I’ve written elsewhere about why we at TFG focus on trees that are meant to directly serve livestock. The summary is this: most graziers want to focus on being graziers, already have too much on their plates, and don’t have the bandwidth for the additional work and investment required to manage, harvest, process and market tree crops in addition to their existing livestock enterprises. Plus, I’m skeptical about the scalability and profitability of most tree crops, whereas folks will keep buying animal products for a long time to come, and being able to produce those products at lower cost (and hence higher margins) is a simple, dependable formula for success.
I wanted to share a small anecdote from my personal experience that illustrates this just a bit.
I am a tree crops guy, so naturally I take any opportunity I can to plant more tree crops, which my wife would certainly testify to. I have all manner of berries and tree crops, including serviceberries, raspberry, blackberries, goumis, gojis, mulberries, currants, gooseberries, jostaberries, persimmons, pawpaws, apples, walnuts, heartnuts, chestnuts and probably a half-dozen other plants that I can’t recall offhand, planted anywhere around our small homestead that I can fit them. Point is, I like tree crops.
And while I like tree crops, I do not like getting sick, so I planted elderberries. A lot of elderberries. It’s hard not to when you have an open patch of ground and they are so easy to propagate, and now I have over 200 linear feet worth of elderberry bushes, crammed tight with plants. Needless to say, we’re producing way more than our family could ever need for elderberry syrup, even with daily consumption to ward off colds.
The same thing is happening for pawpaws, though with a long built-in delay. I planted a ton of pawpaws gradually over the last 6 years, both seedlings and grafted trees. I planted them when I was mighty excited about pawpaws, and since have fallen a bit out of love with them. They’re still good, and I still have them in moderation, but I sure won’t be able to consume the fruit from all 15 or so trees I have scattered about. While that’s not an issue yet ( just this season I got my first 8 fruits from my oldest tree), I’ll soon be swimming in pawpaws. Beware the long, delayed feedback loops for tree crops.
So what to do with an overabundance of tree crops? Selling them would be the most obvious solution. Problem is, I generally have plenty going on as it is, and need another thing to do like I need another hole in my head. Selling pawpaws would be easy enough, since they don’t need processed, but selling elderberries requires harvesting, de-stemming, freezing or drying, turning into syrups, etc. It’s a lot of work. I’ve told my boys they can keep all the proceeds from the tree crops if they sell them, but so far they haven’t taken me up on it. Given that the oldest is only 5, I’m hoping that by the time the pawpaws are in full production, he’ll be ready to sharpen his marketing skills. This illustrates a neat opportunity that I do love about tree crops: they allow farms to stack enterprises on an operation, creating more income streams for the next generation to take on, or for a second person to eventually draw their income from the farm.
Meanwhile, my neighbor has two beef and a bunch of chickens we help take care of, and they are always buying feed for the livestock, whether hay during the winter, grain to supplement throughout, and of course feed for the birds. Those represent existing costs to the farm, guaranteed outlets for tree crops, and hence guaranteed savings, with no additional work to harvest or process or market. Honey locust and persimmons would be a good energy supplement for the cows, poplar fodder would be a great feed during droughts, and the chickens would love to roam underneath a grove of mulberries. Establishing these trees is a sure-fire way to decrease input costs, and a penny saved is better than a penny earned, because you don’t pay taxes on it!
So when we at TFG say that we’re mostly focused on trees that serve livestock, we should qualify that it’s the bulk of what we do, but not all that we do. Our goal in general is to use agroforestry to seed human flourishing and resilience. At scale, and for most farms, what I see as most reliably leading to steady prosperity and reliable success is a combination of trees that are there to serve a livestock operation, as well as the direct needs of the farm, through a combination of fuelwood, building material, and food. As I noted above, I love tree crops, and many of our clients choose to integrate a diversity of tree crops to bolster their homestead. Less than an acre would fill most homesteads with all they need of chestnuts, walnuts, heartnuts, hazelnuts, apples, pears, berries and more. The rest can be devoted to other uses, and the most reliable means of improving your income from that land is through silvopasture. Tree crops for human consumption make the most sense when there is a known, and ideally direct-to-consumer market outlet available.
So please, go out and plant all manner of tree crops. Fill your yard, and fill your neighborhood yards if they’ll let you. Plant enough for you, your family and your friends. This will increase your health, your resilience, and your joy of life. I can attest to the great joy of picking fruit from plants I planted and waited for. And if you have a pasture, fill it up with the right trees so that your livestock thrive. They will thank you for it.
