Mark Shepard
Converting a worn-out row-crop farm into a commercial oak-savanna analogue, and selling from it.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- New Forest Farm · Viola, Wisconsin
- Home ground
- 106 acres in the Driftless Area of south-western Wisconsin — once a worn-out row-crop farm, now one of the country’s most ambitious conversions of degraded corn ground into a perennial agricultural ecosystem.
- The model
- Oak savanna, successional brushland and eastern woodland as the ecological templates.
- The crops
- Hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts and apples as the primary woody crops.
- The water
- Keyline and Master Line water management, ponds, swales, terraces and other earthworks, designed through Restoration Agriculture Development.
- The nursery
- Forest Agriculture Enterprises, founded on the farm in the early 1990s to breed productive, hardy cold-climate chestnut and hazelnut hybrids.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
The objection to perennial agriculture is always commercial: it is beautiful, and it does not pay. New Forest Farm is the standing counter-argument — a hundred and six acres of former corn ground in the Wisconsin Driftless, run at commercial scale on a savanna model.
The design layout follows the water. Shepard’s earthworks — keyline and Master Line systems, ponds, swales and terraces — decide where the runoff goes before anything is planted, and the plantings follow that geometry. The consulting arm, Restoration Agriculture Development, does the same work for other farms.
The breeding programme is the long game. Cold-hardy hybrid chestnuts and hazels that yield reliably in the upper Midwest are what would make this pattern reproducible across a region, and the farm has been selecting for them since the early 1990s.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.