant contribute towards resilient, profitable farms for the long haul.
