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The Deep Dish

An insider look at food and farming from Civil Eats

 
Issue 19, May 2023: Farming With Trees
The Editors' Desk
In this month’s Deep Dish, we look at an often overlooked, but extremely important, aspect of farming: trees. While row crops get most of the star attention (and funding), farmers who blend crops, trees, and livestock are increasingly working toward food production and conservation goals on the same land. In our feature story, we showcase how agroforestry, which includes planting trees and bushes in strips, along streams, or between rows of crops, is taking root all across the country. Many of these practices, including silvopasture and alley cropping, have long been used by Indigenous communities, and also show great promise as climate solutions.
 
We also follow up on our previous tree coverage, including an update on how citrus greening, a bacterial disease, is impacting orange production in both Florida and California—with new research showing Florida is far worse off. We talk with cider makers and apple growers who are keeping forgotten varieties alive and promoting resilience in a changing environment—not only through the cider and other apple products they make but also by selling and sometimes giving away trees.
 
And we check in with journalist Erik Hoffner to learn more about how climate change is continuing to expand the natural growing range for pawpaws, North America's largest native fruit.
 
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Tim Crowhill Sauder of Fiddle Creek Dairy. (Illustration by Nhatt Nichols)

First Look: Can Farming With Trees Help Save the Food System?
Unprecedented funding is flowing into a broad range of agroforestry practices, which can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and build farm resilience as the climate changes.
BY LISA HELD

Fiddle Creek Dairy sits at the top of one of the endless rolling hills in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. On the first day of spring, farmer Tim Crowhill Sauder looks from his sloped pastures out over the open fields that extend in every direction. A bright red barn interrupts the long horizon. An Amish farmer rides a plow behind a team of horses. It’s a bucolic picture that belies the landscape’s natural state.
 
“This was the great Eastern Woodlands,” says Sauder. “It wants to be a forest here.”
 
Centuries ago, Sauder’s Anabaptist ancestors arrived and, instead of learning from and alongside the Native peoples who had already developed techniques to farm within the forest, took the land and cleared the trees to grow crops and graze livestock. Now, Sauder sees its next chapter as both practical action and penance.
 
“I do it for the sake of my children’s future and for the sins of my ancestors,” he says, of the 3,500 young hybrid willow, honey locust, mulberry, chestnut, and persimmon trees that are now maturing slowly in neat rows across 30 acres of pastures.
 
Sauder’s system—where his cows will soon graze among trees instead of in fully open pastures—is called silvopasture. And it’s one of several practices that fall under a broader agricultural approach called agroforestry, or farming with trees.
 
Farmers can plant trees and bushes in strips to prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for wildlife (windbreaks and hedgerows), along streams to stop nutrient pollution (riparian buffers), or between rows of corn (alley cropping). These practices, long part of Indigenous farming, are taking root all across the country.

Agroforestry includes planting trees and bushes in strips to prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for wildlife, along streams to stop nutrient pollution, or between rows of corn. These practices, long part of Indigenous farming, are taking root all across the country.
In California, Rebekka and Nathanael Siemens graze sheep to their 2,000-tree almond orchard. On 18 acres in Wisconsin, the Midwest’s leading agroforestry nonprofit, the Savanna Institute, is growing chestnut, elderberry, black currant, and black walnut trees between rows of organic soybeans.
 
Whatever the approach, more abundant plant life that stays put year after year—i.e., perennials—lead to healthier ecosystems that support biodiversity and store carbon. Indigenous cultures around the world, including Native American tribes, have long practiced various forms of agroforestry. And, as researchers, policymakers, and governments look for effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience on farms to secure the food supply, agroforestry is approaching a renaissance.

Funding Agroforestry as a Climate Solution
 
Project Drawdown ranks silvopasture and alley cropping among its top 20 climate solutions. In the latest round of reports published by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate experts concluded that practices that store carbon dioxide are now critical to meeting climate goals. They found that scaling up agroforestry could make a meaningful contribution to carbon removal while also helping farms adapt to climate risks.

“Farmers are stewards of photosynthesis, one of our oldest and best technologies for getting carbon out of the atmosphere,” Keefe Keeley told policymakers, government officials, and CEOs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) biggest annual gathering this year. 
 
Keeley, the executive director of the Savanna Institute, was invited to speak to highlight the USDA’s Climate-Smart Commodities program. The agency awarded $3.1 billion in two rounds of grants last fall, including $153 million to projects focused specifically on agroforestry. (Additional broader projects also include elements of agroforestry.)
 
The Savanna Institute is one of many organizations involved in a $60 million effort coordinated by The Nature Conservancy across 29 states. In the Southeast, Tuskegee University is leading two projects intended to help underserved farmers transition to agroforestry practices and to grow markets for their products. The Adirondack North Country Association will help women-owned farms measure the benefits of riparian buffers and cropland reforestation in New York, while Caribbean Regenerative Community Development will work with small coffee farms in Puerto Rico.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
In recent months, the USDA started distributing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act designated for climate-smart agriculture—including agroforestry practices. Then, in late March, Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) reintroduced the Agriculture Resilience Act. If included in the next farm bill, it would direct the USDA to establish three new regional agroforestry centers. As lawmakers prepare to write the 2023 Farm Bill, many are looking to continue to expand funding for climate-smart practices.
 
“When we did a pre-survey of farmers across the region, agroforestry was the No. 1 thing they were interested in doing. And the No. 1 practice they were interested in is silvopasture,” says Hannah Smith-Brubaker, executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, an organization that supports Mid-Atlantic farmers.
 
Pasa received a $50 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant to implement and expand agroforestry and other soil health practices on 2,000 small- and mid-size farms along the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to South Carolina. Through a network of partner organizations, it will subsidize the cost of tree planting and offer technical support. 
 
The Nature Conservancy’s project will tackle the same two challenges in additional regions. And covering the upfront cost is key, said Joe Fargione, the group’s North America science director. Fargione compared getting started in agroforestry to organic transition. Initially, farmers have to invest money and time into going organic, they often see lower yields as they work out the kinks, and it takes three years before they can charge more for their crops. With agroforestry, trees are expensive, other costs often arise in setting up the system, and farmers won’t see benefits to their bottom line until the trees mature, which takes a minimum of three years—and usually more like six to eight. “But one of the things that's exciting about agroforestry is that . . . it's profitable,” Fargione said. 
 
The Need for Local Agroforestry Expertise
 
At Fiddle Creek in Pennsylvania, Sauder is hoping the shade his trees provide will improve grass growth and reduce stress on his cows, which is not only good for their welfare but also for milk production. During the hottest months, when pastures dry up, honey locust trees will drop edible pods; Sauder can also use a technique called pollarding to drop branches from the willows, providing the cows with extra feed at no cost. That will all become even more helpful as temperatures continue to rise.
 
Still, on his own, Sauder didn’t have the cash to plant the trees until Austin Unruch made it possible.

"I would love to see every county have someone that can offer these kinds of technical services and consulting. It's something that needs to be done locally."

~ Austin Unruch
Unruch is the founder of Trees for Graziers, and he and his team have now completed about 20 silvopasture installations in Lancaster County, with more in the works. Key to his success has been access to public and private funds directed at reducing nutrient runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. (Pennsylvania is behind on its goals to reduce Chesapeake Bay pollution and is counting on 90 percent of future reductions to come from farms.) Unruch finds the funding for farms like Fiddle Creek and then brings his deep expertise to help farmers develop their systems.

“There's a lot of experimentation, a lot of farmers comparing notes, but very few agroforestry technical support people out there advising farmers,” said Pasa’s Brubaker-Smith.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
 Unruch is the exception, and his knowledge of the local climate and landscape is crucial. He knows exactly how much shade is good for cool-weather grasses that thrive in the Mid-Atlantic, but that calculation would be very different if he were helping a farmer plant trees between rows of corn in Illinois. “I would love to see every county have someone that can offer these kinds of technical services and consulting,” he said. “It's something that needs to be done locally.”

And while the Climate-Smart Commodities projects will train more experts and get a lot of farms planting trees, Unruch said agroforestry will only reach its potential if support for the approach is sustained over time. In his state, for example, silvopasture isn’t eligible for funding through existing conservation programs. But demonstrating and measuring the impacts over the next five years should help, he said.
 
Brubaker-Smith agrees. “Alley cropping wasn’t approved before, but we were able to do these demonstration sites and then have NRCS [the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service] agents come out, and now NRCS does fund alley cropping. We're hoping the same will happen with silvopasture,” she said.

On its own, the acreage that will be affected by this new funding won’t be enough to make a huge dent in agricultural emissions, but Fargione says it will provide important data and tools that could spur future investment and growth, allowing it to scale up. The Nature Conservancy project, for example, will be measuring carbon stored in trees and soil on the farms while also working to develop an affordable measurement method. He said giving farms the tools to implement agroforestry practices and document the impacts will then allow food companies with net-zero commitments to buy from them.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
Either way, says Unruch, “it's a drop in the bucket compared to how big agroforestry should be and what the opportunities are.” Beyond dairies like Fiddle Creek, there are also pastured poultry and hog farms that Unruch sees as having even more potential. Those have barely been considered.
 
For now, spring is in full effect. Robins are flitting between grasses and still-thin branches speckled with buds. In about three weeks, Sauder says, the pastures will be ready for the cows. For the first time since planting, a canopy will start to provide shade for the animals. While it will be far from a forest, the farm will inch closer to its roots—and toward a resilient future.
Citrus workers in Florida, where citrus greening has ravaged the industry. 
The Follow-Up: Citrus Greening Persists. But Florida's Groves Are in Much Worse Shape Than California's.
By ANNE MARSHALL-CHALMERS

When it comes to oranges, Florida citrus groves once reigned supreme. Recently, though, California has steadily taken the lead. In fact, the USDA forecasted that Florida’s 2022–23 orange production could drop by 60 percent when compared to the previous year.

“It’s a significant turn of events that we have outproduced Florida,” says Victoria Hornbaker, director of the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Division at the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
 
Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida in the fall of 2022, is largely to blame for hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to groves, but the state’s citrus production has been in a downward spiral for more than a decade as a bacterial disease known as citrus greening has gripped the sunshine state. (To add to the post-Ian citrus woes, hurricanes are known to spread canker, another bacterial disease.)

“Every grove in Florida has been affected by [citrus] greening,” says Peter Spyke, a third-generation Florida grower who also has a grove management business. As the name implies, the disease turns fruit green, bitter, and misshapen, and the trees can eventually die.
 
A speck of an insect known as the Asian citrus psyllid is the vector for citrus greening, which originated in China more than a century ago and is also known as Huanglongbing (HLB.) If the psyllid carries the bacterium which leads to HLB, there’s a chance it will pass the pathogen from its gut to the tree while eating.

Spyke says that when Florida first discovered HLB in its groves, the state lagged in its response. Left unmanaged, psyllid populations explode. In Florida’s case, HLB quickly swept through the state. And so, when the first Asian citrus psyllid was discovered in California in August 2008, Spyke and other citrus leaders advised their counterparts in the state not to follow their lead, and instead to monitor where psyllids pop up and to quickly destroy infected trees. “We’re telling the Californians, ‘Spend your money on surveys and tree removal,’” Spyke recalls.

In 2021, Civil Eats covered California’s intense efforts to protect the state’s multi-billion dollar citrus industry from greening, and the heavy reliance on neonicotinoids, also called “neonics,” to do so. The application of these pesticides is harming beneficial insects, like honeybees, which are often inadvertently exposed through pollen and nectar. Research shows the systemic insecticides lower the pollinators’ immune systems, dim their navigational skills, and weaken their ability to reproduce.

 “It was a timely wake-up call to the industry. People had become somewhat complacent about the risk, because nothing was happening.”

~ Neil Roberts 
California’s use of pesticides and vigilant monitoring has kept commercial orchards free of HLB. The disease, however, has hit residential trees, especially in Southern California. Hornbaker says the state’s residential tree owners are critical to limiting the spread of HLB from their yards to commercial groves by permitting psyllid detection traps in their trees, greenlighting pesticide sprays on their properties, and allowing for the removal of roughly 4,000 infected trees over the last decade. “It’s all those pieces coming together,” she says.
 
That’s not to say California is in the clear, though. An ongoing study in the commercial groves of coastal Southern California has discovered psyllids carrying the bacterium that can lead to citrus greening. According to researchers from the U.C. Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, U.C. Davis, U.C. Riverside, and the University of Arizona, about 3.5 percent of 3,000 collected psyllids from 15 different commercial citrus sites had some level of detectable bacteria.
 
“It was a timely wake-up call to the industry. People had become somewhat complacent about the risk, because nothing was happening,” says Neil McRoberts, a professor of plant pathology at U.C. Davis, adding that these findings heighten the probability that citrus greening will eventually strike commercial groves. “It tips it towards when, not if,” he says.
 
Researchers in both California and Florida are seeking remedies to HLB. Last fall, Florida regulators allowed for trunk injections of antibiotics to boost resistance to the disease. And Hornbaker of CDFA says there’s “a lot of breeding going on” in a race to find tree varieties that are fully resistant to citrus greening, allowing the trees to stay healthy even when the wrong psyllid comes along.

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Apples harvested from Century Farm Orchards in Reidsville, North Carolina.
The Follow-Up: The Cider Makers Preserving Varieties by Helping Others Grow Them
By BRIDGET SHIRVELL

After spending years reintroducing Harrison cider apples in New Jersey, Charles Rosen knew he had more work to do.
 
“Bringing back the Harrison apple and disseminating it throughout the community to ensure its resurrection and environmental diversity while creating a viable revenue stream was critical to my main goal of building resilience and almost an alternative food system,” said Rosen, who is the owner and founder of Ironbound farm, a 108-acre regenerative farm and a cidery.
 
Cider makers and apple growers like Rosen, John Reynolds of Blackduck Cidery in New York’s Finger Lakes, and David Vernon of Century Farm Orchards in Reidsville, North Carolina, are keeping forgotten varieties alive and promoting resilience in a changing environment—not only through the cider and other apple products they make but also by selling and sometimes giving away trees.

“It helps ensure diversity of fruit, which can be a great advantage to counteract diseases that can target specific varieties at times,” said Vernon, who started Century Farm Orchards after moving back to his family farm and discovering apple trees that his grandfather planted in the 1800s.
 
While Century Farm Orchards ships apple trees all over the country, they also invite people to the orchards during Open House Days in the fall, where people can taste apples, cider, and baked goods, something Vernon’s friend Lee Calhoun, a history buff that tracked and saved rare Southern apple varieties, encouraged.
 
“Lee not only requested that we [sell] these rare varieties to folks all across N.C. and the nation [to grow], but that we also actually produce apples so that people can taste their history as well, in case they cannot plant their own,” said Vernon.
 
Beginning in the early 20th century, many traditional apple varieties disappeared when growers started planting varieties that were better suited to industrial production. As a result, most people have never tasted the Harrison apple—nor varieties such as the Newtown Pippin, Roxbury Russet, or Northern Spy, all of which Reynolds uses to create his line of ciders.

“We still propagate some of our favorite named varieties, but exploring for new varieties is our family’s fall pastime.”

~ John Reynolds
Reynolds started his orchard more than 20 years ago with the intention of making apple-based ciders, perry (a fermented alcoholic beverage made from pears), and other fermented fruit concoctions. He first focused on grafting and selling varieties that he found in the wild, which had good cider qualities and some disease resistance. When he launched Blackduck Cidery nine years ago, he continued to focus on wild varieties.
 
“In a future that seems to have more climate extremes in store, we want to try and hedge our bets in the orchards,” said Reynolds. “We still propagate some of our favorite named varieties, but exploring for new varieties is our family’s fall pastime.”
 
While the nursery makes up a small part of their business, Reynolds said it does provide some income during the later winter and early spring when, like most farms, they tend to have lower revenue streams.
 
“We also find grafting one of the most amazing parts of fruit growing,” Reynolds said. “Our two daughters, now 15 and 9, have grafted a lot of trees themselves and both think of that as the best task in the orchard.”
 
Back in New Jersey, Rosen has given away thousands of heirloom Harrison cider apple trees to small and medium-sized commercial apple growers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, and he has also sold apple trees to people who visit the farm.
 
“When we’re selling trees to the local community, it has no real revenue, but we’re using these trees as a calling card to learn about the history of New Jersey cider making, regenerative agriculture, and food systems,” Rosen said. “And I hope they’re significant when someone looks out their window and sees them growing.”
Erik Hoffner planted his pawpaw trees, shown here, in western Massachusetts in 2009. (Photo credit: Erik Hoffner)
The Check-In: Pawpaws Continue to Show Promise for Northeast Farmers 
By TILDE HERRERA

In 2020, journalist Erik Hoffner brought us a story about how climate change is expanding the natural growing range for pawpaws, North America's largest native fruit revered for its unique flavor.
 
Historically grown from the Gulf Coast Plain up to the Lower Midwest and east to the Mid-Atlantic, pawpaws are making inroads in the Northeast, where they may become a viable local crop for farmers in the coming years.
 
They are easy to grow and attract very few pests. And since they have a late growing season, they have the potential to become a bonus crop harvested after apples in the fall, according to Hoffner, who first planted his own pawpaws in western Massachusetts in 2009.
 
We checked in with Hoffner about his experience growing this unusual fruit, what he's learned so far, and how pawpaws are slowly making their way to more consumers in the region.

You planted pawpaws because you wanted to taste one but couldn’t find any to buy. What was the appeal?
 
An apprentice on an organic farm I co-managed in Colorado went to the University in Bloomington [in Indiana, where they are grown]. He went on and on about their complex flavor, interesting horticulture, their red flowers, and how they used to be eaten by mastodons. I wanted to try one. We settled in the Northeast, and they were nonexistent out here, so I had to put my own trees in.

“[Pawpaws taste] like banana, mango, pear; other people taste hints of other things. The varieties all taste different."
What did the first one taste like?
 
It was such a novel experience. It's all these sensations at once in your mouth that don't belong together, but all the flavors are delicious. It's like banana, mango, pear; other people taste hints of other things. The varieties all taste different. It was really exciting.
 
What did you learn in those 10 years of waiting for fruit?
 
Patience, but also spacing. They like to have something like 30 feet between them, but I planted them more like 15 or 12 [feet apart], so they're a little crowded. They make a pretty little grove in a shady spot in the corner of our land.
 
What do pawpaws need to thrive?
 
They're known to grow wild in the South and in the Midwest along rivers. They get overgrown by large trees; it's an understory tree. Those are wet soils, but they actually love sun and well-drained rich soils, so it's not a requirement to grow them like that. In fact, they grow better if you give them more sun. Mine have grown more slowly, and it probably took 10 years to get fruit because they get pretty shaded from other trees that are towering around them.
 
What is their growing cycle?
 
They flower super late, which is nice because it usually means the flowers can't get zapped by frost. Around here, we lose peaches, apples, and other kinds of stone fruits every other year from a late frost, but pawpaws are so casual about flowering that they almost never lose their flowers. They have red flowers that smell sort of like rotten meat because they're pollinated by flies. Flies come looking for some kind of roadkill, but they find a flower.
 
They grow, swell, ripen, and get luxurious all summer, and they don't ripen to any kind of harvestable state until almost Halloween. It's a long wait. But you're getting a new crop of fresh fruit after apples are done. The trees still keep their leaves until they drop their fruit, so it's usually one of the last trees with leaves in my yard. They're a semi-tropical tree with these long teardrop-shaped leaves, but they can survive these temperatures—down to negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit in winter. They are adaptable.

“They have red flowers that smell sort of like rotten meat because they're pollinated by flies. Flies come looking for some kind of roadkill, but they find a flower."
Where can people find pawpaws?
 
We're seeing the fruit pop up in western Massachusetts food co-ops now in October. It was pretty neat last year to see big bins of them for sale. That supply, I've been told, is coming from home growers, not farms or orchards. If farms here have been planting pawpaws, they're probably not old enough to set fruit yet.
 
A couple of farm stands and the Brattleboro Food Co-op in southern Vermont stocks them in the fall as well. Their October supply comes from a farm nearby with a grove of 30-year-old pawpaw trees. The farm owner told me he gets about 200 pounds of fruit each October that he sells to the co-op. I've also discovered this venerable orchard near Brattleboro—Scott Farm Orchard—grows them and sells them in its farm store.
 
In terms of big stores like Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, not yet.
 
What advice would you offer people who want to grow them?
 
I always mention Kentucky State University's pawpaw-planting guide, which is indispensable. It lists every variety, all the parameters, and links to studies. It's a great clearinghouse of information. For anyone who's curious about them and wants to learn a little bit about how they grow, Andrew Moore's 2015 book, Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit is really fantastic. That’s all the inspiration you might need to get interested in them. There are also several pawpaw groups on Facebook that are pretty active. People will answer your very bizarre or basic questions.
 
You’ll want to research what varieties you're interested in growing. There are different tastes, sizes, and hardiness.
 
How do you see pawpaw awareness and production evolving?
 
I think orchards and farms are going to catch up pretty fast when people learn how easy they are to grow—and without chemicals. Allegedly, goats won't even eat their leaves. The only thing that likes to grow on them is the caterpillar of the zebra swallowtail butterfly, which are just beautiful, and we want those anyway.
 
Pawpaws seem like a really handy additional crop that chefs, foodies, and people like me really want. They have a short shelf life, but that's really no problem. You can pulp and freeze them, and you have them forever. You can add a lot of value to the pulp. You can make smoothies and baked goods, ice cream. People even make crazier things like beer.
 
Folks are starting to ask about them in stores and farmers markets—that'll spur it along, too. But until then, it's going to be backyard growers like me that are mostly sharing this novel, native fruit with their friends—that's going to be the main driver for a while.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In Case You Missed It
Some of our latest tree-related reporting.

How Perennial Crops Boost Biodiversity Both On and Off Farms
By CHRISTINA COOKE
Above and belowground, perennial crops including wheat, grasses, trees, and more provide habitat and nutrition to creatures that help make ecosystems whole.
 
As Coffee Rust Reaches Hawaii, Farmers Prepare for a Devastating Blow
By TWILIGHT GREENAWAY
A climate-fueled fungus that has decimated coffee regions around the world has reached Kona; what’s on the line is more than a really good cup of coffee.
 
Civil Eats TV: Liquid Gold on Tribal Land
By THE CIVIL EATS EDITORS
With its Séka Hills olive oil, the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation is reclaiming its ancestral land with a crop for the future.

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What We're Reading

Historic Investment in Urban Trees Underway Across the U.S.
By SUSAN HAIGH, Associated Press
The Inflation Reduction Act has earmarked $1.5 billion for the federal Forest Service Urban and Community Forestry Program to fund tree-planting projects over the next decade, with a focus on underserved communities.
 
The Giving Forest
By CARA BUCKLEY, The New York Times
The Menominee tribe has sustainably logged its forest in Wisconsin for 160 years. But that careful balance faces a crisis: too many trees and too few loggers.
 
The U.S. Has Cataloged Its Forests. Now Comes the Hard Part: Protecting Them
By JUSTIN CATANOSO, Mongabay
A new inventory by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management has identified 112.8 million acres of old-growth and mature forest on their lands—bigger than the size of California—but it’s unclear how much of that federal land will be fully protected.

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