Plant The Trees

An audio-version of our written article:  https://www.propagateag.com/blog/the-nuance-of-invasive-species The Threat of Invasive Species The American Chestnut (blight) and Climate Analogues Native to when ? → Black Locust's native range Those who live in glass houses... Introspection without despair. What can we do ? Narrative vs. Action. Agroforestry Systems as an actionable next step Intro:...

Amelia Baxter is the CEO and co-founder of WholeTrees. WholeTrees Architecture and Structures uses structural round timber (literal whole trees) to create durable, functional, aesthetically-breathtaking buildings and features of the built environment. The company was founded in 2007 to develop and sell products and technologies that would scale the use of underutilized or waste-trees in commercial...

Costa Rica has one of the highest standards of living in Latin America. Quite a few years ago now, they dissolved their military and placed their focus on services. Not just education and public health, but ecosystem services. Water quality, flood mitigation, biodiversity, weather stability… Scott Gallant is an agroforestry practitioner based in Costa Rica, and has worked there for over a decade....

We’re planting all of these trees, many of which carry the goal of ecological benefit: conservation, regeneration, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood mitigation, relative homeostasis in weather and climate. But what does intact nature really look like in the forested biome (biomes) of the Northeast United States? The Mid Atlantic, Great Lakes, the Humid midwest? How can we know? How can we get t...

Darren J. Doherty, founder of Regrarians, is a pioneer in modern regenerative agriculture and agroforestry in the anglosphere and beyond. He’s planned hundreds of farms across Australia, New Zealand, The United States, Vietnam, India, The Country of Georgia, Mediterranean Europe, and beyond. Today we’ll dive into the mechanization of planting trees.  Trees are permanent infrastructure, so you want...

How do you further mechanize tree planting? Where are the leverage points? How do you get the trees on a perfect grid or a Keyline grid, at inch-accurate, GPS-guided intervals? Can you mow, subsoil, rototill, seed, and mark all in the same tractor pass? Bob Walker is a core member of the Propagate Team. He has decades of experience farming, and I’m really thrilled to finally get him on the podcast...

Jeremy Kaufman, together with our CEO Ethan Steinberg, and I, started working on Propagate in 2016. 10 years later, we have some insight into planting trees on farms, not without the standard battle scars of entrepreneurship. Today, we walk through why trees need to make money, the financial and economic bottlenecks in agroforestry, working with farmers and not replacing farmers, Jeremy’s family b...

It’s one thing to plant trees. And stewarding a chestnut ecosystem is a multigenerational endeavor. Today we’ll dive into chestnut yields, harvest and post-harvest processing, predatory wasps and soil nematodes, chestnut buyers & markets, and a lot more. This might be the most information-dense episode yet. Dr. Amy Miller is a wealth of knowledge, and we’re thrilled to bring this conversation...

Before you plant apples, blueberries, and black walnut, try these 5 species instead.  I started out 15 years ago planting black walnut and apples, because apples are the go-to fruit and black walnut veneer logs can pay off a mortgage. But what other species can feed us, create economic value, and provide ecosystem benefit with a more gradual learning curve? For best-fit tree options on non-foreste...

How are we paying for trees? How are you paying for trees? At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. We’re either paying with our time, or paying with our wallet. We’re going to explore both sides of that coin, and hopefully leave you with a better understanding of funding agroforestry in the United States. If you’re not in the US, you’ll still get a lot out of this episode. Link for how to w...

Farmland is often considered marginal because it’s rocky, steep, or because the soils are too shallow. But in much of the northeast and midwest, farmland is “sub prime” or less productive because it’s wet or poorly drained. Not wetland, but damp farmland that’s harder to access until it’s dry in mid summer. The question here is: what tree crops work for this soil? Chestnuts don’t like clay, or wet...

Global perspectives on forest-driven economies. It’s easy to confine ourselves and our thinking to our own countries, states, and bioregions. But we all live on one planet, and the integrity of our rural economies and our ecosystems reaches beyond the borders of our nation states. Today we’re joined by İsmail Belen and Marton Németh. İsmail is from the country of Türkiye (Turkey), and he is the Ch...

Byron and I first encountered syntropic agroforestry in the same way. There was a stunning documentary released in 2014 called Life in Syntropy. It profiled farms in Brazil utilizing planned ecological succession to grow food and restore the vibrant, verdant Atlantic Rainforest. Now we both incorporate the processes and practices of syntropy into our work, Byron to a much greater extent than I do....

Julie Richards stewards the operations of Ohio Chestnuts and Wintergreen Tree Farm. 200+ acres of chestnuts produce great food for real people, while improving water quality in the streams and creeks that flow into Lake Erie. Julie grew up with chestnuts, and came back to the family farm not just because chestnuts are really satisfying crop to work with, and not just because she had the opportunit...

It’s 1972. Led Zeppelin IV just hit the airwaves, and Greg Miller is planting chestnut trees as a junior in high school. With time on his side, he goes on to get a PhD in plant breeding, and vastly improves chestnut yields, nut quality, and disease resistance. 50 years later, the trees are still bearing huge crops. Greg has planted tens of thousands more trees, having refined the genetics over mul...

What do agroforestry-interested land managers have in common? And how do they differ? Are they open minded and risk averse? Are they extroverted and orderly? Our hypotheses, based on working in this space for 10 years, may surprise you. It’s well established that we have to fit the tree species to the soil type.  Listen on if you’re curious about aligning the tree species with the people that are...

Russell Wallack, founder of Breadtree, joins us to talk chestnuts and perennial pantry stables. Breadtree farms on 800 acres in the Upper Hudson Valley (NY) and Southwest Vermont, where they steward 20,000+ food-producing trees and shrubs — including chestnut , hickory , oak , seaberry , apple, pear, mulberry, and persimmon — in orchards grazed by sheep and cattle. The practice of raising food cro...

Planting trees? On farmland? But what about feeding the world? There’s a lot wrapped up in this question, and we’re here to bring you the frameworks and the data on how agroforestry can feed the world with caloric staple crops, ecosystem services, and financially successful farms. Have questions about planting trees on your land? Visit propagateag.com/contact-us to talk to someone from our team!

Take a listen to this phenomenal interview with Dana Shapiro, CEO of the Hawai‘i Ulu Cooperative. Ulu is the Hawaiian word for Breadfruit, which is a tree crop starch that traveled across the Pacific Ocean in canoes, and can still grow straight out of lava rock. And the conversation got. good. and I think we did a solid job of profiling this case study in rebuilding a food system with agroforestry...

Today’s guest is Austin Unruh of Trees For Graziers, who is a silvopasture and agroforestry practitioner who I’ve known for about seven years now. He does phenomenal work planting trees for water quality and cattle shade, and shatters the tradeoff between the two. We talked tree species, planting techniques, and a whole lot more.  Have questions about planting trees on your land? Visit propagateag...

Silvopasture is the intentional integration of trees, forage, and livestock, and Northern Argentina boasts over 200,000 acres of plantation silvopasture. If we’re going to make more silvopasture happen in the United States, it’s good to learn from similar climates, even if they’re in the Southern Hemisphere. In this episode, we talk to Luis Colcombet, who is a silvopasture veteran, and an agrofore...

Argentina is full of agroforestry. From 200,000 acres of silvopasture across the northeast, to thousands of miles of windbreaks in Patagonia, to shade-grown yerba mate, trees on farms just make sense. It's incredibly helpful to compare agroforestry systems across different climates and different economies, and we can learn a great deal about our own climate and agroforestry through the lens a...

Here we have our first Australian on the Plant The Trees Podcast. I first met Darren Doherty at a Keyline agroforestry course in Iowa City in 2014. Back then we sometimes called it permaculture, but you could say that sphere was starving for pragmatism. How could we add financial realism to a socially-inclined ecological agriculture?  There are so many things we can do on a landscape, but where do...

When we try to transform the world’s distressed or abandoned farmland, we'll come across a massive leverage point. That can be a new technology. Or it can be a tree species. Today we’re going to the country of Hungary to focus on a very unique tree. It grows fast, fixes nitrogen, and produces timber that rivals tropical hardwoods in strength and durability. In Hungary, it’s a species that’s w...

I’ve traveled to Hungary on five separate occasions, to learn more about black locust silviculture. Hungary grows 1 million acres of locust dominant forest and forest plantations, so it’s the right place for Robinia immersion. Have questions about planting trees on your land? Visit propagateag.com/contact-us to talk to someone from our team!