Thousands of Trees - A Modern Update to an Ancient Grazing System

Agriculture of all forms has very thin (or even negative) profit margins, and a central goal of all farmers is designing systems that relentlessly cut costs, build in efficiencies, and optimize an array of highly interconnected variables as efficiently as possible.  And in large-scale agriculture, farmers have achieved some level of success.  Large-scale farms have developed complicated and data-driven regimes, complete with tightly coordinated planting dates, annual R&D, highly specialized and expensive equipment, and deep marketing channels.  But even though these highly refined systems produce bushels and bushels of bulk calories, the relentless drive toward yield comes at the cost of people and the planet.  Rather than producing a wide array of crops, each addressing a need in the human diet, we instead have shopping aisles made primarily of corn- and soy-derived products.  Meanwhile, the relentless drive towards yield leads to constant tillage, loss of topsoil, over fertilization, fertilization leaching, and ultimately pollution of our rivers and ground water.

erosion chart, see erosion tables for data values

Source: NRCS

At Turning Leaf Ranch, we operate under a different paradigm, equal parts old and new.  Our ultimate vision for the farm is tree-based, with a wide array of tree species, each bringing up valuable minerals from deep in the soil column, and producing healthy and diverse amino acids and proteins.  This valuable tree-based fodder will provide a fresh source of summer nutrition, and will be harvested late into the year until the rains start again.  Soil disturbance will be minimized, and the trees will provide ecosystem services for our animals, as well as wildlife.  It is an ancient system that is starting to receive a lot of modern attention, and it is a potential alternative to tillage-based systems.

To this end, we have built two "air prune" beds, for growing out tree seedlings.  Air prune beds allow tree seeds to germinate, and send down roots as usual.  But the bottom of the bed is a screen, rather than a hard bottom (like a plant pot), and there is an air gap beneath the screen.  When a tree root hits this air gap, it naturally prunes itself, and this self-pruning of tap roots then promotes lateral root formation, so that seedlings grown in air-prune beds have full, healthy root systems.  We plant the seedlings at an extremely high density (thousands of trees in about 3 square meters), and will pot them up in pots over time.  These air prune beds are the foundation of our future farm system, as they reduce our tree-expense to a fraction of the cost were we to purchase the trees at retail.


Air prune beds allow for high density plantings
Bare root seedlings are transplanted in spring

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