Intensive Silvopasture

Eric Toensmeier conducted a global survey of carbon-sequestering agricultures ("The Carbon Farming Solution"). If you ask him what he thinks is the single most important form of regenerative agriculture to develop in the temperate U.S., he says intensive silvopasture. That is, livestock systems where trees produce feed for animals. Why?

Meat is a nutritionally critical food, and a strategically important part of our food system. Any resilient future food system needs answers for ecological, climate-adaptive meat production. Today, the majority of U.S. meat production happens via factory farming, a system that causes a great deal of climate and ecological harm.

The most common regenerative alternative is managed rotational grazing, without significant tree integration. This practice faces some intrinsic limitations: it doesn’t compete economically with factory farming — which limits its potential to impact the food system — and although it creates significant positive climate and ecological impact, it leaves a lot of potential impact on the table. The form of silvopasture we practice today combines managed rotational grazing with orchard trees. This is a big improvement, but it’s still just the tip of the iceberg for silvopasture’s potential.

This challenge can be understood simply in terms of total feed per acre. Factory farming more efficiently produces feed per acre than single-strata pasture systems. Today, grain feed is often the largest single expense in “regenerative” poultry and hog operations, and hay (winter feed) is often the largest single cost limiting the profitability of sheep and beef-cattle operations. Intensive silvopasture has the potential to change this equation by harnessing the enormous productivity of trees for the purpose of growing animal feed — in the form of perennial beans, fruits, nuts, seeds, and edible leaves.

These "3D pastures" significantly increase biomass and feed per acre, with the potential to reduce or eliminate dependency on annual grain feed or herbaceous hay. Intensive silvopasture can significantly improve the overall carbon sequestration, resilience, productivity, and economic scalability of pastured meat production, while creating “heaven on earth” conditions for cattle, sheep, poultry, hogs, rabbits, goats and more.

According to Eric's research, multistrata fodder systems in Indonesia have increased feed production by 90% and stocking densities by 46% versus baseline pasture, while improving resilience to drought. Intensive cattle silvopasture systems in Mexico and Colombia are among the most effective carbon-sequestering agricultures in the world:

• improved stocking densities and meat yields 2-10x

• reduced methane emissions

• improved animal health and reduced incidence of disease

• improved water quality

• improved wildlife habitat

• increased resilience to drought and extreme heat.

A few resources on intensive silvopasture and perennial fodder:

• Steve Gabriel's 2019-2020 SARE research showed that a number of promising perennial fodders for the eastern U.S. have relative feed value over 2x that of grass pasture, and offered significantly higher values in many nutritionally-important macro and micro nutrients. Steve’s 2018 book Silvopasture documents his experience with perennial leaf fodders in a sheep silvopasture system in New York State, and proposes a short list of priority species and a list of species that warrants further research.

• Shana Hanson has conducted a series of pioneering SARE studies documenting different livestock species interactions with different Northeast tree species in different seasons, as well as nutritional values and tree hay fermentation techniques.

• Michael Machatschek’s Laubgeschichten (“Leaf Stories”) documents the history of coppice and pollard techniques in the South Tirol region of the Alps, including extensive species by species leaf fodder and tree hay commentary.

• Eric Toensmeier’s 2016 The Carbon Farming Solution documents a number of multistrata intensive silvopasture systems in the Mexico, Colombia, Australia, and Indonesia. Eric’s 2023 paper “Trees with Edible Leaves” focuses on perennial leaves for human consumption, but overlaps considerably with edible leaves for livestock feed.

If intensive silvopasture systems in the cold temperate Northeast can achieve any meaningful fraction of the results demonstrated by those tropical examples, it would transform the ecological and climate impact, resilience, and commercial viability of pastured meat production in the U.S. Much more research is necessary to adapt intensive silvopasture practices to this climate, and to produce agronomic data and designs for intensive silvopasture farms that could move toward commercialization in 10-15 years. Today, no major agroforestry organization in the U.S. is focusing on this important research. In 2027, Breadtree Farms will be launching an intensive silvopasture pilot for sheep, in collaboration with the Monarch Foundation and Studio Hill.