ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ

Peckham Farm looked like more field than forest during a tour early Tuesday morning.

A sod farm for many years, the field is now dotted with white pipes sticking up from the ground housing saplings that will grow into native trees: chestnuts, oaks, maples, and black willows.

The University of Rhode Island is turning the field into a , professor Laura Meyerson explained on the tour, which was part of the two-day conference.

"Silvo" comes from the Latin word for forest.

"We've been putting in this silvopasture to do several things: to protect the watershed and to restore this site," Meyerson said. The native trees could help repair the soil degraded by decades of sod farming and prevent excess nutrients from entering nearby White Horn Brook.

Silvopasture and the broader land management system known as agroforestry were popular topics at the conference, hosted at URI, which focused on effective, environmentally friendly food practices from producers on land and sea.

"The idea of agroforestry is integrating trees, shrubs, perennial vines into agricultural systems," said Harrison Greene, chief research officer at the agroforestry company Propagate. "So, not only are you growing food or creating livestock, but you're having additional benefits."

Beyond silvopasture by addition, which is the practice being implemented at Peckham, other examples of agroforestry include:

• Silvopasture by subtraction, removing some but not all trees from a forested area to create pasture.
• Alley cropping, planting trees either for harvest or as windbreaks in between rows of herbaceous plants.
• Riparian buffering, adding trees and shrubs near streams, rivers or other on-site waterbodies to help prevent excess nutrients from entering them.

Many of these practices were common in pre-industrial farming, but they're making a comeback as both the ecological—and even monetary benefits—of agroforestry become better known.

Ben Coerper of Wild Harmony Farm in Exeter gave a talk at the conference about his experience using silvopasture over the past couple of years.

With the help of a logger who did the work in exchange for the timber he cultivated, Coerper converted 25 acres of leased, forested land into silvopasture, creating about a 50% opening in the canopy and seeding the open space with various grazing grasses.

Although there have been a lot of mistakes along the way, the farm is taking on a new project to create more silvopasture, he said.

One of the biggest benefits he's seen is decreased recovery time between grazing, regardless of precipitation. "There's no need for drought insurance if you've got silvopasture," he said, because the trees help retain water in the soil.

Coerper believes the system could be a great alternative to buying or renting arable farmland, which is much more expensive per acre than forested property.

"Forested land is just cheaper and more available in the Northeast," he said. "This is the resource that we have that we can run profitable businesses on and that we can produce a lot of food on."

Ethan Farrell of Sunset Farm, the oldest working farm in Narragansett, has also created silvopasture by subtraction. He marveled at how little maintenance the process has required since they initially thinned the forest.

Farrell said using silvopasture has led to higher weights for their cows, which benefit from the shade the trees provide.

Still, agroforestry presents its challenges, especially when trees have to be added to an environment.

"If we could just snap our fingers and a mature tree would be there, I think we'd see silvopasture all over the place, " said Austin Unruh, CEO of Trees for Graziers, during one of the conference's panels.

Abby DeVries, livestock manager at Ocean Hour Farm in Newport, talked about the challenges of the early stages of agroforestry.

"There's a lot of trial and error going on right now," DeVries said. "None of those trees are actually an asset to the livestock right now, which means they're mostly in my way."

"That's really the challenge of agroforestry, is the longtime horizons between the time that you put in, the money, the effort into getting these trees established," Unruh agreed, "and when you actually get a return on your investment."