So we're here at the Arnot Forest in central New York, not far from Ithaca
and we're in the midst of a two day working retreat
titled Forest Farming to the Forefront focusing on
developing roadmaps for the northeastern US
This is about the future. There are a lot of issues at
play and this is about coming together to talk
about what we might do
down the road to address some of those
challenges but then also capitalize on the opportunities.
The objective of the meeting really is to gather and celebrate forest farming
but also work, you know, put some pen to paper in terms of addressing the issues
and have that critical dialogue so that we have some sense or idea about how to
move forward and continue to advance
forest farming as an agroforestry practice
in the temperate forests of the Northeast.
All these products are extremely important
to ecology of the forests in the Northeast and some examples
we're considering are fiddlehead ferns
and medicinal herbs such as ginseng, goldenseal
but also mushroom products that be cultivated
on logs underneath the forest canopy along with ramps
another important product culturally speaking
but also ecologically speaking and thats really part of the focus is
the importance of these plant populations.
This has got to be one
the coolest groups of people that I have worked with because everybody
has an expertise and experiences
with these products and these plants and they're all looking at it from
different perspectives right, so there's some people are looking at
from a social side and some people are looking at it from a
commercial side but we all love these plants
and these products and we want to really figure out how to
sustain them into the future from
different experiences and different perspectives. We have a collection of people
who have a vast amount of experience
in forest farming.
Everyone here is an expert in one way or another and it's just a
wonderful opportunity
for me to get together with these people that I don't see very often.
This is a our main laying yard and I really like it
because it has several characteristics that make for a good laying yard, one of
which is year-round shade. So
the mushroom research is really exciting.
We're growing shiitake mushrooms and comparing different tree species for the
log substrate things like that. We're growing a relatively
new species that hasn't been marketed very much called
lion's mane. It's a beautiful mushroom that we've been very successful with. We're looking at developing
more branding around sustainably grown
forest farmed ginseng that can be sold
here domestically to
processors and herb companies and always you know just trying to
find ways for the whole suite of
non-timber forest products that you can produce that really make it profitable for the grower.
There's so many opportunities for us right now
because many of the herbs that grow in our forests
many are imported from other countries and
they're wild harvested right now and they're
not considered of much value. If we forest
farm them and we show that we can produce a consistent product,
that we can help conserve our native plants
by cultivating these same plants in a forest farming
system, I think that we can help improve the quality of product that is
fed into the system while at the same time supporting forest farmers.
We're exchanging some ideas and learning some new things
and it's really helping to put a focus on
forest farming and see where - where can we go with this? Is it economically viable?
Do we have the
resources to to go forward and do research if we need to do research? So we're
exploring some of those really kinda hard questions. I'd like to see more people
doing
multiple things. I know it gets a little
difficult at times
to be very diverse, but I
think that's what our forest have to offer
is diversity
and we should embrace that and
immerse ourselves in it. I hope what comes out of this more than anything is
that we really get government support
you now, you know, I mean forest farming is kind of a .001
on the scale of all the funding that goes into the agricultural industry
even if we can get 10 percent 15 percent
of that pie, it could have tremendous effect
on
global food security, I mean
climate change. These plants have more of a capacity to
supply food and adapt and
so I feel like, I really hope
that with the momentum of this meeting
that some of the clear ideas and obstacles and
opportunities are gonna
come to fruition
for more government support. For the future of forest farming I would hope that knowledge continues
to increase in order to do it in a sustainable
manner
but also in a manner that promotes safety of the product,
quality of the product - some people are getting interested in forest farming
before they're getting all the knowledge that's necessary to collect the proper
plants in their prime condition from the forest
as well as how to properly plant them to be successful
before they lose interest in producing.
So I would hope for forest farming for people to continue to collaborate
to make that information more available to larger populations.
What I'm finding out is that there's a lot of experts
in the fields of forest farming and
that it's you know there's a lot of opportunity for environmental
stewardship
to happen with the production of food within those forests and that's a
better
way for a lot of us to probably think about how we want
to manage our forests for the future not just for timber and
for wood products for non-timber forest products as well.
We get a ton of landowners who have woods and want to know what they can do
other than just harvest timber, so I think there's just lots of people interested
in the possibilities and
we have to do our job to
kind of tell those stories and paint a realistic picture of what people should expect as they think about these things.
I think coming out of this meeting it's exciting to think about having both
concrete next steps for outreach and education and also for longer-term
research goals and really finding ways to
share information about forest farming with landowners
all over across the eastern US and see what kind of an opportunity can be both for
conservation and for economic development.