Episode Three - Agroforestry
Episode Description:
This month, when the maple sap is flowing, we have three different stories about the importance of trees and our interaction with them. We’ll meet a pioneer in the Cincinnati permaculture movement who is creating a food forest on the Grailville farm, go out with a small batch maple syrup producer to learn how to tap a tree, and hear one man’s journey to save the trees in his community.
Side by side before and after photos of clear cutting host trees for the Asian Longhorned Beetle in Bethel, Ohio.
Photo Credit: Bill Skvarla
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO: You're listening to Grounded Hope. I’m the host Renee Wilde.
This month, when the maple sap is flowing, we have three different stories about the importance of trees and our interaction with them. We’ll meet a pioneer in the Cincinnati permaculture movement who is creating a food forest on the Grailville farm, go out with a small batch maple syrup producer to learn how to tap a tree, and hear one man’s journey to save the trees in his community.
From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you grounded hope.
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ACT ONE: AGROFORESTRY
RENEE WILDE: In the1930’s, the U.S turned to agroforestry to combat the effects from one of the worst disasters in the U.S. - the Dust Bowl. It takes between 100 and 500 years for nature to create 1 inch of topsoil, and in 1935 alone, more than 850 million tons of topsoil blew off the southern plains. So the Government turned to trees for help - 217 million trees.
President Roosevelt’s Great Plains Shelterbelt Project envisioned a wall of trees from Canada to Texas that would hold down the soil to keep the wind from eroding it, and from 1934 to the start of World War II, overlapping bands of trees were planted on around a quarter of a million acres of land, surrounding 30,000 farms to protect the soil.
This large-scale agroforestry project had the dual purpose of being not only good for land and the farmers, but also beneficial to wildlife by providing habitat, cover, and food.
In Loveland, Ohio, Cincinnati Permaculuralist pioneer Mary Lu Lageman is duplicating those same agroforestry benefits on a much smaller scale.
MARY LU LAGEMAN: We’ll go down the hill to the first level, which is where my food forest is. Then it goes down to a second level where we reforested and put in preservation, about 20 acres.
RENEE WILDE: It’s a warm late, winter day. The snow is melting into puddles as we walk down the grassy path to see the work Mary Lu’s been doing on the Grailville farm. The farm was named after a women’s movement in the 1940’s that came out of the Catholic Church called The Grail.
Mary Lu's first experience with this farm was in the 1960’s as part of The Year School. The idea for school came out of the Catholic Rural Life Conference and Back to the Land Movement in the 60’s and 70’s. It brought together young women between the ages of 18 and 25 to live and work on the farm for a year, with the hope of building an expanding community of women working towards a vision of social justice, world peace, and the renewal of the earth.
The Grailville women were pioneers in the Ohio organic movement. Two of its members, Jody Grundy and Maria DeGroot, helped found the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association in 1979 and Graillville became one of the first OEFFA certified farms.
Mary Lu has been working on creating a diversified food forest in a mowed clearing next to the woods. Her goal is to make a forest garden that transitions from the woods to the field.
LAGEMAN: An area where there are trees, and shrubs, and other perennials growing that will be producing food for people and sometimes the wildlife too. I have no doubt.
WILDE: A food forest mimics a forest edge using edible plants. It uses a small footprint that mimics a layered woodland ecosystem - starting with the tallest plants, the Canopy layer. These are typically fruit and nut-bearing trees. Next to these go the Dwarf layer, like fruit trees, then the Shrub layer, like currents and berries. Under and around these trees and shrubs are the root crops, vines, herbs, and edible groundcovers.
By mimicking the natural forest ecosystem, this agroforestry technique needs no-tilling, fertilizing, weeding, or irrigation.
LAGEMAN: This food forest has two different methods. On the left, we have an area that’s trying to grow up in the forest.
WILDE: Clumps of trees 6-8 feet tall have invaded the field. Some of them are Black Walnuts that are creeping into the field from the woods, but most of these trees are Bradford Pears.
Introduced in the 1950s, the Bradford Pear tree would go on to become one of the most popular landscaping trees, and one of the most destructive. These resilient and fast-growing trees are quickly spreading along roadsides, in forests and fields, crowding out native species.
Mary Lu has been leading the charge in digging these invasive trees out of the field.
LAGEMAN: We want the Black Walnut, but it was so thick that we had to go through and thin it.
So in that sense, that’s a little different approach to a food forest, letting the trees be.
And we’re going to be taking down more of those Black Walnuts, and interplanting them with pawpaws that grow well with Black Walnuts. I call that side of my food forest the Balck Walnut Guild.
WILDE: Although Black Walnuts contain a plant poison called Juglone, Paw Paws aren’t affected by it, and the two are often found growing naturally together in the same ecosystems in Ohio.
LAGEMAN: So that’s on the right, on the left is my fruit and nut guild, so I’ve got some fruit trees and some nut trees. We planted apples, pears, sugar maples, chestnuts, hazelnuts.
And we’re just getting started with the plantings, we’re going to be planting a whole lot more.
WILDE: Mary Lu thinks she might have found a good use for a few of those pesky Bradford Pears in her food forest.
LAGEMAN: You can see some small trees. Those are Bradford Pears. There’s about 11 of them that I’m keeping, and we’re going to graft edible pears onto them. We’re going to try that.
I feel that the more you work with nature, the more nature will work with us.
ACT TWO: MAPLE SYRUP
FORREST ROWE: You could drill a hole anywhere on this tree and sap will come out.
RENEE WILDE: Forrest Rowe, is a small batch maple syrup producer near Clifton.
Maple syrup is an agroforestry product unique to North America. Indigenous people to North America are the earliest known practitioners of boiling sap into a sugary solution. Prized for its sweet flavor, maple syrup is one of the first medicines of the year, and used to preserve meat and food.
Ohio ranks 4th, or 5th, out of 12 maple-producing states in the U.S., contributing $5 million annually to the state's economy.
ROWE: People say that there are optimal places to drill a hole, and that’s probably true. So here we have this giant root mass going up, so right above that is where theoretically a lot of the sap is moving up the tree. So that would be a good place to tap. A lot of the sap is going to main branches, and so that makes for another good spot to tap.
So we’re just drilling in right here, and we’re going about an inch and a half, maybe two inches. It’s not super critical that you get a certain depth, but, a lot of times I’ll put a little piece of tape around here, that’s an inch and a half, to guide me.
WILDE: And this is just your standard drill that you can get at the hardware store around the corner.
ROWE: Exactly, yep. So we’re doing it at a slight upward angle. And so you can see that saps are going to start coming out of there, just like that.
WILDE: It’s just clear.
ROWE: Yep, it looks just like water.
WILDE: Because it mostly is.
ROWE: Yep, a very low percentage of sugar. So yeah, it’s just a matter of putting these metal spiles in there and tapping them in. The goal is to tap them in far enough that they're not going to get pulled out, but not tapping them so far the tree splits.
WILDE: Can you tap a tree every year?
ROWE: Yeah, absolutely. There’s people that have been tapping the same tree their whole life. For me, I’ve been tapping this particular tree for probably 8 years straight.
WILDE: How old do they have to be to tap them?
ROWE: I don’t know age specifically, but we typically go by the dimension of the tree, so minimum of about 12-inch diameter. And then anything maybe 2 feet in diameter is two taps, anything over that can take three. And I see people put more than three taps in a tree, but that just seems unnecessary. So three is the most I do.
DOUG FITCH: When I was a kid we used to hang 6 to 8 buckets on a tree. I would see the neighbors do it, that’s just the way it was. Now, through research, we have found out that you don’t have to put more than three taps into a tree.
WILDE: That’s Doug Fitch, of Fitch Pharm Farm in Ashland, Ohio.
FITCH: Fitch Pharm Farm. My last name is Fitch. Pharm. I’m a pharmacist - and after about five years, our trees, after backing off, just a maximum of three taps in a five-foot tree, still it produces sweeter sap. So we gain about half a percent of sugar content which means that less water I have to boil to get a gallon of syrup.
So it paid off in the long run.
WILDE: Converting sap to sugar is the most time-consuming part of the process in making maple syrup.
FITCH: A good tree is one that’s hard, rather than a soft red maple, or soft maple. They produce the highest amount of sugar content. The higher the sugar content, the less boiling you have. So if it’s 2.5 to 3%, you’ve only got 35 to 38 per (tree) to make a gallon of syrup, Where if it’s 2% it yankees 48 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. So we always want to tap the sweetest trees.
We’re blessed in this area to have pretty decent trees of 2% or higher. However, the average for Ohio is 2%.
WILDE: Tapping in Doug’s area in Northern Ohio started two days ago.
FITCH: So it’s weather. We need it sunny, we need it above 32 degrees. We like it to get down to 18 to 20 degrees (at night), and if we can do that with no wind. Now the wind has picked up today and that causes a wind chill and starts slowing the trees down.
WILDE: Scientists have been researching how climate change will affect maple syrup production. Studies are pointing to a shifting sweet spot, where production will decline in the lower producing states, like Indiana and Virginia, but increase considerably further North.
In a Forbes article on climate change and maple syrup, Dr. David Lutz, a research assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth, said “Maple syrup producers may want to consider adapting their technologies and collection logistics in advance, so that they are prepared for how climate change is going to affect production.
FITCH: In all honesty, there's changes all the time. Someone asked me what's the constant. Like maple syrup, the constant is, everything’s a variable. Because it’s weather-driven.
WILDE: Doug is now retired from pharmacy, and devoted full time to the farm. He converted a log cabin on his farm into a store where he sells a range of his products; including eggs, honey, apple cider, and fresh ground buttermilk and buckwheat pancake mixes.
FITCH: And so I have a very diverse farm. My goal has been to always have some type of income, from my land, from the farm, coming in every month. Not wait till you plant your beans and corn and harvest it in the fall.
And that’s tough for a beginning farmer, too.
WILDE: Doug uses silvopasture management on his 30-acre farm. Under his maple trees free-range chickens forage for bugs and insects, fertilizing the soil as they go. And when the maple flowers come out on the trees, they are one of the first sources of nectar and pollen for Doug’s two hives of bees as they wake up in the spring.
Agroforestry techniques like this really benefit small-scale farmers like Doug, by allowing him to generate more income on less land.
FITCH: There’s a book I picked up one time, it said How To Make $100,000 Off 25 Acres, and that’s always been my goal, and we have reached that.
WILDE: How to Make $100,000 off 25 Acres was a groundbreaking treatise on profitable small-scale farming by Booker T Whatley in 1982. Whately was a Black agricultural professor at Tuskegee University, who saw first hand as Black farms began to decline and family farms struggled to compete with industrialized techniques.
Whatley’s book is a ten-point plan to regenerate small farming livelihoods. He advocated for pick-your-own farms and client membership clubs that would eliminate the middleman and give farmers a better return on their investment. Those membership clubs are now called CSA - Community Supported Agriculture, and are the backbone of many small organic farms.
FITCH: That's always been a goal of mine and we’re living that goal. So that’s pretty awesome.
WILDE: You can learn how to tap a maple tree in your own yard by going to our educational tab on our website at GroundedHope.org
ACT THREE: ASIAN LONGHORNED BEETLE
WILDE: Ohio’s hardwood trees are under attack.
BILL SKVARLA: We had three red maple trees in the front yard. They were beautiful. All of a sudden, the branches started falling out of the tops of the trees, just a small amount here and there, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. Then we had a fairly significant thunderstorm. It wasn't ridiculous in velocity, but all of the sudden the whole top of the tree fell out.
RENEE WILDE: The first Asian Longhorned Beetle in Ohio was discovered on Bill Skvarla’s Bethel farm in June of 2011.
SKVARLA: And when I looked closely at it, this is what we found.
WILDE: He’s holding a piece of trunk from one of those Red maple trees, and it’s covered with perfectly round, dime-size holes.
SKVARLA: What the ALB does, it lays its eggs underneath the bark, in that part of the tree bark that called the Cambrian, and what happens then is those eggs hatch and they feed just underneath the bark line - that’s what you see right here, all this kind of mottling of the under bark.
They feed in the heartwood of the tree, in the center of the branches, or the center of the trunk, and they grow bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger until they pupate. Then they end up driving their way back out of the tree to mate.
WILDE: Which is when they make those dime-sized exit holes in the trunk.
The Asian Longhorned Beetle, or ALB, has the potential to cause more damage than Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, and gypsy moths combined, destroying millions of acres of hardwoods, including national forests and backyard trees.
Ohio’s woodlands have already been hit hard by the Emerald Ash Borer, which has killed millions of Ash trees nationwide. While the primary host tree for the ALB is maple, instead of having a single host tree, there are 12 different species that are vulnerable to infestation, including our state tree, the Buckeye.
With $2.5 billion of standing timber at risk, that’s a serious threat, and the various government agencies kinda freaked out. Just a little.
SKVARLA: They drew a half a mile circle around each infested tree, and any host species within that circle had to be cut down, whether it was infested or not.
WILDE: This process is called full host removal. The idea is to just eliminate any food source for the beetles so they can’t expand into other areas. In this wooded township, which sits on the southern edge of East Fork State Park and Wildlife Area, clear-cutting these areas would leave a huge scar on the land that would take decades to erase.
SKVARLA: They originally wanted to take down 2.1 million trees, in just this small 25 square mile area.
WILDE: That’s when Bill got his neighbors together to form the Bethel ALB Citizen’s cooperative.
SKVARLA: Rather than cutting everything down and creating a strip mine out of Bethel, treat some of the trees.
WILDE: Once a tree is infected it's a goner and needs to be removed. But uninfected trees can be treated with an insecticide that will kill the beetles as they feed on the leaves and twigs. This method has been used by cities and municipalities in Ohio to successfully treat Ash trees against the Emerald Ash Borer.
In 2013 the Bethel ALB Citizen’s Cooperative succeeded in helping to persuade the USDA to abandon plans to force the removal and destruction of healthy, non-infested potential host trees, and instead to focus on a more balanced approach to stopping the infestation.
This balanced approach to removing only the infected trees and treating the uninfected, instead of full host removal, is now the blueprint for the USDA to save the trees in other communities hit by the ALB across the U.S.
SKVARLA: Actually through that method of treatment they ended up eradicating those beetles in those areas in Monroe Township and Stonelick Township which are our two neighboring townships, in a matter of five years.
WILDE: By banding together to save the uninfected trees, the Bethel citizens group were responsible not just for saving the trees in their own communities but other communities as well.
You can go to our website to find out how to join a citizen science project that helps you track the value of trees - no matter where you live.
We end this episode with an excerpt from Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World.
“But we shouldn't be concerned about trees purely for material reasons, we should also care about them because of the little puzzles and wonders they present us with. Under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination-in many cases, what you imagine is not so far removed from reality, after all!”
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Check out the educational resources tab at our website GroundedHope.org to find a recipe for maple snow, book suggestions that complement our themes, and ways to engage these themes in classroom discussions.
Our theme music is by Kevin MacLeod.
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson, an Americorps VISTA volunteer at Agraria
Our scholars are Beth Bridgman, an associate professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, and Rick Livingston, an Associate Director of the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University, in Columbus.
This podcast is made possible by the people at Community Solution’s Agraria Center for Regenerative practices, and by a grant from the Ohio Humanities.
I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset