- All right, well, let's get going here.
So, hey everybody.
Thanks for joining
and, I just wanna say a quick thanks
to the organizers at FEMC for putting on the event,
but I know we don't have a lot of time,
so I'm gonna go ahead and just jump right in here.
So, today I'm gonna be talking
about Forest Farming in the Northeast,
and we're gonna talk about a new initiative
that promotes the development of forest farming operations
on private forest land across the Northeast region.
But I'm gonna start by providing an overview of the concepts
of forest farming,
non-timber forest products in agroforestry,
and I'll talk a little bit
about why the practice is a good fit for the region,
how it dovetails
with some larger forest conservation goals and frameworks,
and then I'm gonna talk about
how this new USDA funded initiative
is gonna help forest landowners across the Northeast,
get started with a forest farm of their own
to address some of the major challenges
facing forest conservation on private lands
across the region.
So let me get going here.
I'm gonna start, let's see.
Is it going? Okay,
by introducing myself here.
So, my name is Karam Sheban,
and since I registered for this conference,
I've had a change in employment.
So I'm currently the Director of Sustainable Forestry
at Rural Action.
This is a community development
and environmental non-profit organization based
in Appalachian Ohio.
So I'm from Ohio originally and worked
with my current organization
for a number of years after college
before returning to school for a master's in forestry
at the Yale School of Forestry,
where I still have like a research affiliation.
So there my studies focused on forestry,
forest ecology and agroforestry with a particular emphasis
on temperate forest farming systems in the Eastern US.
So to get us going here,
I wanna introduce some terms and I'm gonna start
with this one, non-timber forest products,
which maybe some of you,
or all of you may have heard this term before.
It's somewhat self-explanatory,
but essentially, non-timber forest products or NTFP's,
constitute a broad category of products.
Anything other than wood coming out of a forest
that has a commercial or a use value.
And so, it might seem obvious to say
that forest produce useful things other than wood,
but for some people this idea of a non-timber forest product
is a new concept.
It's also very inclusive term,
there's all kinds of non-timber forest products.
These include medicinal plants over 50 species,
like ginseng, elderberry and slippery elm from this region
that are common to the market,
edible plants like black walnuts,
pawpaws, persimmons,
tree syrups, not just maple syrup,
there's increasingly market opportunities
for alternative tree syrups,
like beech walnut, birch, even sycamore.
And so when you begin to talk about forest farming systems,
these are the species that often are the focus crops
of these types of operations.
So, there's lots of ways to describe
or define forest farming,
but at its most basic,
forest farming is the cultivation of crops
under a forest canopy.
And so you're actually utilizing the natural shade
of that forest canopy
to create a conducive growing environment
for your target species.
And in contrast to farming field crops,
where you're dramatically modifying the environment
through clearing and tilling
and adding inputs like water and fertilizer,
forest farming systems are generally based around native,
mostly perennial species.
And this means working with plants that do well
in your native forest environment.
And so forest farming systems,
they exist around the world,
but across the Eastern United States,
that means working primarily with plants
that are native to Eastern Deciduous Forests,
and in particular,
this region that follows the topography and soils,
the Appalachian mountains and for us
and for folks in that region,
the good news is that
it's a highly bio-diverse tempered forest region.
So there's lots of plants to choose from.
And so when we're talking about eligible plants
for forest farming systems,
just to go through a few,
some of the more commonly cultivated understory species are
things like American ginseng,
maybe many of you have heard of that one,
but there are other plants like goldenseal pictured here,
sometimes called yellow root.
You've got black cohosh and other understory medicinal,
as well as a bloodroot.
Another one sometimes you'll see this
as a popular horticultural plant.
It's got this beautiful flower and then ramps or wild leaks,
which is an understory edible.
And then lots more,
we've got black walnuts, the top left,
and then in the center there is a hauling machine
that our organization runs.
You've got inoculated mushroom logs,
tap maple trees for syrup, pawpaw fruits
and talking mushrooms.
So one of the really cool aspects
of forest farming is it allows
for these integrated cropping systems where,
potentially all of these things could be produced
on the same piece of forest land.
You could have crops in your understory.
You could have stacks of inoculated logs,
tubing systems running between trees,
with your fruit crops in the mid story,
like pawpaws or the canopy, your black walnuts.
So you'll sometimes hear this referred
to as a vertically stratified or multi-story
forest cropping system.
And so forest farming is of five practices
that together constitute the discipline of agroforestry,
which is the integration of tree and field crops
into the same system.
And this brings all kinds of benefits,
including climate benefits, biodiversity benefits.
And this idea,
agroforestry is something that the USDA
is really promoting right now.
In order for practice to qualify as agroforestry,
it has to hit what USDA calls, the four Is,
intentional, integrated, intensive, and interactive.
And so, based on that vision of multi-story cropping
that I just gave you,
you can see forest farming systems definitely
have the potential to hit all of these four categories,
but it's important to note that there are all sorts of ways
to produce forest crops,
other like that I mentioned earlier.
And so the intensity of production
can actually vary quite a bit.
And I'm just gonna run through this real quick here.
On the one end of the spectrum,
you have just the stewarding
or tending of bio-plant populations.
So, this just looks like,
you probably can't see there,
but there's some ginseng there by my foot in that picture.
It's just harvesting from an existing wild plant population,
maybe tending to that population
by doing things like deliberately planting seeds
or berries from plants
before you harvest roots or taking care to only harvest
the sustainable portion of that population each season.
Then you get what gets called wild simulated production,
where you're introducing a species
into a natural forest environment,
planting some ginseng seed or whatever it might be.
But beyond planting that seed or transplanting rootlets,
you let those plants grow as if they were wild.
And so then those plants are competing with other plants
in the understory, they are being browsed by deer,
but there's essentially no labor costs
beyond the initial planting.
You've got what you hear called woods-grown production,
which is a bit more intensive,
you're still utilizing that natural shade provided
by the forest canopy,
which you're making major modifications
to the growing environment,
including potentially removing competing plants,
tilling the soil or creating raised beds.
You'll sometimes see applying fertilizers and fungicides
to the soil to combat disease
and to allow you to plant at a higher density,
this is an under planting of American ginseng here,
and you can see it's not competing with anything
and you would never find a plant growing
at that density naturally.
So that's gonna require some fungicide probably
to sustain that type of a population.
Then there's also field-cultivation
under artificial shade or partial sun.
Although these systems tend to be commercial,
as you can see here,
there's no intact forest canopy.
So you can see the production
of forest plants can happen at different scales
and it can happen at different intensities.
Looking at this sort of production spectrum here,
according to the USDA,
only two of these systems would even qualify
as forest farming.
These two in the middle here, wild-simulated, woods-grown,
like I said, the last that commercial production,
there's no forest to speak of.
And so honing in on these forest farming systems,
you know, they generate a number of benefits.
They're utilizing practices of plant stewardship to achieve
what this professor here,
Eric Burkhart at Penn State University likes
to call "Conservation Through Cultivation"
where you're actually transitioning
the forest herbs supply chain,
the botanical supply chain from wild harvested
to sustainably cultivated understory plants
and forest landowners are able to participate
in the economies around
these species without drawing exclusively
on wild plant populations.
In fact the re-introduction
of native understory species
on your property increases biodiversity,
well, actually turning your forest understory
into a working landscape.
So, like I mentioned,
there's real economic benefits potentially
on a very small track of forest land activities
like tapping maple trees
and growing ginseng can yield
a pretty nice supplemental income,
the prices you can see down there.
So to put forest farming into that economic context,
ginseng and other forest farm understory species,
and NTFP is actually represents
some pretty significant forest based economies.
You can see that maple syrup tops the list here,
but ginseng and other native understory species
like golden seal and black cohosh represent economies
in the millions and tens of millions of dollars annually.
So, some pretty significant economies.
And there's lots of other reasons, not purely just economic,
where by forest farming is a good fit
for Northeast forests and beyond.
And I'm gonna go through these somewhat quickly here,
but I think they're important to note,
from a forest land ownership perspective,
you can see that so much of the forest land,
as I'm sure most folks here know,
in the Northeast it's privately owned.
And the majority of that is held in smaller parcels.
So that brings a lot of challenges
from a management perspective,
including maintaining native biodiversity on private lands.
And so forest farming presents an opportunity
to reintroduce dispersal limited native understory species
into the largely second growth forest of our region
while generating forest based income from landowners,
which is a strategy that fits well
with the ownership patterns that we see in this region.
We also know that it is increasingly difficult
for small family farms to survive
in an era of farm consolidation,
economies of scale and industrial farming practices.
And so forest farming is a way for farmers
to create new income streams from their properties.
And here's an important statistic to keep in mind,
20% of the forests in the Northeast are associated
with a farm property.
And so we're talking a lot about working lands here,
when we're talking about forests.
And so, there's a real potential for farmers
to integrate forest crops into their operations
and here are just a few examples of local foods being made
from forest farm crops.
A lot of these are from the Ohio area,
kind of where I'm from.
So, there's lots of opportunities here.
And forest farming is,
it's not mutually exclusive with other property uses.
It's low cost, it's relatively low impact,
it fits with many of the reasons
that forest land owners identify
as why they own forest land,
things like aesthetics,
beauty, recreation, wildlife,
and legacy or maintaining family land.
And it's also important to note that forest farming
is not mutually exclusive with active timber management
and harvesting.
So it's a complimentary of land use practice.
There's also a really important biodiversity reason to care
about forest farming.
And this is a 2020 paper by Michelle Spicer
that highlights the fact that over 80% of the biodiversity
in Eastern deciduous forest is located
in the forest understory,
and most of these plants are slow growing,
they're dispersal limited,
and populations don't really cover
after a major disturbance,
such as a heavy cutting or development.
And so there's a real need
to think about strategies
for restoring the native biodiversity of a region's forest.
And I think the forest farming has a role to play there.
And then you can think of the practice under the paradigm
of something like assisted species migration.
So it fits with these kind of larger frameworks,
but our region, what's missing in the Northeast
is the education and outreach around forest farming
to help landowners adopt the practice.
So to that end,
I want to see a few quick words
about my current organization, Rural Action,
we're a non-profit organization based in Southeast Ohio,
our work is considered,
we consider it asset-based community development,
which is a model where you're working with the strengths
that exist within the communities where you serve
and you're building from those strengths.
And we're doing this work in the context of region
that historically has seen a lot of resource extraction,
timber, coal, natural gas,
and that's suffered many of the consequences
of this kind of development,
a lot of the challenges,
this conference aims
to tackle things like forest degradation and fragmentation.
And so in response, Rural Action has been working
for over 30 years with forest land owners
to develop non-timber forest products
as an economically and ecologically sustainable source
of supplemental land based income.
And so land owner education outreach represents
the foundation of this work,
pictured here, outdoors in the field,
as well as services like in-person site visits
and the development
of non-timber forest product management plans
for land owners.
Building this body of work over the past few decades,
Rural Action has reached thousands of forest landowners
across the central Appalachian region
and through partnerships with groups
like the Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmers Coalition,
group here, led by Virginia Tech University.
And in partnership with the National Agroforestry Center,
that footprint has continued to grow,
the Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmers Coalition here has
over 2000 members and their forest farming,
YouTube channel has like 200 educational videos posted
with 22,000 subscribers to the channel.
So by partnering with them,
our reach has really grown a lot recently.
And so what we're hoping to do in my capacity
and my affiliation with Yale on this new project
is to replicate this model and to bring
some of the resources in momentum around forest farming
from the Appalachian region into the Northeast.
Funded through the USDA,
Sustainable Agriculture Research
and Education Program, SARE,
our goal is to establish
the Northeast Forest Farmers Coalition.
A community forest landowners,
technical service providers, herb growers, and buyers,
and others along the value chain
across the Northeast region.
And at the same time create the opportunity to quantify many
of the ecological and economic benefits
that this agroforestry practice brings
to private forest land.
So, in surveys of forest farmers,
in-person education in the field is consistently
a top requested service.
So in response to that,
with this project,
we've established a network
of research and demonstration sites
at strategic locations across the Northeast.
Now, these are located on university
and non-profit owned forest land.
In these plantings, pictured here on this map,
are gonna serve as the infrastructure
for in-person educational events
that target forest landowners across the Northeast.
So the sites are distributed
across a pretty wide geographic range
to increase educational reach,
but also for research and to capture variability
across a range of habitat types.
And so on the research end,
these plantings are addressing
some key ecological, financial
and production questions related to five understory species
that all have commercial markets,
American ginseng, goldenseal, ramps,
blood root, and black cohosh.
Some of the species I showed earlier,
and here's just a schematic for planting design.
We're essentially conducting forest based growth
and yield trials for these target under different planting
and management conditions.
And so we spent the fall establishing these sites,
and here's a few pictures of these research sites going
into the ground,
had a great group of volunteers
and different people doing this work.
And so we're tracking every individual species
and we're gonna be able to produce a lot of great data
over the lifetime of this project.
So we spent, like I said, this past fall,
putting these research plots in,
we had a lot of students, community, forest farmers,
and volunteers that helped out in the process pictured here.
We're currently in the process
of building out online content,
beginning to plan educational events for the spring,
and those events are gonna cover topics
like site selection and preparation,
forest management, for NTFP's, species biology and ecology,
things like processing,
selling and marketing forest botanicals and more.
And through these in-person trainings and workshops,
the model for this project is
to generate new forest farming operations
on privately owned forest land across the region
through education and outreach,
in the process, preserve healthy intact forest land
in the Northeast.
So, at the same time we'll be working with undergraduate
and master's students, Ideals Forestry School,
as well as community partners to collect data
and use these sites to produce scholarship with the goal of,
let's see if that work,
there we go, providing some useful scholarship
in data for forest farmers that are hoping to replicate
these plantings on their private lands across the region.
So this' just a paper I published recently
with some colleagues on forest farming.
Ginseng, that also was supported by the USDA, SARE program.
So, hope I'm still on time.
I'm just gonna say, thanks for listening.
My email address is here.
My current email address for anyone
that's interested in following up.
I know I was talking fast there,
trying to get it all in or staying updated
on project, events and activities.
Like I said, we're looking to the spring
to start hosting in-person events, hopefully.
And hopefully, we have little bit of time for questions.
So I'll go ahead and just open things up.
- I just wanted to say thank you from the FEMC
for talking today.
I have to head out,
but you are welcome to stick around and answer,
there's one question that is already in the chat,
and you can unmute as well and ask direct questions.
Thank you. - Yeah, thank you.
Alright, so yeah.
What impact was grown cultivation have on soil structure,
native biota and the microrisal network?
This' a good question.
And, I think that's something that specifically
there hasn't been a ton of research on,
and I think that's partly why we designed this project
to have it for research component.
So part of what we are comparing,
maybe I'll just go back if I can
to our research design,
which I kind of glossed over quickly,
but one of the things we're actually comparing
on our research sites is a wild simulated planting approach
with a more like woods cultivated planting approach.
So you can see these two,
the two kind of color-coded rows,
We essentially varied our management
and for the woods grown cultivation,
we're actually tilling the soil down to about six inches.
I mean, I think that it's really reasonable
to think that there are gonna be major changes as a result
to soil structure, to microrisal networks.
And we don't have a ton of great information right now
on the importance of those networks for the functioning
and productivity of plants in these forest farming systems.
But I think there's a lot of good reason to assume that
there's definitely gonna be impacts
and that the impacts might sort of go beyond just
the lifetime of the crop that you're planting.
I will say that in those,
like the picture I had of a woods grown cultivation
with that blanketing of ginseng in the understory,
that particular operation I know is using
fungicide and stuff.
And they basically,
with that intensive over planting,
you really can't plant ginseng twice
in the same location because of fungal load.
So in that type of artificial population density
and planting like that,
you'd definitely see changes in terms of the soil biota.
And so, we're approaching this
from just a research perspective,
but I think that there's a good chance that we may find
that a wild simulated planting approach
ends up producing plants that grow just as fast,
just as well in many cases on many sites.
And so it may turn out that there's really no need
to undertake the sort of more intensive production methods.
We'll see, I think some people are definitely concerned
about that in a forest environment understandably.
So let's see here.
So how would wild simulated fit in
with traditional silver culture group selection
that allows a tree regeneration along with NTFP's?
So I think it fits pretty well.
And that's actually something
that in my own master's research,
which looked at plantings of wild simulated ginseng across,
it was a large area planted in the Catskill region.
They're doing it on a wild simulated approach,
essentially just raking back the leaf litter,
broadcasting ginseng seed across,
they were cultivating almost a thousand acres,
it's really interesting operation in the Catskills.
And what I ended up basically,
from my research looking at the relationship
between environmental factors
and the relative success of these plantings.
So like how fast were they growing?
How big were the plants getting?
How many plants were surviving?
And we found that the main relationship
that was happening there is that on the sites
that they were cultivating that were sunnier,
their plants were doing way better,
and the shade levels were
over 90% in most canopy coverage in most cases.
And so our conclusion in that paper
was that traditional silver culture,
whether it's group selection or individual tree selection,
could work really well to actually increase the success
of those understory plantings.
And I think as long as you are able to sort of go in
and do harvesting with minimal disturbance,
so you weren't really disturbing plantings
in the understory,
that active silver culture that opened up
the canopy a bit, let a little more sunlight in,
could really be complimentary,
and obviously then,
if you're deriving some income
from that active forest management, just to supplemental,
synergistic relationship between those two activities.
Okay, so let's see.
How has the Northeast Forest Farmers Association
approach in herb seed sourcing
and genetics regarding wild simulated methods?
So that's a good question.
It's one of the biggest challenges
with forest farming right now,
where we're at is there's increasing interest
from landowners.
People are really interested in,
they wanna get started.
The challenge is sourcing planting stock.
That is definitely a challenge and it's different,
it totally differs by species.
So American ginseng is probably the most well known
or commonly planted as often sort of the centerpiece
or like focal crop,
just because prices for American ginseng
are particularly high
and can support planting other species.
And basically, all of the seed stock that's produced
for ginseng commercially is coming out
of large commercial operations,
like I pictured under that artificial shade cloth,
mostly located in Wisconsin.
There's also a lot of production coming out of Quebec.
And so right now, if you wanted to buy ginseng seed,
that's probably where you're gonna find it from,
unless you happen to have a local connection,
but there's some concern
for sure regarding genetics when it comes to planting out
across habitat ranging all the way down from Alabama,
all the way up through Quebec,
you're planting the same seed stock produced
under these kind of intense conditions, there's concern.
So there's a major need as far as the other,
what we're gonna hope to do through our project
is to build out resources in terms of just,
where allow like to help people figure out
where they can source these products.
We work with a number of growers to source planting stock
for our plantings across our research sites,
which is quite a lot of plants.
And so we made some good connections through that process,
we'll probably recommend to people that they could reach out
to those same growers that have planting stock,
but we're also hoping to really
as part of this project and through another couple
other initiatives that I'm working on with different groups
to build out the local planting stock sources
through the creation of nurseries
that are growing as planting stock and doing it
in a sustainable way so that ultimately,
ideally, people could go to their regional nursery
to buy planting stock that's sourced from genetics
from the region and is adapted to local conditions.
So that's definitely what we're working toward.
So, our plan will be to just help land owners navigate this
in the early years,
and to work with the growers that we have a network with
to get plants in the ground.
So, all right.
If there's any other questions, you can throw them
in the chat, that's otherwise.
Let's see, I think it's just me in here.
So I'll give it just maybe another few seconds
if anyone wants to throw anything else in there,
and if not,
then, thanks again for coming.
And hopefully everyone enjoys the rest of the conference
and feel free, like I said,
just put my email back up there to reach out.