ADVANCE PRAISE FOR RESTORATION AGRICULTURE “This book, written from real experience of working with the land and referencing real results of experience over time, will be invaluable and is destined to be a permaculture classic. This will be a reference book of great value for anyone interested in using permaculture design in a farming operation and valued by future generations.” Geoff Lawton, managing director, Permaculture Research Institute of Australia “In Restoration Agriculture, Mark Shepard convincingly makes the case for no-tillage, perennial agriculture. He draws inspiration from J. Russell Smith, Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, his father, his grandfather, his neighbors and others who showed him that trees are the key to productive and sustainable agricultural systems. Shepard shares his practical knowledge and hard-won wisdom gleaned from years of experience growing up on a farm in central Massachusetts and later transforming a barren overgrazed landscape in western Wisconsin into a richly productive polyculture. The discussions include rotational livestock management, beekeeping, soil and water management, plant breeding, turning a profit on a small farm, and many others. This book is well organized with lots of delightful and informative personal anecdotes.” Larry Korn, translator of The One Straw Revolution and Sowing Seeds in the Desert and student of Masanobu Fukuoka “What a great story and a fun read … a wonderful history of man’s intervention. It’s not just the ‘reasons’ we need to change land management, it’s the ‘model’ to follow … a call to action.” Gary Zimmer, president, Midwestern Bio-Ag “I’ve never been a big fan of permaculture, that is, until encountering Mark Shepard and his work. Restoration Agriculture describes the reasons why permanent agriculture is needed, the ecological systems behind farm-scale permaculture, and the step-by-step of how to get there. His message is reality-based, down-to earth, and a call for new pioneers!” Faye Jones, executive director, Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) 2 Restoration Agriculture 3 4 Restoration Agriculture © 2013 by Mark Shepard All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission except in cases of brief quotations embodied in articles and books. The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author and Acres U.S.A. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use or misuse of this information. Cover photography credits: Blueberry cluster (front cover) © Erik Shepard Pine cone © Brand X Pictures Blackberry, raspberry & blueberries (back cover) © Stockbyte Orange willow leaf © Goodshoot All other images © Thinkstock Back cover author image © Praveen Mantena Interior photography credits appear on page 313 Roundup® and Roundup Ready® are registered trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC. Acres U.S.A. P.O. Box 301209 Austin, Texas 78703-0021 U.S.A. 512-892-4400 • fax 512-892-4448 [email protected] • www.acresusa.com Printed in the United States of America Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Mark Shepard, 1962- Restoration agriculture / Mark Shepard. Austin, TX, ACRES U.S.A., 2013 xxii, 330 pp., 23 cm. Includes index and bibliography ISBN 978-1-60173-035-0 (trade) 1. Permaculture. 2. Tree crops. 3. Fruit — culture. 4. Nuts. I. Shepard, Mark, 1962- II. Title. SB170.S54 2013 634.04 5 Contents FOREWORD INTRODUCTION 1 The Perennial Agriculture Vision 2 Our Present Reality 3 Standing on the Backs of Giants 4 Challenges Facing Agriculture 5 Turning Things Around 6 Farming in Nature’s Image 7 The Steps Toward Restoration Agriculture 8 Other Biomes 9 Livestock & Restoration Agriculture 10 Including Bees 11 About Nutrition 12 Nutrition & Perennial Agriculture 13 Getting Started 14 The Transitional Strategy 15 Managing a Healthy Farm Ecosystem 16 Plant & Animal Breeding PHOTO TOUR OF NEW FOREST FARM 17 Making a Profit 18 Creating Permanent Agriculture: A Call for New Pioneers APPENDIX RESOURCES 6 Acknowledgements EVERY book, I suppose, needs to include some sort of acknowledgement of the multitude of people who were an instrumental influence on its author. Although writing a book may seem like a solitary task, it is not. There may only be one monkey pounding on the keys, but there is a whole host of support behind and around any author as they go through the process of writing and publishing a book. It would have been impossible on several levels for you to read this book if it wasn’t for my Mom and my Dad. Aside from the obvious, they provided me with an incredibly dynamic way of interacting with the world. My Mom was a displaced Vermont farm girl who taught her children Yankee thrift and ingenuity, how to garden, and more importantly how to cook, can, freeze, pickle, dehydrate and jam just about everything that is edible (and some things that turned out not to be edible!). My Dad was a displaced Maine woodsman who instilled in his three sons a love of nature, a desire for constant learning, plant identification, and how to piece together a ramshackle tool with little more than bubble gum, duct tape and a generous application of WD-40, and to love the physical exertions of living a rural life. His never-ending planting of food trees, and his (unintentional) neglect of those trees helped me to see perennial plants in a different way than the main stream would. The forest and the farm are part of who I am and they have become one in restoration agriculture. Indirect inspiration came from many directions, of course, but most significantly J. Russell Smith, Masanobu Fukuoka and Bill Mollison. I may never get to meet Bill Mollison in person, and even if I do I don’t know whether I’d like him or not, but Bill has begun a revolution on this planet in founding the international permaculture movement. Because of his work and charisma, millions of people worldwide have dedicated themselves to earth care, people care and equity. The world is and will be a better place because of Bill Mollison. If nothing else, millions now live lives of meaning and purpose within the wreckage of the industrial, materialistic global economy that has left them behind. More directly I would like to thank all of those who have coached me through the years directly and indirectly and have helped me to come to the point where I would write all this down. To all of the workshop participants, course students, consulting clients and to folks who have come on tours of New Forest Farm, I thank you for helping me to understand that I actually do have something of value to share, and thank you for helping me to hone my message so as to be able to communicate it (I hope!) clearly enough for non-experts to understand. Thank you to Fred Walters, when I was in a challenging phase in my life, for suggesting that I write a book, and thank you for the Acres U.S.A. staff who have helped me through the process. Especially to Anne Van Nest and Maggie Voss, my editors, who have somehow been able to remain calm, level-headed and polite even when I am not. There must be a dark side to them somewhere! Thank you to my “research team,” the board and staff of the Restoration Agriculture Institute: Peter Allen (Executive Director), Ron Revord, Kevin Wolz and Brandon Angrisani. Thanks for feeding me with the ecological research that confirms my on-the-farm discoveries. Thanks also for reviewing and commenting on the manuscript before sending it off to Acres U.S.A. Thank you also for the ongoing conversations and arguments that have helped to clarify the message, and thank you for working with these systems in your private lives as well as your careers. Special thanks have to go out to Julie Gahn who was my backup during the most challenging chapters of this book. Julie tirelessly researched and compiled all of the nutritional information that is included throughout the book, but especially in the About Nutrition and Nutrition & Perennial Agriculture chapters. The nitty-gritty details of those chapters seemed so unimportant to me at the time compared to the overall system and I never would have survived writing those chapters without Julie keeping me on task. Yippee, we did it, Julie! Thanks to Anna Lappé, a dynamic and tireless advocate for social justice and sanity in a seemingly insane world. An online recording of Anna giving a presentation to a group of college students where she mentioned New Forest Farm, was the first time that I had ever heard anyone positively acknowledge the work that I have been doing. Thank you Anna for helping me to trust that what restoration agriculture farmers are doing is good, right and a noble occupation. Thank you also for reinforcing my view that food is the central theme and can be the catalyst for the broad changes that need to ripple through all levels of society if humanity is to thrive as a species. We are what we eat and our planet looks like it does because of how we get our food. 7 One person deserves special recognition here who has been largely behind the scenes at New Forest Farm except at the beginning; Rand Burkert. In a sweaty sauna at 2 a.m. at a permaculture design course in Colorado in 1993, he and I decided to give our thoughts about Permanent Agriculture a form, and to put them into practice. With the initial down- payment from Rand, the land for New Forest Farm was purchased, for which I am forever grateful. Namaste, my friend! Finally (aside from those whom I have forgotten or intentionally ignored) I would like to thank my immediate family: Erik (who took most of the photographs in this book) and Daniel for growing up so apparently well-adjusted while living with a Dad who, for so many years, could have been considered seriously strange. You two have experienced something that very few people on this planet have. You have seen hundreds of acres of bare dirt and pastures transformed into an abundant food-producing ecological paradise. I hope now that you can see the wisdom of restoration agriculture and its power to change the world. I hope that you will help others to do the same, and will help to convince them how easy the transition can be. You two are the first generation of temperate “mid-succession” restoration agriculture farm managers. I know how to transition from annual crops to perennials, but how will we manage the system for the next 50, 100 or 200 years when I’m gone? You and the next generations will be the ones to learn how. At least we’ve provided you with some resources to work with. Last on this list, but definitely not least, I have to acknowledge Jen, my best friend, lifemate, lover and companion through thick and through thin. “Wife” is such a small and shallow word for something that is as vast as the entire universe. Thank you for your patience, your forgiveness, your understanding, your encouragement and all of what it is that constitutes LOVE. I may not have a “nice job” and a Porsche; my grubby Carhartts and long sleeve white shirts may have holes in them, but I love you. All of what I do, this book included, points to the fact that I love you, and to the fact that there is some sort of grand mystery unfolding in all of our lives. Behind the outer appearances of this material world, there is an invisible pattern, being or “field.” There are invisible forces finding fulfillment in the visible drama that is life on earth. I stand with the “grand unfolding” and will strive to do my part to take care of The Garden. 8 FOREWORD Hope for a Hot Planet Nature includes us … We are in it and are a part of it … If it does not thrive, we cannot thrive. Wendell Berry STALKS of shriveled corn in Iowa. Colorado residents trying to stay cool in 115-degree heat. Farmers in 1,369 counties across 31 states holding out for disaster aid. The record-breaking heat of 2012 is a hot, dry taste of global warming- induced weather: unpredictable and extreme. I read farmer Mark Shepard’s visionary book with this summer’s weather front-page news. In the context of our new climate reality, I am reminded how urgently we must rethink how we farm — and what an important tool this book is for doing just that. I got my own peek at Mark’s vision several years ago when I visited his 106-acre farm, nestled in the verdant valleys of western Wisconsin. That summer the state was hit with its own extreme weather event — powerful rainstorms had devastated farmland and left the state footing a bill for millions of dollars in flood relief. By the time I pulled onto the dirt road curving up to Mark’s farm, I’d driven by enough flooded fields to have a knot in my stomach: I assumed Mark had faced the same fate. Imagine my surprise when I parked in front of his wind-powered cider house to find Mark and a farm intern joking around, grinning from ear-to-ear. These were not the faces of farmers in despair. While New Forest Farm had been pelted with the same rain that had crushed neighbors across the road and left dark brown gullies in its wake, Mark’s fields were relatively undamaged. In fact, a few of his crops had never been better. How did Mark prosper while his neighbors suffered? I was eager to know, because the answer, I believed, could hold a key for rethinking farming in a climate-unstable world. The answer, as you’ll discover in these pages, is a fascinating vision for recasting our relationship with nature and the land. As Mark shares in this book, it’s a vision built on the inspiration found in a lineage of ecological farmers, including J. Russell Smith (Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture), Masanobu Fukuoka (One-Straw Revolution), and the originators of permaculture, including Australia’s Bill Mollison. And it’s a vision Mark has tested on his own fields often with incredible results. Restoration agriculture, as Mark calls it, is a vision of agriculture that taps into the inherent abundance in nature. Consider the sun. As Mark writes, “Sunlight is the ultimate energy source of all agricultural systems.” Crops are merely vessels of stored sunlight — as Mark puts it, farmers and ranchers are in the “solar energy collection” business. The American corn and soy farmer is doing lousy business. A monoculture field — planted with just one annual crop the way the vast majority of American farmland is — captures the least possible sunlight a field could. Restoration agriculture does the opposite: It maximizes the amount of sunlight captured. Mark gives us a glimpse when he says, imagine a piece of paper as an acre of farmland. This flat paper is like a monoculture field; it captures an acre worth of sunlight. But take another sheet of paper, and another and another. Fold them into tents of triangles, large and small, and lay them on the same 8½ x 11 footprint. Place them over and under each other — just as crops grow in nature, some thriving under the canopy of trees or the shade of bushes. Do so and you’re tapping the abundant sunlight for all those crops now thriving. Do so and you’re quadrupling, quintupling, or more, the surface area! Go to Mark’s farm and you see this solar energy collection business at work: the chestnut, oak, black walnut and hickory trees growing tall above the hazelnuts; down close to the ground the raspberries and blackberries. And that’s just in one spot on the farm. Restoration agriculture asks a lot of us — not only to rethink our relationship to the sun, but to recast the relationship between farmer and insect, too. Of the 1.1 billion pounds of active ingredient pesticide used on American farmland every year, much of them are used to deal with the weeds, nematodes, fungus and insects that routinely go after our main commodity crops. But what if we saw insects not as nuisances to eradicate, but as essential members of a flourishing farm? If you’re a chemical farmer, as soon as you get an economically harmful threshold of a pest, you spray some chemical or another. 9 But if you let the population run naturally, you start getting new populations of insects who arrive to eat, and thrive, on those original so-called pests. “Eventually you find a certain stability,” says Mark. That’s why he likes to call himself a population ecologist. Mark is not in the bug-killing business. Go to his farm and you sense it immediately: New Forest Farm is alive with buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, predatory insects, soldier and dung beetles. In the pages of this book, you’ll learn more about Mark’s vision of agriculture — and the potential it holds to feed us well in a resource-compromised future. By latest count, this summer broke 2,312 temperature records across the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture downgraded the bushels of corn coming off an acre by 12 percent. And Arctic ice melted faster than even many of the most dire scientific estimates had predicted. This is indeed a remade planet; how will we feed ourselves here? That question should be on everyone’s minds and Shepard’s answers should be on everyone’s lips. Anna Lappé Brooklyn, New York August 2012 10