Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
366 Austin Unruh - Silvopasture, planting trees on millions of acres of grassland, is the most scalable and profitable regen solution
A conversation with Austin Unruh, founder of Trees for Graziers, about the investment case for silvopasture. What if we could plant hundreds of millions of trees on degraded, low-value pasture land and make money from it? What if we planted trees that are beneficial for livestock—ruminants, pigs, and poultry? The market for meat and animal products is fairly stable (unless we get a massive breakthrough in precision fermentation soon, but that’s hard to predict). Trees can dramatically lower costs and increase production.
Austin argues that this is the best entry point to get many more trees into the landscape. When chosen well, these trees provide shade (a basic need), but more importantly, they offer feed during the most difficult periods of the year—like high summer, or specific fruits that drop in the autumn, full of sugar and energy, just as cows prepare for the colder winter months. Especially with pasture-raised pigs and poultry, you can save massively on expensive (organic) feed, which is mostly grain. And as a bonus, pastures grow better with partial shade.
More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/austin-unruh.
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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AI and take a picture of their farm and see if I can get AI to generate a whole savanna on their farm. We put those down in there and it's the most beautiful instant gratification that you can ever get in this agroforestry space. We're so short on instant gratification in agroforestry. It's really nice to be able to come into an open pasture and then two hours later, leave and you have fruits, nuts, pods. That's the next level here that we want to be able to add. So any tree is going to provide shade, but we want to have trees that are going to really bring a lot of additional benefits to the farm.
Speaker 1:A lot of the cost of doing business and raising pigs and poultry is in the feed that you have to buy in order to feed them, so we know that we can also plant trees that are going to drop feed for them. Then, going into the fall months, then you have just a whole bunch of options. So that's persimmons and oaks and chestnuts and apples and pears and all kinds of different things that are dropping during the fall months that can provide additional feed for your livestock. Then what would you do if you had that much power? I would simply want trees to be able to reach maturity in one year. It's like super fast. I think that would. If we could do that, there would be silvopasture everywhere, like anywhere that people would have any interest in integrating trees.
Speaker 2:There would be no excuse in integrating trees, there would be no excuse. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Welcome to another episode Today with the founder of Trees for Graziers good, uh, title of a of a company taking grazing to new heights, which I love as an under title and we're definitely gonna, or a subtitle and we're definitely gonna unpack a lot of that. Welcome, austin, thank you for having me. I appreciate it and we started the artist of the podcast, so you know where, where we're going.
Speaker 2:But we start always with a personal question um, why do you spend most of your waking hours I used to say awake hours, but I got corrected and waking hours thinking about soil, obviously, but also about the role of trees, specifically in animal systems and then specifically for a silver pasture side of things, very specific of a niche within this. Oh yeah, very, very interesting. We're gonna get to that. But how come most of your let's say, yeah, your time spent awake is spent on that?
Speaker 1:yeah, so I myself did not grow up in agriculture at all. Um I am, I'm one generation removed, so my dad grew up on a dairy farm in minnesota and and now I get to I'm a sherman uh, not very many trees actually.
Speaker 1:He was in the Southern part of the state. The Northern part of the state has plenty of trees. Uh, his, his uh area did not have a whole lot. They'd removed that a hundred years prior, so, um, so I am a generation removed from the farm. Um, but it's, it is still in the it's in the background, it's in the legacy a little bit. And I only got the agriculture bug in college and I got interested in organic produce and vegetables and that kind of thing which led down a slippery slope into permaculture. And that's where I found Mark Shepard's book Restoration Agriculture, which presented this idea of really large scale landscape scale regeneration of the landscape through trees.
Speaker 2:Fantastic Inspired me Such a good guy.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Doing that Inspired so many different people who are now in agroforestry space who probably would not be here otherwise. So that was kind of my launch into this world of agroforestry with a little bit more of a permaculture bent that I came into it from, and my first foray into agroforestry professionally was through multifunctional buffers. So this idea of can we take a stream buffer that's there to clear our, improve our water quality and make this more attractive to farmers Because the way that stream buffers are done is they're really benefiting not the farmer themselves but the people downstream. So it's really hard to get the intrinsic incentives, the intrinsic benefits to the farmer out of a stream buffer, and so governments need to provide cost share and incentives, incentive payments in order to make that happen on the landscape. And I'm in Pennsylvania I'm in Lancaster County, pennsylvania, home of a lot of small farms, and we send more pollution down to the Chesapeake Bay than any other county in the Bay watershed. So there's a lot of water quality related money sloshing around here and a lot of conservation groups trying to get more stream buffers on the landscape. And my entry into this as a small business was can I do something that can make these stream buffers more interesting, more beneficial to farmers. And as I was doing that, I had a couple of clients who were doing grass-fed dairy, and those clients had other problems that they were dealing with. They said, like these small, narrow corridors of streams on our farms, these are great, let's get trees established here.
Speaker 1:But I have the whole rest of my farm, the other 50 acres or 100 acres or whatever it is, where I would like to have trees. I don't need quite as many. I don't want a forest, but I want trees for shade and maybe trees that can provide me with something else in addition to that. But how do I get my trees established in a way that doesn't completely change the way that I do my management? I don't have to take the land out of production for five years, 10 years, while those trees get established, and at that point I really didn't know how to do that.
Speaker 1:There weren't very many people doing this in an effective way.
Speaker 1:That was easy for the farmer, but I knew that if we could figure this out, there's the scale of application is literally millions of acres, and there's a whole bunch of farmers that could use this and integrate it very seamlessly into their farms, whereas a stream buffer is something that you take out of production and you're you're losing productivity on your farm.
Speaker 1:With the integration of trees, you can actually gain more productivity and you get ecological benefits out of it. So that's really been the key for me is how can we make farmers more productive, more profitable and increase our ecological productivity on the landscape by this integration of trees onto farms. That's the simple thing, and there's a whole lot to figure out on how to get trees established, and we've pretty well figured that out now. And then the next is how do we improve the quality of the trees that we're getting out there? And that's what we're working on right now. And then, once we've done that, really scaling that up and seeing a lot more of that, seeing that applied on the scale of millions of acres that's the next phase.
Speaker 2:You mentioned, these grass-fed dairy farmers were already interested in trees because of shade. There's often the thought, okay, trees are competing with the grass for sunlight and in this case, they clearly see, or saw, a benefit. Why is shade so important?
Speaker 1:So shade is going to help livestock by reducing their heat stress, right? So in right now this time of year March, april, may, and then in the fall again, you don't have to worry about heat stress and grazing is perfect and there's lush forages and everything is great. But there's, in our area, probably about five months out of the year where livestock experience significantly reduced productivity because they're stressed. Five months out of the year where livestock experience significant uh significantly reduced productivity because they're stressed.
Speaker 2:It means milk yeah.
Speaker 1:Less milk, less pounds that they're putting on. Whatever it is, whatever type of livestock that you're using, uh, they are less productive because they're subject to that heat stress If they have, uh, if they're out in the pasture and they don't have access to shade, they're just not going to produce as much, they're not going to eat as much. They don't feel comfortable. You and I don't feel comfortable. If we're really hot out on a… that's where you always see the cows or any animal on that side.
Speaker 1:One like under the trees, that one tree or the wood's edge.
Speaker 2:No grass anywhere underneath, because that's where obviously they go. We have the same effect and that's what people see.
Speaker 1:When they think about silvopasture, they they think to the neighboring farm that has one tree out in the pasture and all the cows are right underneath that all day long. And what we want to do is we want to spread our trees out so that a lot of stuff has like system exactly.
Speaker 1:Yep, really, what we're shooting for is a savannah. Another thing that we want is we want our trees to have their canopy really up, far up, high off the ground, so that the shade moves throughout the course of the day. So rather than one short tree where all the shade is right underneath the tree all day long and then the cows are right underneath the tree all day long, we want tall trees so that that shade moves and then the livestock move along with it.
Speaker 2:Trees so that that shade moves and then the livestock move along with it and the grass underneath gets only a small part of the day shade and a small part of the day livestock on it, which means it has a chance to grow. Yes, yep, exactly. Which is better for grass? Probably as well If it's slimy, makes it not fully in the sun. Many plants suffer in heat stress as well. Simply, pasture probably suffers. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And many other tomatoes, I think, and of course coffee and cocoa etc. Shade grown is is way better. Is that the same for pasture?
Speaker 1:that's the same for pastures, especially in our area where we are. Most of our clients are doing cool season perennial forages so, as the name suggests, they do best in the cool season really well in summer, exactly, uh, so they want to be, they want to be.
Speaker 1:They do best in the cool season. They do really well in summer, exactly so they want to be cool. They thrive in the spring and they thrive in the fall. They don't thrive in the summer. The summer is when they decide to peace out because it's just too hot for them, and so by having the right amount of shade, we can actually increase the amount of growth that we have over the summer months.
Speaker 2:And then there is a big piece. So just a bit of background. We got connected through Paul McMahon as an in-partner. It's definitely a shout-out. He wrote a great white paper on the investment case for Silver Pasture, clearly modeled after the investment case. We could watch it by agriculture. It came out in 2016 and then got updated by as In-Partners, which is on your website.
Speaker 2:I will link to that and one of the pieces there, of course, shade super easy go to most people sort of grasp that we already got a few levels deeper now in terms of actually it helps your pasture, actually it helps your because we need higher trees etc and there's a whole feed piece um for ruminants and no ruminants and monocastric animals. Let's get into the non-so obvious benefits of having productive trees not for human consumption or integrated in your past.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, as you said, shade is what we'll call, maybe the low-hanging fruit, but then fruit. That's the next….
Speaker 2:Okay, low-hanging fruit is better's the that's the next. Uh, the next fruit is better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, uh. So the shade is kind of the next or, um, sorry, tree crops, so, uh, fruits, nuts, pods that's the next level here that we want to be able to add. So any tree is going to provide shade, but we want to have trees that are going to really bring a lot of additional benefits to the farm. So let's break this up into trees for feed for monogastrics, so that's pigs, chickens, turkeys, those kinds of things, and then ruminants, so your cattle, sheep, goats, because there are very different ways that they consume plants. So for ruminants cattle, sheep and goats we want to focus on and this is in general, we want to focus on tree crops that are going to be made available during times of year when livestock don't have enough feed.
Speaker 1:So that's very critical and every area has its own kind of unique seasonality, seasonal fluxes of when feed is available. So right now, as we record this in Pennsylvania, this is everything is bright green and it's so. It's the beginning of May, everything is bright green, it's lush, there's tons of forages and livestock have more feed than they need, and so people hay it and they store it for later. So if we were to put in tree crops that were to bring additional feed right now. It's really kind of wasted because we have more than we need right now. But during the summer we know that consistently. If you have a summer slump or you have a drought, that's when we need additional feed and that's in the form of fodder, so leaf fodder and then in the known as tree hay, tree hay.
Speaker 1:Although tree hay is, uh, I think of it as something that you harvest, and then you store this is fodder which means you cut your prune and let it cut it drop it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very simple low, uh low labor or much lower labor than tree hay. I would never recommend people do tree hay on any kind of large scale, unless they really figure out how to mechanize it and then in the fall, like in the fall, going into the winter. We know every year you don't grow anything during the winter. So can we stockpile additional feed, whether it's the form of honey, locust pods or persimmon fruits or potentially acorns or things like that, especially high energy feeds that are going to provide those livestock with the energy, the warmth that they need to get through the winter, or actually to put on additional pounds and to increase their yield during those fall months, fall and winter months? So that's what we want to do, is we want to have the right types of feed available at the right types of times of the year in order to smooth out those curves of having a lot of feed at one time but then not enough feed at other times of the year. And then, on the monogastric side, so your pigs and your poultry monogastric just meaning one stomach. So rather than having multiple chambers in their stomach, these animals have one stomach, and so they need simpler food, easier to digest food, and typically that is grains. So corn and soybeans is what is commercially fed.
Speaker 1:But on a pasture-based operation, we want to see our clients be able to get rid of a lot of their inputs. A lot of the cost of doing business and raising pigs and poultry is in the feed that you have to buy in order to feed them. So we know that we can also plant trees that are going to drop feed for them and that basically comes down to in the summer, that's mulberries. So for us it's June, july, august comes down to in the summer, that's mulberries. So for us it's June, july, august. In Georgia you can start having mulberries a full month or almost two months earlier than we do, and then going into the fall months, then you have just a whole bunch of options. So that's persimmons and oaks and chestnuts and apples and pears and all kinds of different things that are dropping during the fall months that can provide additional feed for your livestock.
Speaker 2:Then and that really means, specifically, if you're in the organic space, you're trying to substitute this very expensive grain that comes from elsewhere. We've seen spikes in prices, specifically here in Europe, but I'm imagining also in the us. A lot of it came and comes from from ukraine. Of course, that became a lot more difficult and and so you're very dependent even if you're an organic system from outside sources and of course you can grow something that provides shade, provide better pasture and in the months you need it. Of course there's a specific there's, there's a some variables and an equation to fix. But once you fix that for a certain latitude and also there's a certain context, you've done it. It's not just your neighbor who runs pigs, and 10 kilometers away it's not going to be so different, no, um, and then you can replace quite a significant amount of this input, because most of the pigs and poultry run on inputs.
Speaker 2:They can forage a bit, but it's not a whole lot, not like ruminants and it's an interesting market. If you see the egg bases at the moment you're getting chicken or especially pasture bird and pasture birds that have been on pasture, et cetera. There's a good market there to explore. So how has been the uptake? A ruminant versus or is it sometimes people that do both like? How's been the uptake in terms of?
Speaker 1:I'm going from a dairy farm, a grass fed dairy farm, that wants a few trees for for shadow and shade, to these slightly more complex systems that also internalize the feeding side of it yeah, so we're just on the cusp of doing a lot more with those, uh, with pigs and poultry, and a lot of that is being led by our nursery, because we can propagate mulberries and we can propagate persimmons uh, at this point, a little bit easier than we can honey locusts we can produce them at larger quantities and at better prices than we can for our honey locust trees, and honey locusts is really our number one for our cattle and that's been the backbone of our business to date has been working with these small dairies in our area. Most of our clients are Amish and Mennonite and they have small organic dairies. That's been our main clientele and we've done almost all of our jobs within two hours of where I'm sitting right now in my home office, so we've been very locally oriented. We're-.
Speaker 2:And focused on the nursery and the seedling side of things, because that's yeah, it's amazing if you say I want 10,000 trees or 5,000 or 1,000, but you cannot get any.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly and that's where, uh, so we started out not having a nursery, uh, and really much more of a services company. And we still are uh, I'd say primarily a services company where we do the consulting and we do, we help people find funding, find cost share to do these projects, and then we will do the planting and we will, we will take care of the trees after they've been planted as well, because we know that there's. You just need to be able to get in there and, uh, and make some tweaks, make some adjustments, uh, a couple times a year, just to make sure that just a little bit of weeding, maybe a little bit of pruning, just, and make sure that the the protection that's there to provide, uh, to keep the livestock off is up to date and is not falling apart, so just little things, that they go a long way towards making sure that those trees survive. So those are the. That's the suite of services that we provide, and our goal is to make it as easy as possible for our clients to say yes to silvopasture. And then, in the last couple of years, we've really started to invest more in a nursery so that we can have much higher quality nursery stock to provide to our farmers. So we've been really focused first and foremost on ruminants and that's most of the landscape is in, whether it's dairy or beef, and throughout the country it's much more skewed towards beef, so that's the largest applicability by far.
Speaker 1:Over 100 million acres in the US that is right now being grazed by cattle and it's open. That could easily have silvopasture integrated in. But then when I look at what has the highest upside and what can really transform the way that we do agriculture the most, that's that's where pigs and poultry come in to the place, because right now, if you're someone who's raising those on pasture, you have a slight advantage to someone right raising them in a CAFO, because you're getting, let's say, 20 percent or 30 percent of your feed is being reduced because they're eating forages and grubs and insects and that kind of thing, but they're also. It's a much less efficient system to be able to manage so much more labor, uh, labor input needed and uh, and you're probably still feeding the same amount of feed actually, even though they're getting some of their feed from their forages, from the pasture. Uh, they're, you're probably still giving them the same amount of feed, because in a CAFO system the animals don't hardly move.
Speaker 2:So they don't get the exercise.
Speaker 1:they don't burn energy, and so there's not many competitive advantages of a pasture-based system compared to a CAFO industrialized growing system. And what I want to be able to do is I want to be able to offer to our farmers that they can one. They can reduce their input costs by having these perennial feeds dropping for free for their livestock. But also I want them to be able to tell a much better story, so I want them to be able to have videos that they show to their customers, with chickens eating mulberries, with, uh, their Thanksgiving turkey, uh filling up on chestnuts and persimmons, uh, with the their. The bacon that they're selling, uh being bacon that was fed off of acorns or whatever it is, uh like.
Speaker 1:Those are the kinds of things that I think we can. We can reduce the cost of doing business and we can have the highest quality feed. It's organic, it doesn't have polyunsaturated fatty acids in it or much lower content, because it's coming from fruits and nuts and that kind of thing, so all the things that folks want to pay a higher margin for, and it's just it's created and produced with the very highest quality of animal welfare. So that's what I want to be able to make available to farmers who are already raising livestock out in pasture. And this is just a way to stack another enterprise and a higher margin enterprise on the same land base. You're meaning?
Speaker 2:farms that are already, let's say, the organic dairy and grass-fed dairy farmers around you would be also introducing pigs and poultry on their land. I would love to see more of that. I mean what's currently limiting? I mean mean the parking lot is a massive other enterprise on top of it. It's not. So let's not underestimate that. Let's say what are the main limitations? Is it the seedlings?
Speaker 2:Is it knowledge Is it? Everybody else is doing dairy, so why would I put chickens in a more scaled way? For sure they have some chickens around the house, but let's say not in a more structured way. What's holding them back to start experimenting? Or maybe somehow?
Speaker 1:So I'd say first is nursery stock, so having the right material to put out there. So for the three trees that we focus the most on in our nursery, that would be honey, locust, persimmon and mulberry, each one has male and female flowers on different trees, so only the females are going to give you anything. So just by being able to clonally propagate these trees, you're going to double the amount of production that you're going to get, versus putting a whole bunch of seedlings out there and then half of them aren're going to get, versus putting a whole bunch of seedlings out there and then half of them aren't going to give you anything anyway. So that's a major, again low-hanging.
Speaker 2:How far away are we?
Speaker 1:from that. So this last year we were able to start offering clonally propagated mulberries, and by the end of this year we should have three or four different cultivars of mulberry and one persimmon, and then in two years we should have a number of like six different cultivars of mulberry and six of persimmons, and then honey locusts we're working on via grafting and maybe at some point we can get those into tissue culture and be even more efficient yet through clonal propagation.
Speaker 2:What does tissue culture mean and how did you get the mulberries to do the work you just described? I already forgot the name. So, what we're doing, Because what's currently? When you have two, you have a male and a female do you have to go around and wait for a bee? Or you have to go around with a little pencil to touch that.
Speaker 1:So even if you were to do that, you're still going to get a seedling and chances are you'll get either like 50% chance of getting a male or a female, and you can do that. But you're having to spend twice as much time and effort and money in getting all these trees out there. And if you can just clonally propagate, then you know that every tree that you're going to put out there is going to yield what you want. And so there's a couple of different ways of getting clonal propagation. One is grafting, and grafting is is a old, tried and true technique of doing this. Every apple orchard in the country is is grafted and the. The challenge there is some. Some species don't graft quite as well, like mulberry is one that it just pushes a lot of water when you cut it and when you graft it, so it doesn't graft quite as well. Um, and then others like a persimmon. Persimmon is kind of notorious for dying back to the roots, so you can plant it out and it's a it. It's a tree that comes back from the roots very well. So what I think is going on is the. If the plant is stressed, it might say you know what this top, I'm just going to abort the whole the plant is stressed. It might say you know what? This top? I'm just going to abort the whole top of the plant and I'm going to put my energy back in the roots and I'm going to come back from the roots this next year. And so we've had quite a few scenarios where we were putting out a tree uh thankfully not too many that were grafted because those are expensive, and the tree died back to the roots and then it came, came right back. So it was you get a tree, but if that was a grafted persimmon that you're putting out there for $40 or $50, and it dies back to the roots and then all you have is a really really expensive seedling. So we can't really do that, we can't recommend that to our clients at scale. And then for honey locust, again, we're talking about being able to graft uh, and that's that's probably the best method that we have so far and we're seeing if we can get um.
Speaker 1:So tissue culture that term that I used earlier is really just a micro propagation technique where you send off a tree and to a lab and they have very sterile environment and they have these little uh jars with a gel in them and they take little, little tiny pieces of the environment.
Speaker 1:And they have these little jars with a gel in them and they take little, little tiny pieces of the plant and they put it in there and they get it to root and they get it to grow, and then they just snip that little plant into three pieces and then they put it back into the gel and they start again and they're just constantly propagating, so multiplying and multiplying and multiplying, propagating, so multiplying and multiplying and multiplying. And the really neat thing about it is you can turn one plant into like hundreds of thousands in the course of a year. So that's that's why we're we're going after tissue culture is you're just able to take the, the few genetics that we have available because we don't have a whole lot available in this agroforestry space it's really been neglected and quickly scale them up much faster than you can with grafting, which is a more traditional practice, but it is much slower in order to get those numbers that you need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the crafting it's an interesting how it's been neglected, also when you talk about, and then we'll get back to to other challenges, like when you talk about the data and and there's just very, very little like if you start looking at economic data, if you're looking at, okay, what does a mulberry field do, or how many trees do you need for, versus, etc. In this context. Basically there's nothing between the lines, or very little.
Speaker 2:Um, because, yeah, we've separated the two, let's say production of feed and the production of livestock in all kinds of different shapes and forms. Yes, um so other challenges. Is it also just a mental? I mean, people are already doing grass, but they're in. Maybe they're using, starting to use shade and things that you provide for ruminants. Is it a big mental step to go to poultry and pigs?
Speaker 1:I think part of it is. What I want to see is I want to see brands that are built around this, so a brand that can go to a farmer and say here's a contract for you to grow pigs to this specification.
Speaker 2:Like Tyson does now, but in a slightly different environment. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Exactly Tyson, but in a pasture. And like having systems, having protocols for and having contracts, right? Because if I go to a farmer and I say, hey, let's plant these mulberry trees and in five years you're going to see significant production off of these trees and you're going to be able to make a profit by running pigs underneath them, that's just me telling them that this is possible. And again, there's not a whole lot of scientific data, there's anecdotal data, but there's not a whole lot backing this up. But if they had a company that could provide them with a contract that they know that they can get pigs for a certain price and that they can sell pigs for a certain price and that they're going to be able to make a profit off of this, I think that's really the limiting factor in that space is just knowing where to sell these and where to be able to produce these for.
Speaker 2:And do you see the ones here, the farmers you're working with now on the ruminant side? Are you already taking into consideration they might add poultry and pigs later on, or are you providing a lot of ruminant feed and shade that later on becomes tricky, or how does it feel? Look like that you worked on, let's say in terms of possibility, but also in terms of the neighbor that hasn't done?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we're mostly focused on the ruminants. For someone who's already raising dairy or beef, we're mostly focused on supporting those enterprises, unless they tell us, hey, I want to also add, I want to add chickens or pigs, or I want to add tree crops like chestnuts or something else like that, because we definitely do that as well. But for the most part, our main focus is on supporting those livestock that they already have and potentially want to build in there. So right now, through our nursery, we're now at the point where we can provide these mulberries and persimmons, and I'm anticipating that by the end of this year we'll have mulberry trees in particular that are six feet tall or more, and so we can put them out there, and in a year or two they're producing fruit already, and so the nursery side is then going to be able to advance that further than what we have been able to so far.
Speaker 1:Because today, if we wanted to get a grafted mulberry tree or a grafted persimmon tree, we're paying $40, $50 a piece for those, and they're only a foot and a half tall. We just can't do that. It's much too expensive for us to do for our clients, whereas a shade tree can cost $3. But now, if we can through our own nursery, if we can put out a tree that's six feet tall and it costs $20 instead of $40, we're getting twice the tree for half the price. Now it starts to be much more interesting and much more affordable for our clients to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's interesting the point you made as well like human food versus animal feed. The meat market and other animal products is very well established compared to chestnuts in the US versus not so much. The human food side of things in agroforestry is super interesting but still under, except when you're doing coffee or cocoa, but of course in the more temperate climates that's difficult. It's just feeding into a current system that is established where, if you can lower feed costs, you have a winner quite quickly compared to establishing a new market for chestnut flour which we absolutely have to, and we're very happy, our grocery partners and Propagate and others are doing it, but it seems to be a more uphill battle.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely have to, and very happy, agroforestry partners and propagate and others are doing it. Um, but it's, it's uh, seems to be a more uphill battle oh, absolutely, and that that's what I really enjoy about silvopastures.
Speaker 1:we don't have to work on creating new markets, right? I think right now we import about and this is the us. We import about 4 000 acres worth of chestnut production, which is not much right. If we were to do, if we were to have a hundred thousand acres of chestnut production which is not much right If we were to do, if we were to have 100,000 acres of chestnuts on the market right now, we would completely flood the market.
Speaker 1:Now I would like to see a lot more demand developed for chestnuts and the processing to create chestnut flour and all those things, and I think we can push the demand a lot higher than it is right now. But if you were to have 10 million acres of silvopasture right now that's there for livestock it won't do anything to the demand. The demand for meat is going to stay the same and the only difference is that those people who are running those 10 million acres are now going to be able to produce more off of that piece of land with a lower cost of input. So, very simple, I think no one's going to get crazy rich with it, but it's going to be able to provide much more resilience to a lot more farmers and with the stability that they know that this is going to work for them.
Speaker 2:And are there other places where particularly Spain are famous for their oak savannas, don't you say? But other places as well, where silver pasture, for instance in dairy, et cetera, is more common, like where do you look for inspiration and insights, or it's? We've pretty much separated the two very well, either 100 years ago or 50 years ago, whenever that happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's very few examples for us to look to. The oak savanna of the Dehesa in Spain, as you mentioned, is probably the best example that's out there and it gives people at least a visual. It's such a different context than what we have but at least it gives people a really beautiful visual of what this can look like. There was also an oak savanna in North America that was managed for hundreds, probably thousands of years. So much of the area that is now wooded and it's kind of separated out into cropland and pasture and woods was a much more diverse mosaic of savannah at one point. But we really don't have that as an example these days.
Speaker 1:The main way that silvopasture is done in the United States at this moment is like a pine timber silvopasture and mostly in the southeastern part of the country. But that is one. It's just not very applicable to where we're at and also they're pretty low margin games. Having like a pine plantation is a very low margin, large acreage game that you can't really do very well at. So what we mostly promote is less the timber side of things and much more focused on just the livestock and supporting the livestock.
Speaker 2:And is there another way of flipping this instead and actually going to the more forested areas and starting grazing them and thinning?
Speaker 1:Is that something that's happening, or is that?
Speaker 2:very tricky in terms of regulation Because, of course, you separated everything, and on the forest and grazing side is that maybe not your focus, but is that happening?
Speaker 1:or at least it is happening.
Speaker 1:Thankfully, it's less of a challenge of regulation here in the united states. I think europe often has more protections that if you were to take a woods and convert it into a pasture, that you're paying much higher taxes or or other. You're getting disincentivized that way, um, but for for us, and at trees for grazers, it's just not our focus, because we're mostly in an area that has a lot of open space and not a lot of trees. Land in our area is very expensive. Uh, there's a lot of competition for the land and so the prices are very high and no one lets their land just grow up into trees. So we need to be very thoughtful and strategic about how to integrate trees in our context.
Speaker 1:But throughout much of the country there is especially low value grazing lands. There's a lot of trees and there's a lot of brushiness, and a lot of the focus on silvopasture is taking those woods, especially degraded woods that have been cleared of all the best timber trees, and removing more trees to create more pasture. Yeah, so there's a lot of opportunity there. I would love to see a lot more foresters be able to consult, because that's really the main challenge is you need to be able to consult, because that's really the. The main challenge is, you need to be able to do that well and strategically, and you need someone who has experience in in the grazing side and knows, knows livestock, knows forages and knows how to take, uh, an existing woods and thin it down properly in order to create the right kind of savannah silvopasture system. So I'd love to see more of those professionals.
Speaker 2:And it's a fascinating thought because a lot of these were managed ecosystems back in the day by indigenous peoples, tribes, et cetera had been abandoned and they grew into a forest which is not probably the best ecologically speaking. But then how do you get it back? Fire risk in many places, um, abandonment fenced around for and and it's just interesting to to what is it baseline syndrome that we used to do something, because this is a natural quote-unquote forest. Well, it's actually just super degraded and not, uh, functioning at its peak at all, because it's missing big races and it's missing that savannah, like space, and big chunks of europe as well have been reforested because abandonment and we now think, oh, that's a good thing, which it is, but it's also a risk. And because much of of the uk and much of other places were more savannah, like slightly thicker pieces of forest, but also it's like we're open with a lot of oaks and a lot of trees like that and a lot of grazes, and so we but we, which is also where we thrive the best like we're the forest edge people, not the forest people and but also not the open field people necessarily we need trees to be able to climb up into yeah
Speaker 2:and but not too many, that you, you're completely locked into and so it's an we feel really at home there. Probably that's why these few systems we have life like in spain, portugal attract so much, because there's a natural balance, or the savannah. If you go to to several countries and places in africa and you, you really it feels beautiful, without really knowing why, and probably because that mix of of trees and landscape and animals makes makes a lot of sense. And as we're not returning back to that and maybe some technology pieces now make it more possible with virtual fencing, et cetera, because of course, fencing pigs in can be very interesting I haven't seen virtual fencing for pigs yet, but fencing pigs in general, and goats is tricky and it's great to say, oh, let's graze the forest, but yes, let's not lose all the pigs in one go, because that definitely happens.
Speaker 2:Um, what do you see as your main message for investors, for for people working in the financial space, either losing their own money or other people's money that are definitely far away from the daily reality of shade and the reality of feed and the daily reality of what a forest could look like and what natural is. And what would be your main message if you could plant, I always like to say, a seed in their mind, if you could plant one seed.
Speaker 1:What would be your main message to, let's say, the financial world? On this silvopasture, you're able to take a marginal piece of farmland that is.
Speaker 2:We're going here for super arable land.
Speaker 1:This is hayfield, this is undervalued but also underperforming.
Speaker 2:if you look at the ag land classification, this is not on top.
Speaker 1:Exactly. We're not competing here with corn and soybean land. You could and I think actually silvopasture probably could be more, uh, more profitable because your inputs are so much lower. But to start out with, we're probably going to focus mostly on the marginal the big the beast?
Speaker 1:yeah, not quite yet. Once we have more data, I think, uh, we could make the economic case that this is because it is such, uh, so much lower input that you probably could challenge the profitability of those systems. So right now, this marginal farmland is low input but then also low output. Right, there's not a whole lot of margin on it, whole lot of margin on it. With a silvopasture system, you can take a piece of land and now it's low or medium input and it's medium to high output is what it's be able to produce for you, so you're able to capture a larger margin on that. Now the challenge is is it takes patience, like that's.
Speaker 2:that's really the thing is this is not a it's a financial question. This is a financial question. Patience is a financial question.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, so you can do this. It just takes patience. It takes upfront capital and patient capital that's willing to wait and play the long game in this space. So really we're talking about being able to make substantial increases to land at a very, very large scale, and I think, whether you're looking at the productivity of the land or even just the monetary resale value of the land, I was listening to the audio book by Alan Nation recently, the former founder of the Stockman Grass Farmer, who wrote about how land really is valued in the United States at least less for its productivity, its productive capacity, and in many ways it's valued more for the recreational value of the land and the aesthetic value of the land, because you have a lot of people who aren't necessarily earning money from the land but they have an off-farm job and they want to be able to hunt on the land.
Speaker 1:They want to have a beautiful place to live in the country but they can still earn money off in their town job, and silvopasture is a really great synthesis of those two where you can actually get more productivity but it also looks a whole lot nicer and for folks who are interested in wildlife and hunting, you're able to get so much more wildlife productivity off of this land.
Speaker 1:And you're able to get so much more wildlife productivity off of this land and you're able to drop tons and tons of feed for deer and turkeys and bears and all kinds of things. And so, whether you're looking at this from a simply an agricultural productivity perspective or you're looking at this from the perspective of I want to be able to come into land, buy it, develop it into silvopasture and then sell it to people who want to come in and have a beautiful, productive, resilient homestead, you could also pitch this from the perspective of do you want to have a place to live that is just raining down with all kinds of human food staple crops that you know that in the worst case scenario, in a doomsday scenario, you're covered. You have this source of food every year, every year. So there's a whole bunch of different ways that I could see investors being able to bring money into this space and make very significant improvements to the land in a way that is also a good financial return.
Speaker 2:And like next to or beyond the seedling nursery, having of course enough quality and quantity and price with an okay price. What's the other big limitation? What are other big barriers Apart from the mental one that we sort of forgot trees in the landscape. Let's say we overcome that. Like we all wake up tomorrow morning with a lot more trees in our mind and we're like, oh, where did they go? What are other big barriers for this to being rolled out on the ruminant side?
Speaker 1:even though it's really not the.
Speaker 2:You don't need to be. You need to be profitable. But a lot of ruminant farmers as you. You said ranchers aren't necessarily profit focused because they have off-job farms and off-farm jobs. What are limitations there to to roll this out?
Speaker 1:tens of millions of acres yeah, to do that, you need service providers who can make this as easy as possible for farmers, because, even though this aligns it it aligns very, very well with the values of just about anyone who's raising livestock on pasture gets that trees can benefit their livestock and that they need more feed at certain times of the year.
Speaker 1:So people get. It is what I'm finding finding, but the thing is that most people don't have the time, the energy, the money, the know-how, the specific tree know-how, to be able to set up these systems in a way that's successful. So having service providers whose job it is to make this simple for them is really what I see as a huge limiting factor at this point. That's why we've been able to have as much success as we've had in our area. We have a team of nine people right now and we really only cover a very small area. We cover less than a quarter of one state in the country. So you could have companies like us, you could have a hundred of them and you still probably wouldn't have enough, and so, like we can't, the farther-.
Speaker 2:Like a solar providers that popped up everywhere and like how to get these panels on how to measure them? Wire contract subsidies left and right, what makes sense, not sense. Okay, maybe some batteries or not like a charger with your car, like all of these, like yeah, somebody has to manually put them on the roof, maintain them, clean them, sometimes wire them differently. There's an inverter that breaks down, etc.
Speaker 1:Which is a huge boom of like hundreds of thousands of people working the states just in that sector yes, yep, I compare the civil let's call it theo pasture industry, which is not the industry, isn't a whole lot yet, but I think I compare often to the solar industry of like, right now I could go out and I could buy solar panels and I could put them on my roof. I could watch a whole bunch of YouTube videos and figure out how to wire them to my system, my system. I would probably fall off the roof and die If I didn't do that. I would probably electrocute myself or burn the house down trying to put that install the solar panels. I also don't necessarily have the cash to be able to invest in these panels right now, because it's going to take 12 years for them to break even. So all of those barriers mean that and I just don't have the time, I don't have the expertise. I'm not going to figure it out and I'm not going to do it by myself, but I could call someone who lives right down the road who can. They can set me up with the panels, they can install them. They can give me a, a, a projection of how long I'm going to be till I break even. Um, they're going to help me navigate the bureaucracy in order to get my tax credits off of these solar panels. They're going to have electrician to install these all of these things that for me, it's super simple, and they might even be able to set me up with a payment plan that I don't have to put all this money down up front and I can cashflow it and I can be cashflow positive throughout the whole lifespan of these solar panels.
Speaker 1:So all of the things that that the solar industry has figured out in order to make this accessible to homeowners is what I want to figure out to make this accessible to farmers. And then we just need a whole bunch of companies and it could be nonprofits as well, like it can be nonprofits that are providing services to farmers in their area. They're just doing all of this for farmers in that area too, and that's something that we provide. So we have a that we call Silvopro, where we bring people in from all over the country and we show them exactly what we've done the techniques of how to protect trees in a pasture, but then also how to put a project together, how to provide the right services. If you can't provide all the services, how do you find the right people in your community to do those. So we're actively trying to get more people into this.
Speaker 2:At the end I always did a bit of a wonder. We repeat it many times, but at the end the little leaves on the trees, or lovely leaves, are solar panels and you're turning them into, yes, sugary um substances and fibers and all of those wonderful things.
Speaker 1:So there's.
Speaker 2:It's not too far. Of course, it's not exactly the same, but I think we can learn a lot from the, the renewable energy sector in general. Um 10, 15 years ago or 20 years ago, like what, what made this bankable? I can now put a thousand euros into a project and I can get a nice return. I can build my own home. I can get a company to do it. I can probably figure it out with YouTube as well, or with someone. It became so easy with all the different banks, like 15 years ago it was impossible. It was not even I mean, yes, even a bank wasn't investing in Zona necessarily and it became bankable. We just have to go a bit faster.
Speaker 2:But a lot of these things are very similar and I'm imagining quite a few people from the renewable space I already see that are coming into regeneration region, food and ag because they see similarities to the sector they sold before and so flipping the conversation and putting you in the investor seat. What would you do if you had a billion euros, or dollars in this case, and you had to put it to work? Of course not investment amount, exact amounts. Of course we're not giving investment advice here, but if you had to prioritize? That's why I'm asking you a question what would be?
Speaker 2:your top priority if you had to put a significant amount of money to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one thing that I would like to do and this is with a relatively small amount of that money is to have set up a fund with an endowment that is investing in tree crop research over the long term, because what we've seen is that tree crops are they usually get a small amount of investment for a short amount of time, which is not working.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:This does not work as a model for tree crops. These need consistent, even if it is a fairly small amount. But uh, like there's, there's, it doesn't take a whole lot in order to, uh, 10, x the amount of research has been done on all of these livestock feed crops. So I would want an endowment that is set aside, that for the rest of perpetuity, however long we humans can survive on this planet. Exactly, research, yep, um, so that's, that's one. It's relatively small amount.
Speaker 1:And then another one is I would love to have to develop a brand, like I was saying earlier, a company that can buy these silvopasture finished pigs and poultry from farmers and so that there's a real value chain in order to sell into a market, to sell into for these farmers, so that they don't have to worry about market development and they really can just focus on producing on their farms.
Speaker 1:That also wouldn't take nearly a billion dollars. So I think, with the bulk of the money, you'd probably invest in in marginal farmland. So buying up marginal farmland and improving it through syllable pasture, and whether you're looking to to sit on it, hold on it and be able to continue to produce off of that land, or you're looking to eventually sell it for, whether it's for the sheer productivity of it, or you're looking to sell it to someone who is who's looking at it from a wildlife perspective, an aesthetic perspective, but then also is going to have it grazed or going to graze it themselves, and they're going to get more productivity off of that land. I think those are other ways that I would invest the bulk of the money.
Speaker 2:And we like to ask this question, inspired by John Kemp what do you believe to be true about in this case, silver pasture that others I mean you said there is not such a thing as an industry yet, but there are other people. And so let's say the community. What others don't believe to be true, like where are you contrary?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think here it's less of what do I believe that's different. It's more about the opportunities that I see, because whenever I'm driving down the road and I see an open pasture, I just see opportunity for so much more productivity to happen on that land, and the beautiful thing about it is that not only is this land going to be more productive, it's also going to have more birds and more soil carbon and it's going to the water going into the stream is going to be cleaner. Like. You get so many additional benefits. And this, like it, just can be applied at the scale of millions of acres. So if I'm driving through an agricultural area that has a lot of pasture in it, I'm just envisioning Savannah all the while while I'm driving um spread out over millions and millions of acres. So those are the opportunities that that I see that keep me awake at night trying to figure out how do we advance this, uh, steadily, and continue to break down the barriers that exist for for this, this vision, to become a reality.
Speaker 2:When you work with a client or with a farmer, with a client in a customer park or whatever you want to call it. How do you bring them along in that Like? How do you? Of course, you model it like what is possible in terms of production increase, in terms of cost reduction. Is it already possible to easily render a video or something like, just to make people, to bring people along in that Savannah vision you just shared? How do you bring people along in that vision? And, of course, the hard reality of the numbers that need to make sense.
Speaker 1:You know what I need to do. I need to mess around with AI and take a picture of their farm and see if I can get AI to generate a whole savannah on their farm. That, actually that's probably very possible. I would love to play around with that.
Speaker 2:Please show us, send us some examples, because I'm fascinated by this before and after imagery, which a lot of like pioneering region farmers haven't done for good reasons, like also on the number side. Like to really get what we're doing in 1980, 1990, and how is it different from now?
Speaker 2:Like it's difficult and also the soil, carbon, of course they didn't measure because we didn't measure, and biodiversity, like what's a good benchmark. And also to coming back to that investor piece people that are super far removed from any of these conversations best thing is to bring them to a farm and to a neighbor and show them the things. Of course, getting people out there is not easy. We all know that. It's often far away from any financial center, airports, et cetera. So what's the second best thing? How do we bring if the investor doesn't come to the farm? How do we bring the farm to the investor? And I think we're starting to get closer with, uh, the vision pro, which didn't really go anywhere, apple, but like there are ways to bring this and I remember with agroforestry partners when we interviewed them, we had them on.
Speaker 2:He was mentioning he took a video. He has it on linkedin. I think I'll put it on the link below, links below. Like where he just showed the chestnuts planted, like a field which just has planted and um and it and field without, and just the sound of the insects was pulsing, like even just a stupid video made with a phone, like nothing fancy, like you could see and hear the difference at a level.
Speaker 2:And and I'm just imagining, if you said, like you can go, we can go much further than that yet, without going into sci-fi stuff, but having people experience what silver pasture and abundance and diversity could look like. I mean like, oh, wow, that could be just like we're starting to do actually with real estate agents, like, okay, this is what a house could look like. Actually, this is what your kitchen could look in that angle or that angle. Ikea does it now. Anyway, share some examples, if you find the right AI image creator to work with you, and then, of course, do the numbers with it as well, because once you're at it, why stop at the image?
Speaker 1:Exactly, and this is something that we're only just now starting to get into, like the whole marketing piece, because, like I said earlier, most of our clients are Amish and Mennonite, so they're not even using technology, they don't have pictures of their farm.
Speaker 1:They don't have that and most of our work has come out of very old school. We're going to events and we're just showing up time and time again and we're building trust in the community and just word of mouth, people have had success with us and so they tell their brother-in-law and their neighbor and all those. So that's what it's been. It's grown very, very organically and it makes the most sense because we are a very local business. So we depend on repeat customers and all of that. But as we build out our nursery and have the ability to ship trees all over the country, that's where it's going to be very interesting to be able to start communicating what we've done here, where we can get people out and just walk in the fields to people who aren't going to be able to come out here and be able to communicate and show off all that we've been able to do and show it visually.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, absolutely. And as a final question, which often leads to other questions but if you, you know it's coming. If you could wave a magic wand and do one thing overnight, it could be anything. We've heard from all animals outside, to all and all subsidies and insurance, to global consciousness, to, et cetera. Make the supermarket shelves transparent and see what actually is behind them, and not literally. You might not wanna see that actually, but what like? How and stuff is produced. How is your coffee grown in a multi-strata agroforestry system or the monoculture, et cetera? What would you do if you had that much power?
Speaker 1:yeah, I would simply want trees to be able to reach maturity in one year. It's like super fast. I think that would. If. If we could do that, there would be silvopasture everywhere, like anywhere that people would have any interest in. In integrating trees. There would be no excuse because you'd have a mature tree right away. And the main barrier to syllable pasture is this 5, 10, 15 year return on investment that you're not really getting a whole lot until that tree is a certain size. But if it could get to maturity in a single year, like that completely changes the game and it brings those rewards much, much sooner to us.
Speaker 1:And we're working on it Like the. We can't quite. We don't have a magic wand no one has offered me a real one yet but the closest thing that we can do is we can plant much, much larger trees, and so when we started out five years ago, we were planting trees that were a foot tall, two feet tall, and now we're moving much more towards six feet. I'd love to do eight feet.
Speaker 1:A couple of weeks ago I was out in the pasture of one of our former, or one of our early clients and, uh, some of his trees were 30 feet tall, so, like, uh, almost 10 meters, and we cut, we cut down some of these trees these are willows and poplars and uh, we took them to another part of his farm. We uh dug a hole that was three feet deep and we put those down in there and uh, it's the. It's the most beautiful instant gratification that you can ever get in this agroforestry space there's. We're so short on instant gratification in agroforestry that it's really nice to be able to come into an open pasture and then two hours later, leave and you have trees that are sticking up 20 feet out of the ground. It's absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 2:And then later they develop roots.
Speaker 1:It's really cheap, really easy, like in a couple hours we planted, like we harvested and planted 10 of these trees that are going to provide just a ton of shade, and very quickly. So this is still experimental, but I know that I can get trees established that are 20 feet tall and uh and just live limitation there in terms of planting six, ten foot, whatever the number.
Speaker 2:Is that risk of not rooting, risk of moving? What's the what's holding us back?
Speaker 1:of course not having those trees in the first place. Let's imagine you have them yes, that's the main one.
Speaker 2:So that means you have to put everything now you have into a massive tree nursery, get them to grow, and then in five, ten years, and keep doing that every every year, yep, yeah I'll do that with some of my billion dollars, I would, because that's there, because when, not when the demand comes in, I want trees. Now I'm like yeah, you can choose one, like it's 10, 20, 30 feet. What do you want?
Speaker 2:yeah exactly, yeah, and then hopefully I have a good survival rate of transplanting. Then of course, yeah, that's the trick with the root system. At that size, the root system starts to be significant as well.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the nice thing about these live stakes is that you can put them in. There's no root system needed, and so the planting is really easy. I have yet to find the boundaries of how large of a live stake that you can put in, so I've played around with 20-foot live stakes, popped them in the ground and they all ran just fine here, right exactly yeah, not fruit trees yet no, not fruit trees.
Speaker 1:I was so wish that I could do this with persimmons and honey, locusts and all the things that my. My life would be so much easier that way a bit less for even giving we would. We would have silver pasture everywhere if we could do this with with those species. Um, just because it's such an easy technique.
Speaker 2:So that might be a small line of research, like continuous research funding that you allocated. Your slides would be just some of these crazy sounding. But what if you would find a few fruit tree varieties and some weird one you found somewhere that actually survives this technique? Or even one in two who cares? One in three? If you could do it at that scale, that would revolutionize the speed. Or you just do a nice big pull with a sort of it doesn't get the same effect, but that's really like how do we speed up and get more larger trees sooner that we can transplant and in general, how do we get larger trees? It's a funny like challenge as well.
Speaker 2:We've seen that in in in brazil in certain syntropic systems, like if, like also the technique around the tree and growing it, like you can shave years off of development of trees. I think we're only scratching the surface there. Not that it helps to to pull the tree and it goes faster, but there were a lot of ways to make a tree grow faster without all kinds of high-tech uh gene editing stuff that some people are like there. I think we're, but if you can go from eight years to six.
Speaker 2:It's a significant improvement and if you can go from six to four. It starts to become yeah, it starts to become interesting, very interesting in the trees mature in a year we might, we might figure out some ways to, or re-figure out some ways to do that. We're working on it yeah I want to thank you so much for coming on here, for the work you do, first of all, and bringing silver pasture back sort of or bringing.
Speaker 2:It always sounds bad when you say going back to bringing silver pasture into the picture, uh, significantly. And for sharing about your journey here on the podcast.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Gwyn.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend and get in touch with us on social media, our website or via the Spotify app, and tell us what you liked most and give us a rating on Apple podcast or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.
