Is Silvohorticulture the Next Big Thing in Ag? + The Art of Making Farm Decisions

Hey nerds, Farmer Jesse here. Welcome to Growers Daily, your daily dose of ecological farming insight. It is Monday, October 21st, 2024, and on the show today, we are going to talk about silvohorticulture, about making decisions on your farm, and it's Messy Monday, so let's do it. I hope everyone had a great weekend. Mine was busy but fun because it was almost exclusively soccer. Lots of soccer coaching and a lot of soccer watching. On Saturday, I coached or watched soccer from 8 a.m. until I went to bed around nine, and that's p.m. Racing Louisville, the official professional women's soccer team of No-Till Market Gardeners won, which keeps them in the playoff race, but they have to win this upcoming weekend and hope for a loss from the AFC and or Portland Thorns for any chance to go to the playoff, so get ready to cheer your faces off. Unrelated to soccer, I think, we posted a video yesterday about fortifying our farms against fluctuating markets and weather. Huge thank you to Patagonia Workwear for their sponsorship of that one. If you are a podcast-only person, you can check that out at our YouTube channel, No-Till Growers, which I will link in the show notes. Apologies for not having a show on Friday. Hopefully, that video made up for it, but big shout-outs to Thomas and Keith and everyone who helped put together the Kentucky Composting Conference that I attended on Friday. I took a video of my talk on the four types of compost and how market gardeners think about compost that I think I will share at some point. I don't think the audio is engaging enough on its own for it to be a podcast, so probably just a YouTube thing, but I look forward to the future of that conference and that group and, well, composting in Kentucky. It's an important thing for me, specifically. So I have also been reading a forthcoming book about silvohorticulture this weekend that I wanna talk about a bit. Now, I just wanna make sure it's clear that this book is not out yet, but it is on pre-order through Amazon and potentially other places, and I wanted to put it on your collective radars, and I will link it in the show notes. The reason I have it early, that I personally have it early, is that the publisher asked me if I would offer some praise, which I try to do as much as I can. So those quotes you see on the back of books, this is how they work. The author and or the publisher reaches out to other authors or other known people in the industry and asks them to read an early copy, and if that person likes what they read, maybe they could offer some praise. And if this seems like a cool perk of being Farmer Jesse, perhaps it is, except that sometimes you have like two or three weeks to read it. So yeah, not always physically possible. I get more requests for praise in a year than I can get to, even for books that I really like, and that's unfortunate, but I did find some time for this particular book over the weekend and this last week, and I thought I would talk about it here because planting trees in the garden is something that Hannah and I are working on for our farm, and so the timing couldn't be better for this particular book. Silvohorticulture, if it's not clear, is about integrating trees into crop production areas, and that may be fruit or nut trees, but it could also be like trees for nitrogen fixation or native trees or trees for habitat or trees for windbreak and so on. Actually, let's not do the and so on thing. Trees are awesome, and I think it would do a massive disservice to this idea to just et cetera them. So I'm going to go through a few of the reasons why someone would potentially do this in their gardens and then a few reasons why someone may not. First, the would, which is a convenient homonym. Obviously, more food on the same land is a big benefit, no matter what. I always look at how much potential a single plot of land has for food production anyway. For instance, the sunny areas can have gardens. The shadier areas can have mushroom logs or chickens or whatever. The spaces unsuitable for growing in the ground can have greenhouses where you can grow microgreens or plant starts. You can really pack it in with the right design, but adding trees adds a whole other layer or a whole other dimension to this idea because you could have all of that, and at least in theory, be also harvesting from the sky in the same day from the same space, which my more idealistic farmer side loves. Next, wind reduction. Having a windbreak has become more and more important for us for both the typical spring winds we have, which wreak havoc on, well, everything on our farm, our bends, our tarps, our greenhouses, but also on plants and soil. Wind will heavily disrupt and dehydrate young and mature plants, as well as cause erosion. Trees, when they're planned out well, can help break the wind up and reduce the effects. Another advantage of silvohorticulture, and the book describes all of these well, is water management, both in terms of protecting the soil from heavy rain events, as well as preserving the moisture in droughts and utilizing the moisture that moves through the soil past the initial topsoil. Annual vegetables, just so that makes sense, annual vegetable root systems only go so deep. Having the trees there to utilize the water and nutrients below ground means that you are maximizing that space, not just above ground with the fruit and stuff, but below ground as well. Nutrient cycling and biodiversity within the soil are also high up on the list of potential benefits of incorporating trees. Trees are going to house and propagate a different flush of microbes than annuals. They are going to create long-lasting, stable source of food and housing for those microbes as well. The last positive thing I wanna point out is the importance of shade in hotter environments and diffuse light in basically any environment. One of the incentives for Hannah and I to include more trees in our gardens is that shade cloth is a pain. I'm over all crop coverings in general, but the plastic, shade cloth, sort of poly whatever, and the work involved with shade cloth and all the coverings, I'm just, no thanks. So I wanna work towards more natural shade options. Like trees in the spring are not yet flush with leaves when we need the sunlight, but are lush and green in the summer when we could use the shade, so that's nice. And in terms of diffuse light, I always say that pretty much any green part of the plant is capable of photosynthesizing, but that doesn't mean light always gets down there. So having the trees and their leaves around to sort of deflect that light down onto the lower leaves of plants will help maximize your photosynthetic rate. More on photosynthesis another time though. Now, the downsides as I see them to this idea is that if you get the planning wrong in an annual garden, it can be corrected pretty fast. You get the planning wrong in a perennial plot or with perennial plants, well, that's not ideal. Mistakes with perennial plants can take many years to even see the issue, let alone correct it. Next, planting trees in the garden means you will have trees in the way. Though I will say that perhaps all the advances in no and low-till systems has enabled us more opportunity to utilize this tree intercropping idea because we no longer necessarily need a giant empty field to plant into. We can use smaller equipment and work around trees much more easily. I think without question, planning will come into play quite a bit here, so don't skip that chapter of this new book. Also, having fruit dangling above your garden sounds nice, but also could create a mess if left unharvested. Having branches above your gardens, as anyone who has ever parked a car under a tree in the spring can attest, could create some food safety issues in terms of bird poop. Leaves falling into your salad mix can be frustrating as well, though of course the leaves will provide nutrients back to the soil, so maybe that one is a bit of a wash. The last thing I'll say on the negative side is the word silvohorticulture. Stop what you're doing right now and try and say that word out loud. Silvohorticulture, silvohorticulture. Compare it to silvopasture, which rolls off the tongue pretty nicely. For silvohorticulture, if you don't pronounce the H, it gets a little easier, so like silvohorticulture, or you just pause between silvoh and horticulture, as I've been doing, honestly, throughout this video. But that word is an absolute phonetic tripwire. Is there also a little redundancy in the term with agroforestry? Like, aren't they basically the same thing? Maybe, and honestly, the authors don't really try to separate the two. Instead, they offer agroforestry as the umbrella term with three types of agroforestry underneath. So like silvopasture, which is like grazing, silvoarable, so think large-scale crops like corn under trees, and then silvohorticulture. If somebody wanted to just call it agroforestry to avoid having to say silvohorticulture, I think that is fair game. And of course, mixing trees and annual plants, as the authors point out, is the way in which people have grown food all over the planet for millennia. But it is really nice to have this guide to help us learn and relearn how these systems work. Doesn't really matter what you call it. Leave the semantics to the academics, and just grow food however it makes the most sense for you and your land and your life. Anyway, let me know what you think, and I could and will go on about incorporating trees into the garden over time. So make sure you are following this channel or podcast and check that book out. Link in the show notes for the pre-order. Next, we're gonna take a quick break and then get to a question from one of our Patreon members. BRB. Today's episode is brought to you by Rimmel Greenhouses. Whether it's tomatoes to market, flowers in the spring, or your family's harvest, growing in a greenhouse protected from the weather provides the right environment that you need for a harvest that you can count on. Rimmel Greenhouses are designed for durability and offer the quality that you need to grow productively year round. Visit rimmelgreenhouses.com to get a quote today. If I may editorialize for a second, I own a Rimmel tunnel. I love it, we built it ourselves, and I really appreciated the quality of the tunnel as well as the customer service we received in the process. So make sure to check them out. If you, the listener, want to support our work, you can do so at patreon.com slash no-till growers. I will try to get to questions from every single where questions are able to be gotten. Sounds right. But I will always get to those Patreon questions. Hopefully this show saves you two or five dollars a month through farming advice or provides a relative amount of entertainment. How many other shows make you say the word silvohorticulture in public? Gotta be worth something. Anyway, today's question comes from Patreon member and a dear friend of mine, Aaron Worrell of Cedar Chest Farm in Virginia, who writes, loving the show, Jesse. Thanks, Aaron. Here's a question I'd love to hear addressed at this time of year. How do you evaluate the end of your season? What sorts of records, reflections, or notes do you prioritize keeping for the future growth of your farm? And how do you use those records to consider changes that should be made? Okay, thanks Aaron, I love these questions and I think there are a million and one ways to answer them. So I hope others will chime in. But for me, this is where a decision making framework comes in because the questions are not just about data but are about decisions at their core. In other words, the core of these questions is how on a farm should we make decisions about the direction of our farm? Put another way, if you know where you want your farm to go, that will help answer what information would be the most helpful at the end of the season. This is a subject I intend to spend more time on at some point because I think it's really dynamic and interesting and honestly would be something I would love to explore more, not just for business owners but for literally anyone in all aspects of life. There are several examples of decision making frameworks online for businesses if you want a purely technical approach to these questions and to understand how big businesses make these decisions. For farmers though, because this particular business is often so personal to us, so physically and mentally demanding, so difficult to escape, it's literally right outside of our doors a lot of times, it is hard to just make these decisions based solely on numbers. Quality of life must be factored into any decision making framework in farming or frankly in any business. So I'm going to give you a couple ideas and approaches and maybe you can glean something for yourself to use. First, I would go through each market or sales outlet and go through it asking yourself, what do I enjoy about this and what do I not enjoy? Can I do more of what I enjoy about this, say farmer's market or whatever, and do less of what I do not enjoy? Can I fix the elements I do not enjoy? Shrink them? What would that cost and is it worth it? Hannah's always asking me, what do you like and what do you not like about whatever it is that we're doing? I think that is a really important question and that's helped us to answer big things like should we move farms like we just recently did and should we drop a farmer's market and what we're gonna do next year. We're going through that process right now. Obviously, you will have to do some things you don't enjoy sometimes in farming. So crunching those negative elements out and down as much as possible has been important for us so long as it makes financial sense, but you have to identify what those negative elements are. Also, this is a yearly thing farmers go through even if they don't realize it because factors change. Our kids, for instance, once they started school and I started coaching their soccer teams, I realized I no longer wanted to spend my weekends at the farmer's market. I love the farmer's market, but it was taking away from my time with my kids. So we ultimately dropped farmer's markets from our business. But as the kids get older and are able to help more on a farm or at the farmer's market, perhaps we will one day go back to doing the farmer's market because they'll be able to help for longer periods of time and we won't have to choose between spending time with them and doing a market. You should also ask these same questions of crops, not just looking at the profitability of each one, including your own labor, but do you enjoy growing it? Again, can you fix the elements you do not enjoy? Can you shrink them? What would that cost and is it worth it? Sometimes you may realize that, wait a second, I hate growing tunnel tomatoes. Maybe I could use that space for flowers or baby greens instead and make up that income elsewhere or with different crops. Now, I don't wanna pretend we are always the best at this on our farm, but when I look back at the big decisions we've had to make, that framework is almost always how it gets done, even if we don't realize it. Part of this stems from many years ago when Hannah and I did a holistic goals worksheet that the late, great Chris Blanchard, host of the Farmer to Farmer podcast put together, and I actually will link that in the show notes. Thinking about your long-term goals is something every farmer needs to do. You can't hit what you don't aim at, right? And for me, having some sort of long-term holistic goal in standard is essential to making farm decisions both big and small. I will link this worksheet in the show notes, but it helped us to reframe what we're doing and get on the same page about where we were going. Before that, I don't think that we ever really thought about ourselves in the business and what we wanted out of it. We just kind of were trying to satisfy the market. Holistic management is arguably the most popular decision-making framework among farmers, and there are courses and books, et cetera, out there to follow, but this, albeit somewhat cheesy, worksheet is a good place to start. Everyone should know what they want out of this farm life thing. Laying out your personal and business goal or goals is an important step, and again, will help you dictate the data that you keep. I should note that it is hard to find versions of holistic management that are not tied to Alan Savory, who, as far as I can tell, has not offered any sort of apologies for his military or political involvement in, nor his statements promotional of apartheid in South Africa, so maybe not the best person to support. So take what you can from the free worksheet and piece together a framework for yourself. It does not have to be completely or particularly eloquent. Just what are you working towards right now and how does that jive with the other people involved in your life or involved in the business? To your question about what sort of records to prioritize, I think it is important always to know what is profitable and where your time is going, so you have data to look at when you're trying to make these decisions. On the technical side, we are certified organics, so we have all of our production notes that we can refer to in whatever way we need to, like when we planted, how much we harvested, how much came back from market or didn't sell, et cetera. I'm also a big fan of keeping a family budget and farm budget that is updated every day or regularly so that we can look back at that, where we were earning what and from what source, like was it from the market, was it from our retail outlets, was it from restaurants, and how that changes over year over year. I know I have already mentioned this book from Richard Wiswall, the Organic Farmers Business Handbook, this one, but on the financial side of things, that is the most rational and easy to digest breakdown I have read. So definitely pick that up if you have not already. Also, I would love to hear what decision-making frameworks you all use or have found helpful. Let us know in the comments and wherever else you let me know things. Anyway, great questions, Aaron, and I think they are questions we will continue to explore in many different ways throughout the life of this show. In the next segment, let's lighten it up a bit and talk about DVDs. Yeah, be right back. Hey, you all, Farmer Jesse here. I just wanted to let you know that we have posted a bunch of discount codes over at our Patreon page at patreon.com slash no-till growers for our patrons over there. So if you love and appreciate our work and you could use a little break on the cost of seeds this year or on your irrigation supplies or boots or whatever, we have several discount codes available over at our Patreon page. Like I said, patreon.com slash no-till growers. So just to be clear, that means for as little as $2 a month, you can save hundreds of dollars on your farming stuff this year. That's real. That page is so valuable to our work, and at a certain level, we'll even shout you out at the end of this show because you rock. That's it. Thanks, you all. Enjoy the show. All right, so it is Messy Monday, and today I wanna talk about a weedy disaster. Not gonna lie. Messy Monday is probably well-suited for weedy disasters, so it will likely be the first of many weedy disaster episodes. Anyway, this was probably 14 years ago or so. It was the fall, and we had some really nice strawberry plants that we had taken all summer to take care of. These were early glow, and if you've ever grown them, you know that they are not the most productive strawberry plants, perhaps, but they are absolutely one of the best tasting. The thing is, though, in our climate, it's recommended you plant these in the spring, which means you are supposed to pull the flowers that first year, which is frankly cruel, but then the second year, you get a really amazing flush of strawberries, and I assume we just didn't have the mulch in the spring. Otherwise, we would have done it then, so we had to cultivate them until the fall when we finally got some local straw. Now, I was still pretty new to farming at that time, and I had spread untold amounts of hay, but never straw. The farmer we were working for asked us to spread the straw one day, and so we carefully spread the straw around each of the plants as thick as we could without burying them. I was loving it for how soft and fluffy the straw was, honestly, compared to the hay, which often tied itself together and was littered with blackberry briars. Not super fun to spread, and as we did it, I noticed the wheat seed falling from the straw, but I assumed it must not be viable or it probably won't be a problem because, well, mulch keeps weeds down, right? There are weed seeds in the countless bales of hay we'd been spreading, and we rarely had a weed problem there, so it didn't immediately alarm me. Later, of course, the farmer would tell me that if he'd known about the wheat seed in the mulch, he probably would have not mulched them with it because a couple weeks later, we had a really nice cover crop of wheat surrounding those strawberries. So over that winter and in the spring, we spent untold hours pulling wheat weeds. Without question, it was the most delicious and likely least profitable crop of strawberries ever, but I learned a thing or two about straw, so that's good. If you have any good straw or wheat weed stories or any good straw stories, and by good, I guess I'm suggesting bad stories, let us know. I'd love to hear them. Otherwise, I think I'm gonna wrap it up there. If you are watching on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe. If you are listening to us on podcast form somewhere, please make sure to give us a follow. Also leave us a review specific to Growers Daily so I can know how you're enjoying it or if you're enjoying it. You've made it this far. Hopefully you're enjoying it or you're just like, what in the world is this? Either of those things I think is fine. Support us by joining us at patreon.com slash no till growers, where at a certain level or if you just bump up from one level to another, you get a shout out on the show. So big shout outs today to Tim Olson, Lynn Tompkins, Slut of the Cloth, that's what it says, Bottom Land Farm, Bill King, Feed Me Tomatoes Farm, Casey James, Chris Pace, Christian Ham, Paul Sinicle, Honey Works, Janet Lasher, and Susan Campbell. Thank you all so much. Also, if for any reason you signed up and you didn't hear your name that week, let me know. Also, also, I go by your Patreon name. So if your Patreon name is just your first name or your last name or some random name, that's the one that you sign in with, that is the one I'm gonna read because that's the only one I know. If you want that changed, you have to change it in Patreon because I won't see it. Otherwise, you all are amazing. Thank you to everyone who supports us in whatever way that you can. I think tomorrow we may have a special guest host, which should be fun. So be on the lookout for that. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.