Forest Farming

This is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

There's just an incredible diversity in these Appalachian hardwood forests, and that's what all of this wants to be.

When we till the soil, we're we're setting them back to zero so that we can put in this tender annual seed and it can have a chance to survive.

But in the grand scheme of things, as soon as we quit cultivating the ground is trying to reforest here and what was a pasture field will turn into a woodlot in the matter of a decade.

There'll be trees that are five or six inches around just from what's in the soil bank, what's coming in from the wildlife and a disturbance.

And you have bushes growing in the pasture, the bird lands in the bushes, then you got tree seeds growing around the bushes, and then it turns into a big, mature forest that's a healthier, more stable system than this open, cultivated, disturbed landscape that we do with agriculture so much.

I try to tune in to what nature's done and the different flows that are happening in nature on the farm outside of my farm, work and pay attention to where does that water go and where does that sunshine hit and where does the wildlife favor and take those kinds of things into consideration with what we're managing out here?

And then think, how do we encourage that?

The farm was just always.

Part of.

My soul, you know, I love it here.

And then farming became my calling.

This used to be a cow field.

Now it's a new garden.

Pigs can get a garden patch ready for me just by letting them be on there, feeding them.

They're putting that heavy pressure on a site.

The cows are great for making inroads into thick brush.

And then the goats, they clean up the woody vegetation they get, they prune everything back, they'll take out saplings if you let them, you know.

And it's really efficient to use the animals to do that kind of work, because then I'm not doing that work with a chainsaw or a tractor.

I'm not out there mechanically doing it myself and I'm not paying another human to do it right, and the pigs are doing it.

And then they turn into bacon.

There's all kinds of side benefits to these natural areas on the farm from medicinal plants and edible wild mushrooms to, you know, a tree falls in the windstorm.

And now that's a resource for the farm that can be built into boards and put back into the farm.

There's so many valuable species that exist in the natural ecology here and very few farms are working with them on any scale.

But there's tree crops, there's nuts, there's fruits, there's herbs, there's so many botanicals, there's just on our property there's several hundred, if not over a thousand species of plants and trees.

I've sold some burdock.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I dig the little nice new plants and roots and bundle them and sell them fresh, you know, just as a tea plant or an edible, in my opinion, this could be put into commercial cultivation here and become a source of botanical inputs for medicine makers that can be grown and produce on the farm and becomes a lot more efficient to do it then.

Right.

And here I just dig some roots here and there, go out and select them by hand.

But if you put them in a 500 foot long bed out in the garden, you can plow it up with a tractor and then you can sell pounds and pounds of dried burdock root or fresh burdock root.

And they're resilient.

The natural plants are resilient.

You know, the cultivated stuff it once some irrigation it once and weeding it.

It wants a little extra love.

But these plants are really adapted to the highs and lows of our particular weather in our ecosystem.

A lot of the botanical knowledge of working with these plants, as soon as somebody quits teaching it, it's it gets lost.

And who knows when somebody will figure it out again, you know, like cherry trees, you know, they've got a medicinal inner bark.

It's used in cough sirups.

You know, it's been used to treat coughs here since there's been people here.

Now you can find it in products at the CVS or the Rite Aid or whatever, but like that actual hands on knowledge of like this is here and it can treat that human illness.

It's huge.

You know, it gives you a sense of it gives you a real sense of belonging.

You're at a very secretive spot.

And I can't tell you how you got here.

This is an area that we chose to build some raised beds.

We have some perennial plants that will produce large berry pods that will be popped and put into what we call our nursery.

And that's where we're growing these juvenile ginseng plants from our wild seed.

We hope to put off close to 2000 plants or rootlets out of this bed every two years.

Just a different approach here.

What we're looking at is loose soil.

So I can take the root out of that.

So real easy without pulling the hair roots off of it.

So when I take it over here or down there to replanted in a stressed environment, it will have all the root hairs it would need to feed that plant to keep it healthy.

And alive.

A lot of people get into this thinking of more plants and ginseng seed and next year and we'll make 10,000 or $20,000.

I haven't found out how to do that yet.

We do a little bit of everything with ginseng, but I haven't figured out that quick turnover value added products is a good way to utilize small amount of roots or the tops being material to make those in value products.

How to achieve a higher price range without using higher volumes.

And that's that's one of the routes we probably choose to follow more than any.

Anybody can buy a volume of roots and turn around, sell it, make ten $20 off a pound.

That's that's given.

But if I want to dig up three of my own roots and make out maybe the same amount of money I can do, so we have a grinder after the root has been dried, washed and dried, we have a grinder.

And this is what comes out.

A powder consistency.

It's learning those certain ways to make a value added product, whether it be a sav, a tincture, or just a powder turned into a capsule.

There's ways that you can achieve a quick turnaround.

But all in all, letting the root grow to harvest just the root for that said sale, you're looking at a slow turnaround.

You know, you've got a lot of money in the ground that anything can happen to it.

We have some endemic plants that only grow in the Appalachian Mountains that have global markets.

I mean, ginseng obviously is the most well known.

But you've got goldenseal, it has a global market and black cohosh and then even the edibles like ramps, um, which also has some additional use.

But ramps is a really big thing.

And I mean, I've heard of buyers coming from Japan to buy ramps because it's well known even throughout the world.

So we have these plants that are native to the Appalachians that have a global market and with that, pretty much all of what's being harvested is wild populations.

And so through the past several decades we've noticed less and less population, uh, just in general in the woods to the point where they are gone out of certain areas.

And so that has created a big concern for conservation.

But also you got to think about, you know, it's it's an industry too, you know, so you have these big urban companies that supply mass amounts of goldenseal, black cohosh, ginseng.

They make tincture, they sell their own product, you know.

And so these people are also concerned about supply chains and supply lines.

And so they see their supply is dwindling in the wild.

Um, and so that's a concern for them.

But then you also have educated consumer base rising up.

So people that, you know, take these plants for medicine are like, wait, these are being depopulated from the wild?

We don't want to support that.

You know, we're not going to buy your product if it's all wild.

So we want to have something that's been grown.

At many of our sites.

We've seen people actively removing them.

It's become quite trendy and everybody wants ramps and unfortunately for the ranch populations, we have no idea what that means.

I saw them this year at East End Food Co-op in Pittsburgh going for $19.99 a Pound.

When ramps grow, they developed from a seed and they developed much like an onion where they just kind of produce one little single, wispy, almost grass like top for a number of years.

So the first thing is obvious.

Maybe a site like this, which is people should not be digging ramps unless there's a lot of them because, you know, while they are a wild onion, they're a bit unusual in the sense that they take many years to develop from seed.

So typically when a seed germinates for a ramp, you're looking at maybe three to as many as seven years for it to reach anything that then starts to clone itself.

And that's basically a size for harvesting.

It takes typically about ten years to recover from a 10% removal.

So they can reproduce sexually by producing flowers and seed, or they can produce asexually by bulb division, right?

And so when they produce asexually, what that means is every offshoot of that original plant is going to have the same DNA.

Okay.

So it's essentially a clone of itself.

Now, when they reproduce sexually, it mixes up the genes and we get diversity.

And that's important because when people come in and if they're digging a lot, that could stress the population.

And there's other types of threats to the population, like there's an invasive insect that has recently been found in Pennsylvania called the alien leaf miner.

Right.

So if the population has a lot of genetic diversity, it will be more likely to be able to, you know, overcome those novel threats.

Here's an example of how they clone, and yet they're attached to this basal plate, which has roots coming off of it.

So I broke some of the roots off.

So this has a fibrous root system that comes off of a little woody plate down here, and then one plant becomes two.

So you can see there's a little brown sheath here.

I'll pull it off of my fingers.

That's the remnants of what used to be the leaf sheath when these plants were maybe one plant.

Right.

So it divides.

What'll happen is, like, this one's getting so big that it's starting to form.

Probably it takes a couple of years for this to fully happen.

It's forming a partition or a wall in there as it's starting to kind of make two plants.

You should never be harvesting individual plants, in my opinion.

You should always be looking for those nice clumps.

And then you should be thinking about just removing a couple of the bulbs from that clump.

And that's, you know, sustainability one on one, right?

So you're taking one and you're maybe leaving two behind on that plate that's going to promote regrowth and cloning much more quickly than anything.

And essentially, that's what you want to hopefully, you know, push the most because from seed, it's going to take five, six years, seven years to actually generate a bulb.

So you want to maintain nice large clones that are actually going to peel off and multiply.

And it was.

Fine when you would just go in in the spring and harvest for your own family and friends.

But when you're selling two Whole Foods and selling these other grocery stores or selling to restaurants in New York City, it really changes the game.

There is a lack of formality around some of the wild harvesting, such that it's difficult to know when something is going to arrive and what condition it will arrive in.

And I think the efforts presently around forest farming, which is a more intentional model and something that also focuses on a sustained yield and a predictable yield can address some of those issues and create a little bit more efficiency in the market, which hopefully can pay off in terms of what's retained in the region regarding the actual value in that raw material, a lot of these woodland species are slower growing, they're shade obligate perennials.

So it's not like you plant them today.

And then by the end of a growing season, they're ready to harvest.

So they're a little bit like timber.

But the the growing horizon is is much shorter.

Right.

But you still have to invest in that.

So that does add a little complexity in terms of the investment in the time that you have to put into it.

Ginseng or gold goldenseal is a little quicker, but ginseng, you're looking at 7 to 11 years before you can really harvest and before it's producing seeds.

So you can propagate.

Goldenseal might be more like 5 to 9, but so it takes time, you know.

But you know, you think if you have a piece of land and you want to put in a couple, three, four or five, seven days a year planting and establishing, you know, after ten, 15 years, if you're planting every year and establishing every year, you can have a lot of some of these species, you know.

And so there is potential to have a secondary income.

Like any kind of diversified farming operation.

There are different activities that are being tended and stewarded over time to add value, right?

Supplemental income and the idea of an intentional model of cultivation that's situated in the place there's a person associated with, it is a community associated with it has some power in the supply chain.

And so the seed also, you know, so seeds along with some rootlet some people just buy some people just buy the seed, some people buy the seed.

And let's that this is what we these are stratified seeds.

These are seed that we once we de-pulp in the fall, then we'll take the seed and keep them in sand for a year.

And then once we take them out of the sand, then, you know, these would be ready to plant.

So this is our 100% pure berry juice.

And actually we're calling it a juice, but it actually it's it should be called a concentrate when we take that juice and and put it into a canter and then we we actually heat it up and and into temperature where it's canable and then we we can it into drums or, or actually can every into the jars that were that we sell it in.

The off roots.

And when I say all fruits that's anything other than ginseng that is a marketable root, a rhizome.

The off roots I see a big trend in that coming on as well.

Cohosh and goldenseal.

There's other things out there that we can help them with.

Yeah, actually one of the prickly ash we picked up this year and we've done a big volume of and we started researching and it's a lot for toothache.

So yeah, I don't know if it goes to orajel or what, but you know, there's a market for just simple things like the bark off of a prickly ash trees.

And we want to hold up forest farming as a model of continuing to steward and celebrate and use the plants and mushrooms and other diverse species that occupy this amazing landscape.

A lot of these organizations have looked at gaps or holes of what needs to be filled to really get forest farming being done by farmers.

You know, one of those is education, but also one is planting stocks.

So a lot of what we have focused on is producing, planting stuff for future for farmers or for farmers that can have affordable planting stock where they can plan out, you know, thousands of plants and be a good price for them to do that.

So a lot of what we focus on is goldenseal because that's been seen as a really like a gap in the planting site for goldenseal.

This would be one of the areas that we would pick and fan out for said orders of someone looking for some fresh root or some fresh top.

As you can see, it's a little thick, it's a mono crop and there might be a few ginseng in there, but mainly goldenseal.

So we would harvest that by the root rhizome and we'd snap the big ones and put them back.

Yeah, and that can be transplanted too.

And that little spot that I dug up, it'll still grow in other plant because we tore some of the fibers off the root.

So it's so resilient that plant wants to live.

So the division of the plant or just digging up, moving it, you'll get more plants, just need some attention.

West Virginia has a ton of forest.

A lot of people just don't even know that this is a possibility, that it's a potential, that it's an option for the woods.

And it does take, um, you know, these plants, they take specific environments, they take healthy woods.

A lot of these big companies, they want, uh, they want to buy in large amounts, large quantities.

And so processing facilities and hubs definitely would be required or really a requirement to really meet the demands of these big companies.

And that's kind of what, you know, Appalachian Sustainable Development is piloting down in Virginia with having, uh, basically a hub where people can process their, you can bring in and process store and then they can get that to markets.

Forest farming is an avenue for addressing some of the challenges associated with the increased pressure on plant populations and the long term pressure because they have been a base of supply for local apothecaries, for industry, for personal consumption for generations.

But there has not been a lot of teeth in terms of trying to understand the impact to those plant populations, those mushroom populations over time.

It is a way to demonstrate that through the intentional cultivation that you're actually practicing good conservation measures to ensure that those species are here for future generations.

The first thing I would look at my soil, contact my state representative to find out who or where, what permits I would need to do something such as this growing ginseng or any medicinal, and then source out places to retrieve those vine plants or roots rhizomes.

And there is several places and there is grants going out through United Plant Savers or Yew Mountain and there's some colleges it's getting on board and promoting all this and we're happy to be involved with a lot of that.

I think that the big push is the fact that people are seeing that a lot of the stuff that they're buying that's coming into this country getting exactly what it says on the box.

So the wild crafting market is I mean, it's a generational tradition in the region and there are scores of of plants and mushrooms that are sourced and barks and other types of what we call non timber forest products, products that come out of the willows, that are not associated with timber, that have been harvested used in the region for millennia, you know, dating back pre-colonial to post-colonial to today.

And those markets are growing by leaps and bounds.

And we have a great tradition in the region to celebrate and to actually explore how we can work within that economic context to improve livelihoods and communities in the region and continue to celebrate the tradition around those plants and do right by the forest the ecosystems that people depend upon.

I don't want to be that guy that's, you know, mining all of that out of our forest here in West Virginia.

We want to harvest enough to plant on our farm to keep our business sustainable from our farm itself and maybe help a few others.

But there's a limit to what you can do and be sustainable and and still make a living wage.

And that's all we're trying to do.

We're not trying to get rich.

I mean, we are we own the property.

We're just trying to pay our taxes and put food on the table.

Our farm name next seven farm.

There's teaching that are from indigenous people and in America that they talk about thinking forward.

Seven generations.

When you make make any major decision you know if you're going to cut that tree or harvest that plant, if you're going to make any impact on your environment whatsoever, what's that impact going to be in the future seven generations from now?

This has been.

A production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.