Trees for the Future: Agroforestry at Dancing Rabbit

Dear Dancing Rabbit Friends and Supporters,

Eric here, before I hand it over to Ben for a look into how agroforestry can contribute to a resilient, regenerative, and cooperative future, I want to update you on the status of our fundraiser. Due to a heartwarming recent development, the first $9,000 in donations will now be fully matched thanks to three wonderful humans: John Simpson, Jill Tenney, and Nathan Brown! The second $3k we receive in donations will go directly to establishing an agroforestry cooperative at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. At the time of sending this email we’ve raised $2,040! Just a bit more and we’re on our way to chestnut trees, healthy woodlands, and heaps of carbon sequestration. 

So why do these things matter? Well, I’ll let Ben take it from here:

It seems like there are a lot of possible ways our world might look, 10 or 15 years from now. There’s even a few highly probable forecasts for our global future, some of them good news, like increased renewable energy production, some of them clearly not so much, like melting ice caps. From where I view the world currently, the frozen and windswept slopes of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, Northeast Missouri, I can look 15 years into the future and see abundant food, healthy soil, clean air and water, and meaningful work. But mostly, I see trees, or as some of my neighbors might say, brush. Perennial woody biomass. Nut and fruit trees. Nitrogen fixing trees. NFTs, if you will.

There are a lot of bogus investment opportunities out there folks, and in the next decade many more, like crypto-currency (translation: not real money), non-fungible tokens (translation: can’t make change with it), and whole essential oil micro-pyramids will likely rise and fall, taking some unfortunate investors down with them. I suppose we have this privilege, here in the affluent Western world. Before I go forward, a request that nobody explains “block chain” to me, again. Others have tried, but I wasn’t paying attention. As long as folks are having fun and not hurting anybody, I don’t care what they pursue. 

Now, I grant you, I may not be rolling in it. I mean, I’ve rolled in many things, just not hundred dollar bills, though I’m told the price of manure is rising. Fertility, now that’s fungible. Fungal, even. I would estimate that my coveralls smell like no less than $2,500. We’re talking Gucci numbers here. But, I digress. And I ask you, dear reader, a question: What will have more value a decade or two from now, a mature Chinese chestnut tree that cycles carbon into the soil and drops 50-100 pounds of carbohydrates onto the ground annually without the aid of fossil-fuel based equipment, or a literal file of an image of a monkey, or if you prefer, a literal file of an image of Donald Trump as a cowboy? What kinda NFT do you think will serve us better?

When I view the future from where I stand now, I can imagine the harvest season. This year, the air is crisp, the sun is present, though I’m sure some years it will be a bit cold, wet, and miserable. A large wagon, perhaps horse-drawn, is parked centrally in an expansive grove of trees. All kinds of people have gathered, little people, big people, some are old, some are young, and they have gathered to bring in bushels of fresh chestnuts. With gloves and tools they comb the dappled orchard for spiny chestnuts in their husks. The wagon lurches down one lane and back around to the next as gaggles of playful children hurl sharp, spiky husks at each other. (Let’s be honest, that’s bound to happen.) Further up the slope, a herd of pigs and turkeys glean what’s been left behind, breaking the pest cycles in this organically managed orchard. Everyone involved, from the harvest and collection, maintenance and management of the orchard, processing, packing and marketing of the chestnuts, is able to receive some amount of supplemental income (it’s all mostly supplemental here) in addition to pretty much as many chestnuts as they’d care to consume.

Further afield, a small herd of dairy cows lazes and ruminates in the dappled shade of high production honey locust trees. They belch a faintly molasses-like perfume as they chew the sugar-rich pods, building fat and muscle for the winter ahead. These cows, alongside other livestock and all the wildlife present in this harmonious system, are welcome to the remaining persimmons, hanging like amber sugar plums and littering the pasture floor. Further downhill are hickories, pecans, and oaks, soon to mast an abundance of fats and proteins. In the loft of the goat barn, bags and bales of mulberry leaf sit, ready to provide nourishment and precious, perennial protein (as high as alfalfa, but much easier to grow in our soils). Just one day, in the future, where every creature, human or otherwise, is directly benefiting from the investment made in a few simple tree plantings. Alright, some of the tree plantings may be quite complex to implement, but I still believe irrigation makes more sense than “block chain.”

Some of y’all have heard by now that many of us here in the Tri-Communities, (that is Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, Red Earth Farms, and Sandhill) are beginning the work of establishing an agroforestry cooperative. Let me break it down real quick. Agroforestry is, in essence, tree-based agriculture. Unlike a standard orchard, in which one crop is being produced per unit of land, agroforestry is integrative. The spaces between trees might contain some annual crop, such as rye, or garlic, or cut flowers. It may host livestock, like bees, or chickens, or geese, or sheep, which, by the way, will not be my job to manage. A well-planned and implemented agroforestry project blends seamlessly with the natural environment as well as the surrounding human community. It is an orchard, but it is also a playground, a place for wildlife, a space for meditation, and a biological filter that provides positive impacts downstream.

Agroforestry is interactive. In a world where GPS driven tractors and drone seeding are becoming more and more commonplace across vast tracts of land, agroforestry creates a mutually beneficial relationship between people and place. A tree planting is a place where children can play, elders can exercise and reflect, and the rest of us can toil, I suppose. My eventual hopes for this project are that friends and neighbors from our wider community in Northeast Missouri can interact with it and have the opportunity to share knowledge and insights into this agricultural alternative.

Agroforestry is intensive. Back up a moment with me, and let’s look at how trees cycle carbon. Each leaf on a tree is like a solar panel. Through photosynthesis, whereby a plant combines CO2, water, and sunlight to create sugar and oxygen, this solar factory can store carbon in the soil (battery). We all know this, I think. All plants do this, some of them very efficiently, so long as the soil is minimally disturbed. The thing that makes trees especially efficient in this regard, is that their means of solar collection, leaves, are very high up off the ground as compared to grasses or annual crops. As the sun moves across the sky, trees are able to photosynthesize in three-dimensions. When planted at the appropriate spacing, a human-implemented and maintained tree planting can sequester more carbon than either open grassland or a naturally occurring, unmanaged forest in our climate. And so agroforestry allows us the opportunity to not only collect sunlight and store carbon intensively, the very “three-dimensional” nature can create opportunities to yield multiple harvests. Calorie wise, a tree planting that hosts pasture for livestock and room for vegetables within the footprint of the orchard can be sizable. An efficient land use plan for our region.

Finally, agroforestry is intentional. There are a lot of opportunities in the world to plant trees, or pay for somebody else to plant trees and hope they really did it, and there are equal amounts of opportunities for well-meaning (or downright nefarious) individuals to kill or neglect trees. Particularly with nursery grown stock, which have a high carbon cost, doing a bad job at planting trees by not caring for them afterward or putting them in an unsuitable location, isn’t doing the planet any favors. And as a person who has killed many a tree in my career, I just won’t have it anymore. 

As for what a cooperative is, in the context of this project, it’s an opportunity for people to enable each other to do big things, to share in work and responsibility, and perhaps make a meager, if honest, buck together. It’s a way to generate food security and right livelihood well into the future, far past when I’m gone or finished with the project myself. A cooperative is an opportunity for new or newly inspired villagers to have access to tools, labor, land, and money for building their own tree-based dreams, be they basketmaking, mushroom farming, forest medicine, maple sugaring, fruit, timber; anything where some roots remain firm in the earth.

2023 will be our inaugural year of developing and implementing agroforestry at DR. Some initial projects slated include harvesting and inoculating logs for shiitake mushroom production, developing a holistic timber stand improvement plan which can blaze the trail for forest farming, silvopasture, and invasives management, reducing our fire risk, sequestering carbon and improving our compost systems through biochar production, and planting some initial selected native tree crops for dual human and livestock use (silvopasture). I hope to chronicle these goals and efforts in greater detail in the future. This coming year we’re keeping the projects small yet impactful, diverse yet relatively uncomplicated, and attainable enough that I am confident they can all be accomplished. My hopes in helping to develop this cooperative are that we will have a sense of how many resources, labor, financial, and excitement-wise there are to commit before implementing a much larger agroforestry goal in 2024. And I can do this all for approximately 1/10th the cost of a bitcoin… probably closer to an 1/8th by the time this thing goes out. 

Look folks, there’s a lot of things out there without tangible value. And some of us work very hard to acquire them. And it turns out, some of those things that we work so very hard for ultimately don’t even have an intangible value. They are, it turns out, completely without value. And there’s a lot of these things, and there are whole industries and marketing schemes out there that spend quite a lot of time, effort, and energy trying to convince us otherwise. I’m too busy, too tired, and probably too honest to try that here. I think trees have value. Beyond board feet, or bushels per acre. They have value as part of an ecosystem. They have value in our atmospheric and hydrological cycles. They have value according to the wildlife that derive shelter and sustenance from them. Our human communities, too, have long valued trees, for the shelter of their shade, their abundance of material gifts, as places to gather, landmarks on the horizon, or even as friends we’ve grown up with. 

We’re talking about communities coming together to plant trees for the future, y’all. I don’t need to market that to you, do I? It ain’t a file of an image of a cartoon ape… it’s something a bit more durable than that, I think. Roots in the ground. It seems that in this age and economy, the simple act of putting roots in the ground, from the concrete world of transient urban renters to the self-imposed rootlessness of homeowners associations and the acres upon acres of field-scale row cropping that cannot economically afford the margins and edges created by trees, is an act of rebellion, if not hope. Let’s make a change for the better that’ll last a couple centuries.