Picture a farm with ambitions to expand, to produce more food for more people, to make more money, and to employ more people in good, regenerative agricultural work. There are myriad ways of doing so, including stacking new enterprises on the farm like raising chickens, pigs, and bees where previously there were only cows. You could go the value-added route in order to capture more of every food dollar spent. And, in many cases, folks will look to buy more land.
What I want to propose here is that trees which address key challenges on the farm will, in many cases, outperform the investment in more land and should be considered as a farm improvement strategy.
With our context being grazing operations, let’s look at some of the reasons for investing in trees over more land:
- Trees can reduce issues of feed availability at critical times, whether poplar and mulberry fodder cut and dropped during droughts, or honey locust pods, persimmons and apples dropped in the fall and winter to boost winter stockpile. Meanwhile, any new land purchased will be subject to the same forage highs and lows of your existing land, with a spring flush, summer slump and no growth in winter.
- In addition to providing feed at key points of the year, trees can also provide strategic shade, fix nitrogen, and boost soil biology. All of these add significantly to the resilience of an operation.
- The cost of establishing trees is usually a fraction of the cost of buying land. Let’s say your total cost per tree is $75, and you’ll plant 30 per acre for a total of $2,250. Good luck finding land for less than that anywhere trees will grow. More interesting is to compare Animal Unit Days (AUD) of feed from an acre of land to an acre of high-quality silvopasture trees. The best study we have on honey locust yields (referenced here), shows average yields of 95lbs/tree of dry pods for the Millwood cultivar at ages 9 and 10. Let’s be conservative and estimate 80lbs/tree. To be conservative again, let’s say 30 pounds of pods make one Animal Unit Day, even though they’d likely be used in much smaller quantities, and allow the livestock to make use of coarser, fibrous material to offset the high-energy pods. That gives us 2.66 AUD per tree, and at 30 trees per acre gives us 80 AUD per acre. Divide the cost for establishing the trees ($2,250) by the number of AUD, and you get $28.13, the investment cost of an AUD, which gets paid back annually in not having to buy in hay or other feed. You’ll have to come up with your own land numbers, but let’s say someone can buy land for $8,000/acre that will yield 180 AUD. In this purchased land scenario,the price of an AUD is $44.44. Again, this will depend on the context. Many times trees can get a significant amount of cost-share, whether through NRCS or other sources, making them much easier to cash flow and providing a better ROI.
- The above assumes that there is land for sale. In many cases, land rarely goes up for sale, it’s too pricey, or it is too far away. This last piece is key. Adding parcels of land away from the home farm can really complicate management, requiring more running around, the means to handle and transport stock, not having eyes and ears on livestock when they are elsewhere, etc. Adding trees adds management labor for sure, but my guess is it’ll be less than buying new land, especially non-adjoining land. Even for adjoining land, there is more fence to build and maintain, more watering facilities to upkeep, more area to brush hog, and further distances to travel every day. The fact that one has the option of immediately investing in one’s own land through trees without having to wait for other land to come up for sale is significant.
- The case for investing in trees over land gets much stronger when raising monogastric livestock (pigs and poultry) as opposed to ruminants (cattle and sheep). Monogastrics get very little of their feed intake from pastures, but trees like mulberry, persimmon or oaks can provide significant amounts of feed. In a pastured pig or pastured poultry system without silvopasture trees, more land simply gives more room for animal impact to spread out, and only provides a very minimal addition of feed.
- Investing in trees seems to have two main drawbacks. First, trees take years to start providing ROI, so the investment is harder to cash flow (though grants and loans can help). The other drawback is that trees are not considered assets like land is, so you cannot someday take out a loan against them. On the other hand, you don’t pay taxes on trees like you would on land.
- Strategically integrating trees can form the basis for long-term farm diversification and enterprise stacking, whether by adding new livestock types like pigs or poultry, producing tree crops like chestnuts and apples for human consumption, selling hunting leases, etc. The options can expand significantly and create entrepreneurial niches for others on the farm.
I hope you can see the reasoning behind investing in trees as a means of boosting farm production. In no way is it an either/or option, as I want regenerative farmers to expand and control more land. But once on that land, strongly consider investing in the right trees for that land. Use a grant or a loan to bring down the cost and spread the cost over many years so you can make it cash flow. In order for perennial, regenerative agriculture to get a real leg up, we need to use these powerful, long-lived tools, and start using them at scale.
