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Blending Forest and Field with Steve Gabriel
122 Plays14 hours ago
Steve Gabriel joins us to unpack one of the most consequential myths shaping how we grow food in America: the separation between forest and field.
As a co-steward of Wellspring Forest Farm in Mecklenburg, New York, author of Silvopasture, and researcher at the Cornell Small Farms Program, Steve has been listening. Through a SARE-funded project called Farming with Trees, he's been in conversation with over 120 farmers, from Bronx-raised beginners to multi-generational stewards, exploring not just how to plant trees, but why it matters and what gets in the way.
What he's found is that the barriers to agroforestry aren't just technical. They're cultural, historical, and deeply personal, rooted in a Eurocentric agricultural paradigm that told farmers to clear the land and never look back.
In this episode, we dive into:
- How personal relationships with trees in childhood shape a farmer's vision for the land
- The paradigm shift required to move from stark field or stark forest toward something in between
- How indigenous land stewardship modeled a working tree landscape long before "agroforestry" was a word
- What livestock farmers, vegetable growers, and flower farmers each need from trees and why those needs are so different
- Why starting with willow and poplar might matter more than starting with chestnuts and apples
- The role of community, craft traditions, and living fences in rebuilding our relationship with trees
More about Steve:
Steve Gabriel is an ecologist, farmer, and educator from the Finger Lakes Region of New York. Throughout his career spanning 20 years, Gabriel has taught thousands of farmers and land stewards about land planning, mushroom growing, and agroforestry. His experience working in academic research and extension, as a teacher and lecturer, and managing several working farm landscapes has built a unique balance of knowledge and practice which he brings to his work.
With his family, Gabriel co-stewards Wellspring Forest Farm, which is an agroforestry demonstration farm that produces mushrooms, nursery trees, pastured lamb, maple syrup, and elderberry in Mecklenburg, New York. He also collaborates with diverse individuals and organizations through the Farming with Trees Collective.
Gabriel previously served for 12 years as Extension Specialist for the Cornell Small Farm Program, focused on research and education on agroforestry and mushroom production. Steve co-authored Farming the Woods with Ken Mudge (2014) and is the author of Silvopasture (2019).
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Introduction to Landscape Integration
00:00:02
Speaker
Forest and field. In a lot of people's minds, it's like this dichotomy, like, well, it's either a field and it's producing things in a farm, or it's a forest and that is either left alone or it might be a place to harvest you know some timber.
00:00:14
Speaker
What we're talking about a lot is like the blurring of those two things. The myth is that when when European settlers first started coming to the northeast U.S., the forest was this like dense, and untouched wilderness. What was actually happening was a very sophisticated mosaic of landscape management that was happening for thousands and thousands of years previously at the hands of indigenous folks.
00:00:37
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:49
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward.
Guest Introduction: Steve and Agroforestry
00:00:52
Speaker
Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:01:02
Speaker
Steve, thank you so much for joining us here on Agrarian Futures. I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while. We've known each other for quite
Farming with Trees Project Overview
00:01:10
Speaker
a while. We're very much in the same field, both working in the field of agroforestry. And your book, the book Silvopasture, written, i think, back in 2018 published 2018. is one that really inspired me and gave me quite a few tools to be able to do my job and continue to build off of of that foundation that you laid. So we've been able to go back and forth quite a bit over the years. And I'm excited to hear more about your current project, which we'll get into today. So you started off in your career looking at forestry and pretty soon being able to take a different perspective on forestry, on the the relationship between agriculture and forestry. And I know that you've been working on this project here of late called Farming with Trees. And I had the opportunity to be involved in a little bit of that. We did some videos a couple of years ago by now where we highlighted some of the work that we had done on farms that we work with, as well as many other farmers on their farms.
00:02:07
Speaker
So I've had a little bit of opportunity to collaborate with you on that.
Challenges in Tree Planting and Survival
00:02:10
Speaker
But I'd like to hear more about that project and what you've done with it in the last several years. That project really came out of, it was funded through a Northeast SARE grant, which we're grateful for for that entity, providing a lot of support for innovative farming research and education, things like that. And the whole premise of it was the idea that you know people like trees, there's interest in that, and just don't know exactly how they fit into the farming vision.
00:02:36
Speaker
One of the interesting things I dug a lot into was like, globally, we've tried to plant trees a lot at scale. and tried to do reforestation and haven't actually done a very good job. Like success rates are pretty low. And even my local NRCS is like, well, we consider like if half the trees we give you funding for to plant survive, like that's success. And i I was like, that seems pretty, that seems pretty sad. Like if that's, if that's our mark of success, what does that come into account? So it was really this exploration of what's going on here and how how we could do better. And what felt really important was to really take the time to listen before enacting a certain education or or research agenda. At the time I wrote the grant, I had just gotten out of working at Extension. And one of the challenges I found at the university level was often like imposing a lot of assumptions on farmers and then asking for their time and energy without
00:03:30
Speaker
really paying attention to what their needs were or what was really even feasible for them. and And I think with tree planting, it's really important to emphasize that there's a lot of desire to do it, but farmers just don't have a lot of time or don't have the skill set to necessarily do it successfully. We're putting a big burden on them if we just give them some money for some trees and say, just go and do this thing. I remember visiting a chicken farmer in New York. i was working on a project and and he had he had been very committed to planting trees, but like had been doing it for about five years before I got involved and had like, most of them had just died. It was amazing that he still wanted to do it. And so it wass just like about how we understand some of the psyche and some of the perspectives and and really where people are coming from that felt really important. And so a large majority of the project was just spending time listening to farmers and also interviewing folks that were developing ecological nurseries, specifically growing trees out for agroforestry type context.
Cultural Connections and Tree Benefits
00:04:26
Speaker
And to really think about
00:04:28
Speaker
Where are folks coming from? What's driving them? What are their real needs? What are their real challenges? And how does that then play into what we could offer in support in network building in resources? And so we really wanted to approach it from that you know that perspective from the get-go.
00:04:45
Speaker
I'm really curious to learn more about what you've found because this echoes my experience perfectly in that there's a lot of the clients that we work with that have wanted to establish trees in their pastures for years. And some of them have taken attempts at it. And generally they have, they experienced very, very low success rates.
00:05:07
Speaker
I think 10% of trees surviving is more the rule than the exception to the rule. And that's with well-resourced farms. That's with farms who like really they have the dedication to do it. It's quite a bit of energy and time and money that they have to get together in order to even do a tree planting when a farm has so many other things that need to happen on any given year. And yet we see such low success rates. And then that's where we come in as a company. And we come in and we make sure that they we guarantee them a 90% success rate, or we pay for for the the balance. That's been completely our experience. We don't quite have a culture or a ah knowledge base, how to establish trees in anything other than an orchard, like in in agriculture, we know how to set up an orchard, especially if you till everything and you keep all the weeds out and keep all the animals out, like that's fairly easy to get established.
00:06:08
Speaker
But on these more diverse ecological agroforestry systems where there are, we we want lush forages and we want animals and we want livestock.
00:06:18
Speaker
That's a much harder ask. And most farmers have never, ever been trained or seen good examples of that. I think what I interesting is when we started these conversations, we tried to avoid getting too into the sort of technical aspects of things like, oh, you need this, you know, this special shovel or this special tool or this tractor implement. Like, those are all important things that come later. But it was really, you know, back to what I was saying, my own, my own experience, like, what's important to you? And and what do you value? And if if you don't have,
00:06:51
Speaker
excitement, passion, value. i just don't think there's the commitment to to making these things happen, right? These are slow, long-term systems. And what was really powerful is the first question we asked was like, what are stories from your childhood?
00:07:04
Speaker
about trees that you remember and just share some of those stories. And and so we had folks that were doing you know very rural farms, very urban farms, very new to farming, had been farming for generations. And that question like spoke to everybody. There was no one that didn't have ah an answer. And it was really interesting to see what came out of that. And it almost like launched the entire conversation. It was like it was like starting from this place of excitement and joy. And like it just the whole conversation from there just kind of like unfolded. And so it really set the stage. And it was really clear that people's personal relationships to trees in their youth and as they grew up, where they lived, whether it was like an urban or rural context in that story.
00:07:42
Speaker
And then like even their cultural, race, ethnicity, identities all played this really important foundational role in like how they saw trees coming in. Now these folks were like showing up to a space to talk about trees. So they're interested. They weren't, they didn't have an overwhelmingly like negative view or like this was a bad idea, but But everyone really could speak to that from their own perspective. And what was most remarkable then is as we then started to talk about, well, how does that you know shape your perceptions or where do trees fit within the farming or the agrarian landscape?
Historical Context: Forests, Fields, and Colonization
00:08:14
Speaker
People really spoke of a deep sense of all the different, like multiple benefits trees could have. So yes, we could grow a crop and sell it, but even more important than that, they'll protect my farm from the wind or from soil erosion or improve water quality or provide habitat. Or in one case, a vegetable farm was like, ah, we just need some shade in the middle of our 40 acre vegetable field. Like it'd be nice to take a break and like be under that tree. Right. And also like a lot of them spoke to elements of planting trees on their farms was like something that really spoke to how they wanted to actually farm and be stewards of the landscape that it spoke to like a much longer intergenerational kind of time sense. And I think farmers and folks working the land like are thinking about that and want to embody that and are often trapped Sometimes in these like more annual, more like rapid production cycles that you're just trying to kind of churn out things to sell for markets. And those are important aspects of a of a successful farm. But it doesn't always speak to the ways that people are thinking about the practice of farming and how that's going to like really live in them and then live live beyond them, right, too.
00:09:18
Speaker
especially since we really know that most people do not get in into farming because it's the best way to make money, right? Like that's that's not why people get into farming. Ideally, you can get into farming and you can make enough money to continue being in farming. But most people get into it because of the lifestyle, because of the opportunity that allows them to do hands-on work outside, producing something of value that's that's tangible, and for the legacy that it allows them, for the ability to bring their kids to work, to leave their kids something that is tangible and that they can say, one of the most beautiful things about planting trees on a farm to me is you have this very visible way of showing that your farm is getting better year after year after year because these trees are getting more mature. They're providing shade. They're providing feed for for the livestock, food for you, all of those things.
00:10:11
Speaker
Even just the short time we've been here, to see some of the trees we first planted when we started and and how they're really turning into to beautiful specimens is really lovely. And I think about that also in the in the ways that the land was shaped intentionally and unintentionally before us. So we have ah about an acre of sugar maple here that we tap and just produce syrup for, we we do it in a community like with some other families and just make syrup every year and get the kids involved. and that acre of maple was only there because some previous farmer liked a mother sugar maple that he or she like left in the hedgerow and then at some point someone stopped grazing the acre next to that tree and that tree seeded this maple in right and so that was about 70 years ago we know that because of the age of the trees and
00:10:58
Speaker
that decision, which was maybe just a decision not to do something as much as a decision to do something, allows us to now bring maple syrup into our into our farming practice, right? So it's a really interesting thing to think about.
00:11:10
Speaker
Whatever I'm doing on these on these fields and in these forests today is really gonna show itself to that next generation, whether that's people I know or are related to me or not. And that's really the legacy as we turn our ourselves backwards in time, too, where those decisions really showed up in so many different ways and show up in our landscapes today, right?
00:11:29
Speaker
I love it. Two things I want to know, I want to hear some of these stories that you've heard from folks, stories that really stood out. let's start Let's start with that. Are there stories that people shared from their childhood that really stood out to you and maybe help us understand a little bit more of where people are coming from?
00:11:49
Speaker
We'll have all this shared, by the way, in ah in a report that people can read. What we've tried to do is was summarize without without diluting all the individual folks. We talked to about 120 farmers in this. Oh, wow.
00:12:02
Speaker
In group settings, right? So it wasn't like we interviewed each person bit by bit. It was like it was a group conversation. We didn't necessarily like name folks and and and keep identifiers in there, but it gives some some overall patterns of what we heard, right? But for example, one story that sticks out is a fellow who recently is starting to farm, has moved to a rural area of New York, but grew up in the Bronx in New York City and grew up in subsidized housing. And in the middle of the area between all the houses, there was ah there was a cherry tree.
00:12:35
Speaker
And this cherry tree... was something that him and other kids that he grew up with like every year would climb and would harvest cherries from. you know He joked that a lot of it was like throwing cherries at other other kids and kind of like playing with them more than valuing them as food. but But it was something that he remembered like looking forward to every year seeing the cherry blossoms and knowing that that meant the fruit was coming, like seeing the birds and the insects come, like could really recount the sort of phenology we call that in a very technical sense, right? All these kind of like pieces of that annual cycle that are really important to to pay attention to and just how that related to him.
00:13:13
Speaker
It was so important about how he wanted to then bring specifically that type of tree, but also just more of that to the farm that he was just getting and started with, you know, in a rural area like later in life. You know that's one that sticks out.
00:13:25
Speaker
There's another that was a fellow whose grandmother was really passionate about orchards and had a family orchard and really emphasized the importance of taking care of fruit trees and having having this food producing plant in your yard. And that that was just something that he recalled a lot of his childhood was spending time like learning again from his grandmother, like they had names for each of the trees, like human names. So really treating them as as kin, as family, right? And and speaking from that perspective.
00:13:54
Speaker
i mean, there's a couple that stick out, but it got really personal really, you know, real quick. And then I think what was interesting was everyone was able to draw connections between like those stories and and what that meant for them then.
00:14:06
Speaker
and And also we're like, oh yeah, that's a really important piece of this. Because again, I think we're often really led, whether it's through our like education, schooling, just culturally to like suddenly come around to this thing of like from ah a more logical angle of like,
00:14:23
Speaker
okay, what tree should I plant for the most dollars or what's the right thing to do? And I'm going to look to an extension person to be like, this is the right tree I should plant in this place. but but you know And there's there's value in that. Again, that's not to say these things aren't valuable, but I think people diminish their own experience and relationship in that.
00:14:42
Speaker
And don't balance that out necessarily with what someone who has some experience might recommend as a species or something to bring in. And I think that's a really important balance to strike in working with farmers and thinking about you know what success looks like when we bring trees into the farm.
00:14:56
Speaker
Well, let's talk about that a little bit because in the way that agriculture has been viewed over the last hundred plus years, trees are, if they're even ever part of the conversation, they're very much on the margins. And they are maybe a means of having some conservation on the farm landscape. Usually they're completely separate from the farm.
00:15:18
Speaker
Maybe there's a windbreak around the farmstead, but that's really about it maybe over the last 20 years or so, we were talking about planting trees along streams to provide ecosystem services, shade the stream, provide more leaf input into the water, all of those things. But trees are very much considered to be something that is on the margins of agriculture. It's for conservation only, or it's for these touchy-feely type things that speak to the heart, that speak to your emotions, your legacy, all of these things that we want to be part of agriculture.
00:15:53
Speaker
But we we have a hard time valuing and putting putting dollar signs towards. and And we have a really hard time imagining what a working tree landscape, what farming with trees at at ah any kind of scale actually looks like. And that's something that that I've been working to envision what a whole landscape scale looks.
00:16:16
Speaker
solution or a landscape scale vision of working with trees on the landscape. And I think the the beauty of trees is that trees do things that other plants don't.
00:16:28
Speaker
That's really what it comes down to is trees are a tool that can provide shade, that can provide windbreak, that can provide feed during certain times of the year, that can provide food for humans. I think it's interesting for us to understand maybe why maybe let's Let's look back at our history a little bit, if we can, if we can take that step back and kind of understand the moment that we're in and why why we don't have this culture of integrating trees on the landscape into our farming practices and what we stand to gain if we do figure that out.
00:17:06
Speaker
I think the things I've come to and in learning and exploring this you know for most of my career really comes back to that there' there's a real... i don't know if it's intentional, but like a real stark line between like forest and field.
00:17:20
Speaker
There's not a lot of blurring in between because what we're talking about a lot is like the blurring of those two things. But in a lot of people's minds, like this dichotomy, like, well, it's either a field and it's producing things in a farm agriculturally, or it's a forest. And that is either left alone, or it might be a place to harvest, you know, some timber here and there or some firewood or something like that.
00:17:39
Speaker
I think what's important is like, especially in the context of like our part of the world, which is the Northeast, but But this is such a similar pattern when we look globally in so many different ways. is like The myth is that when when European settlers first started coming to the northeast U.S., let's let's be specific with, that the forest was this like dense, and untouched wilderness that was just sort of like unimaginably abundant and thick and dark. And and actually, the a lot of the the writing talks about sort of kind of a negative or like dark or scary kind of place. And that was a perception of Eurocentric folks who had been for now hundreds of years back home, like clearing the land and drawing these stark lines between forest and field and creating mythologies and really beliefs around like what the forest was and what the fields were, right?
00:18:27
Speaker
In historical literature called like the pristine myth is this idea that like this was a pristine wilderness that humans hadn't touched. And then as settlers came, they came to like tame this. What actually happening was a very sophisticated mosaic of landscape management that was happening for thousands and thousands of years previously at the hands of indigenous folks in the Northeast, but really all over the continent.
00:18:49
Speaker
Tools like fire, selectively harvesting, you know clearing an area and growing annual crops for a certain amount of time and then letting that go fallow and moving on and then coming back to it at some point. Just much longer rotations, much different, and not a focus on just kind of creating the same habitat type, you know, over and over again. Or sort of when we think about annuals, like plowing again and again and again, that wasn't really the way that landscape was managed. So it was just perceived as something that was that was wilderness when it really was something tended by humans. And, you know, through that process of management, there actually was a lot of like ah breeding and crop selection, all these things as well. So it wasn't just like
00:19:27
Speaker
Oh, I'm going out and foraging berries in the forest. That's how I'm making my, my way. I'm actually selecting, paying attention. There's a, there's some remarkable, there's a black locust forest near us that is next to the site of an old Cayuga Haudenosaunee village.
00:19:41
Speaker
And some of these trees are some of the straightest and tallest black locust around. There's no like direct geographical evidence, but one of my forest mentors is interested in probably the linkage between like why those trees are so straight and tall and it's its proximity to this village. But there are historical records that show, for instance, Eastern black walnut being clustered around indigenous communities further north in New York State, far out of its native range at the time or even today. clearly there was some very clear effort to select and plant and tend to these things. Right. So, so again, not wilderness, but actually like deliberate ah selection and the Seneca nation, which is one of the indigenous communities still around in our part of the world too, is, was really well known for its orchard management and had developed cold hardy peaches and, There's groves of pawpaw. There's all this kind of stuff scattered in literature that shows some evidence of of what we really don't even can't fully grasp because of documentation, right? So we have this kind of like rich mosaic of landscape management. Then we have a Eurocentric perspective coming in saying, well, all I see is like a treed forested landscape.
00:20:48
Speaker
This needs to be ordered, tamed. And I think one of the biggest changes was instead of a shifty mosaic of land management that actually existed over seasons and over time was actually private land ownership was actually putting boundaries around and saying, well, this is mine and this is the place I'm going to, I'm going to tend every year now for for for generations. Right.
00:21:08
Speaker
Rather than having access to like a large landscape to be able to move to seasonal abundance during certain times of the year, if you only have, let's say, 40 acres and you have to do the most with that as possible, then that does lead you towards more of an annual agriculture system.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, and it's it it was what was also just known as a way to way to tend things, right? There's a really good book by William Cronin called Changes in the Land that I really recommend folks read up because it really opened for my mind like this idea of how the perceptions of indigenous folks played out on the Northeast landscape, how European focused perceptions then altered that and where those things conflicted and how that really has resulted in the ecology that we see today.
00:21:52
Speaker
But you know coming out of that also was just a sense that when we think about farming and agriculture, what it means is clearing land and getting the trees off of it. I'll have farmers all the time. I'll do talks and I'll farmers all the time saying, well, I was told by the extension service and by USDA to like get all the trees out because they're in the way of my my tractors, my equipment. And now you're here telling me to put them all back. you know And so we're kind of coming around to like a different sense of that.
00:22:16
Speaker
maybe finding some of that middle ground between the stark field and the stark forest, like what does that space in between look like, I think is what agroforestry is exploring.
Tree Integration Strategies on Farms
00:22:26
Speaker
But it is a paradigm shift from something that we see historically, we see culturally, and then we see in in policy in the way that agriculture has really been framed specifically in North America, but but also in a lot of the world as well. And so I'm really interested, I think you you as well and others, of of how do we blend those blur those lines, blend those lines and start to think about the mix a little bit more and accept that with that complexity comes something that's you know better than eat ah either of those things just like in isolation.
00:22:55
Speaker
I'm curious to understand what are the some of the things that you've learned, maybe picked up from farmers or learned from from others along the way and from your own experience about how to successfully get these trees established on farms and what some of the the the main barriers have been?
00:23:12
Speaker
like really matching the trees to the site is important. Really thinking about that and and getting to some of the nuance. Farmers can sometimes start start to think of things as more uniform and they're actually quite nuanced, right? so So really helping sort out, I think, some of those microclimates, some of niches. and And like I said, i I'm always interested in identifying those marginal edgy spaces that don't quite feel like they're working as as good places to start. There's a question around the timeline of establishment. And so to what degree do we need trees that are what we call field ready? versus trees that might take a few more years, for instance. So the classic thing is cuttings, like willow cuttings are or poplar cuttings or something like that. Lovely way to start a tree, right? But a small diameter cutting, you know, the size of my pinky, you stick that out in a pasture, it's not going to probably do too well, right? So, you know, if we're going to pound stakes in the ground,
00:24:02
Speaker
right out into pasture, they really need to be, you know, thumb thickness or bigger. Like I like one or two inch diameter stuff is nice. And I know you all have been experimenting with, but we've also been experimenting with like how long we can go as well. So taller is better. We don't need a stubby little thing that's going to get lost in the, in the grasses, but something that can pop up above it, or at least, you know, get a tree tube and a stake so we don't lose it in that and and encourage it to get going. So one of our research projects that our farm was with We played with 14 different willow varieties and and establishing them from cuttings. After three years, who's above browse height was a question we tried to answer. And so the ones that couldn't make it to that point, there's ah a really a willow I'm very fond of called goat willow, Salix capria.
00:24:46
Speaker
which is a beautiful fodder species, but it grows really slow. It's actually really challenging to field establish. You'd really need to probably grow it in a nursery and like transplant it because it just couldn't keep up with stuff versus other, some of the hybrids we found and some of the other, even wild ones we found like did just fine. After three years, they're six feet tall. They're above browse height. Great.
00:25:07
Speaker
So there's those kind of things where I think the thinking about that timing is really important. And like I said, with livestock farmers, they probably need something that's like pretty field ready, pretty hands off. Some of these horticulture oriented folks, they're already growing, you know, thousands of seedlings a year starts. They're used to greenhouse work. They're used to tending and creating beautiful seed beds. So some of those folks were...
00:25:29
Speaker
We're giving them like one-year-old, you know, eight-inch hazelnuts. And they're going to grow them out in some of their cultivation beds for a season or two before they put them in their final planting space. That's something that's exciting to them and comfortable. And it's just it's just a different type of seed or plant, slightly different than annuals, but very much fits into their system. So I think a big learning is like, how do we really pay attention to what these farmers are already doing? And how do we like...
00:25:55
Speaker
like recognize the flow of that and how do we bring trees into that flow versus like creating this other thing they have to try to do that feels really awkward and outside of what they can do, you know?
00:26:05
Speaker
Absolutely. Steve, are there other movements that you're seeing, whether domestically in the United States or elsewhere, that inspire you, that gets you excited about a future that does integrate trees well onto the landscape? Yeah.
00:26:20
Speaker
You know, it's it's interesting. I think a lot of the things that have sparked a lot of excitement in me are often actually like a bit of turning the page back and like rediscovering something. So I went to England a few years ago.
00:26:32
Speaker
And I took a hedge laying class, which is a very specific method of building living fences and a very specific set of tools. And a very small portion of the population even knows what a hedge is and in the UK, much less can do it, right? it ah it's It's a dying art.
00:26:50
Speaker
And I think about that and there's lots of examples of that around where where there's these keepers of this that are kind of holding onto it and and teaching, right? And I think those are going to be really important pieces to to revive. There's a lot of folks weaving willow baskets around. And when you have a culture of people excited to weave willow baskets, well, then you suddenly have a demand. There's actually like a demand in our area for willow.
00:27:15
Speaker
And that then creates an incentive for a farm to plant willow potentially and provide rods for baskets, right? So I think branching out, not to, pun intended, I guess, right? Branching out into into these other side things where people are connected to trees but may not be farming directly could end up in things showing up on the farm. And I think that's something really important to to pay attention to. I also just want to mention, there were some folks in our conversations that had indigenous lineage and what was really striking, and my mentor is is Part Seneca,
00:27:47
Speaker
And what's really striking to me in those cultures are how trees really show up in a central way as really important models, as a really important spiritual figures, cultural figures, whatever you want to call them. And that there's already language, there's already embodied wisdom in how trees show up as just a normal part of cultural practice. And I think we could learn a lot from from that and in paying attention to that as as examples for what we've been talking about, which is really more of a paradigm shift than anything else, right? We have logistical problems to solve, but we really also have just just the kind of perspective question. And and so i've I've really benefited from folks learning Robin Wall Kimmler. There's the Center for Native Peoples in the Environment up in Syracuse, New York. And just the perspective they're bringing to that is really essential to, I think, the ways that then we actually do things differently on the landscape.
Conclusion: Future of Agroforestry and Community Impact
00:28:40
Speaker
See, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really enjoy learning about your work, about the conversation that you're having with farmers and appreciate what you are doing to create a real depth of knowledge and of of insightfulness in farmers, who people who are working with the land. so that they can be these reservoirs of deep knowledge in their community. We need those.
00:29:04
Speaker
We need a lot of those people on the landscape, and we need those people to then inspire and affect others with with this desire to integrate trees into the landscape for profit, for legacy, for just a better world that we're co-creating. Thank you for for your work in doing that and for taking the time to share that with us.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely.
00:29:33
Speaker
agrarian futures is produced by alexander miller who also wrote our theme song if you enjoyed this episode please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice as a new podcast it's crucial for helping us reach more people you can visit agrarian futureturespod dot com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content