permaculture.studio dover, pennsylvania
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plants & perennial crops 4 people

Agroforestry & tree crops

The century-long argument that on sloping ground the crop should be a tree, and the working farms and forest gardens that have been testing it.

Notes

The case was made in full in 1929 and has been re-made every generation since: annual tillage on hill land loses the hill, and a tree crop yielding a comparable staple does not.

What has changed is the evidence. J. Russell Smith could point at old chestnut and carob economies; the people who followed him planted the systems themselves and measured them. A two-acre forest garden at Dartington has thirty years of records behind it. A hundred and six acres in Wisconsin has been converted from row-crop corn and sells commercially from the result. A tenth of an acre in Holyoke carries more than two hundred edible species.

Those are different scales answering the same question, which is the useful thing about them.

The ground they laid

J. Russell Smith Tree Crops (1929) — the argument that trees, not the plough, are the permanent agriculture of hill land. foundational work

Working now

Eric Toensmeier Cataloguing the perennial crops of the world, and then costing out honestly what they can and cannot do for the carbon budget. active practice Mark Shepard Converting a worn-out row-crop farm into a commercial oak-savanna analogue, and selling from it. active practice Martin Crawford A two-acre temperate forest garden at Dartington, kept and measured for thirty years — the reference example of the form. active practice

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