How one orchardist is integrating animals into tree crops
Sir Albert Howard wrote in An Agricultural Testament that “Mother Earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste.”
Eliza Greenman is an orchardist who does not attempt to grow fruit without pigs. Her obsession with growing apples and other tree crops dates back fifteen years, but from the beginning she realized that there were serious problems with how most commercial fruit is grown. Besides not being integrated with livestock, huge amounts of chemicals are utilized for purely cosmetic purposes — a practice that also likely leads to less nutrient density in the fruit most of us consume.
When not working on her orchard in Virginia, Eliza is a fruit explorer and a germplasm specialist with the Savanna Institute.
Acres U.S.A.: For a farmer who is interested in starting off in this realm of tree crops, what would be an easy first step? What does that farmer need to know?
Eliza Greenman: It’s important for somebody to know why they want to grow something. Do they want to make hard cider? Do they want to make syrups? Do they want to have some sort of processing step so they can make a value-added good from it? Do they want to have a U-pick?
All of those questions matter. I would urge people interested in this realm to really take a moment and go through that — what exactly they want. Do they want to spray? What are their ethics around that?
Acres U.S.A.: Let’s say that they’re an eco-minded farmer or someone who knows that they need to start to implement more perennial systems. So, they’ve got the motivation to do that but they just don’t know where to start. Let’s say this person is a row-crop farmer and they want to experiment on, say, five acres.
Greenman: They should know that there are thousands of varieties and handfuls of rootstocks that completely determine how big your tree is and what you’re going to produce — past the grocery store’s seven or eight cultivars.
The first thing is knowing that it’s going to be between five years and ten years to production. The cost of investment is highest for getting your production timeline down to four years or so. Cost of production for dwarf rootstock, which fruits sooner, is way higher because of trellis systems and irrigation — the smallest rootstocks require the most inputs.
I have clients that are 60 and they’re thinking about this as a retirement gig. The conversation I often have with them is like, “Do you ever want to get on a ladder?” A lot of people say no — they want everything to be at reachable height. That automatically means that the up-front investment is going to be a lot more — in order to get fruit faster and also to make it more handleable by them.
Acres U.S.A.: If they’re going that route, then you’re talking about a system where they’re going to be growing fruit for either U-pick or for fresh consumption, correct?
Greenman: Not necessarily. You would want to crunch those numbers for your highest output.
Honeycrisps sell for $80.00 a bushel right now. That’s like $2.00 a pound. But I’ve seen people set up trellises themselves and they’ll cut the cost quite a bit, and they’re growing cider apples that they are then turning into cider on their farm. It’s just a matter of value added.
Acres U.S.A.: This is for somebody who is open to direct marketing these crops themselves, correct?
Greenman: Exactly. Wholesale is pretty much off the table.
Acres U.S.A.: I’ve heard of someone here in Michigan who is planning on planting an orchard purely for juice, cider or applesauce. How much less work, spray and cost would something like that require? If you’re just going for, essentially, “seconds” right from the beginning, how much is that going to change the calculation?
Greenman: Oh, it’s way cheaper to produce for process markets. In a lot of fruits, like pears and apples, there are purely cosmetic diseases that are not at all necessary to spray for unless you want them to be glistening orbs of perfection. That’s part of the reason why so much fungicide is used in the United States — just to make these fruits look gorgeous.
Acres U.S.A.: This is an intriguing model. If you can do it with a lot fewer sprays and a lot cheaper, I think some people would really be interested in that.
Greenman: I focused on this years ago, when I was an orchardist for a hard cidery. One of my two-year-long research projects was that I had a feeling that apples with cosmetic blemishes were more nutritious than clear, beautiful, blemish-free apples. And it turns out that this is very true.
When the apple or the tree is under attack, it sends all sorts of sugars and polyphenols to that site. By letting that attack happen — just managing for it instead of completely preventing it — you’re creating a super fruit.
Rather than depending on seconds, it’s almost better — if you’re wanting to have the best cider, or if you’re really wanting to produce artisan, single-origin fruit — it’s really best to grow for that product. Using a second from a higher-value outlet might not have the benefits of managing it for those other markets.
Acres U.S.A.: So fruit managed to produce juice, cider or applesauce could potentially be more nutrient dense than what you’d get out of an orchard that’s managed for fresh eating.
Greenman: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s a main point I try to hammer home. You’re not failing if these fruits look bad. You just have to start to understand what these diseases are — if they’re even diseases. In apples, specifically, there are some cosmetic diseases like sooty blotch and flyspeck that do nothing to us. You can rub it off on your pants leg. It’s just an unsightly thing. But those things are reason alone for a couple extra fungicide sprays — organic or not.
Acres U.S.A.: Managing this way might make it more feasible to grow fruit in, say, the Midwest or the Northeast — as opposed to a dry place, like Washington or Oregon, correct?
Greenman: Yes, generally speaking. If a desert can be irrigated, you’re going to see fruit crops growing there.
Acres U.S.A.: For someone who wants to start a process-market orchard, as we’ve been discussing, what does that look like in terms of setting it up?
Greenman: With those five acres, you’re looking at maybe 15 to 20 hours a week, on average — more during harvest. So that’s a serious hobby. Diversity is costly. It means that you’ll have to harvest apples at different times and pay attention to different factors. Even though I recommend diversity, it’s going to cost you a little bit more time.
Acres U.S.A.: But is it a hobby at five acres? Or could this be a legitimate enterprise?
Greenman: You can produce quite a bit with five acres. If you’re direct marketing, it could be an actual enterprise on your farm.
Acres U.S.A.: And you don’t have to do a U-pick, so you don’t have to have people coming to your farm.
Greenman: No. I know U-picks are really profitable, but I ran one years ago and it was the most destructive thing I could ever do to the trees. I don’t know what would be worse — moose? Giraffes? I have no idea.
Acres U.S.A.: What would be the difference between having a five-acre orchard managed for processing versus an orchard designed for livestock — where you let the fruit drop and let pigs feed on it?
Greenman: Not very different. Honestly, you can do both. It depends on what state you’re in for drop laws and what your end product’s going to be. In some states you’re allowed to harvest off the ground for fresh consumption. Other states require a kill step between harvest and serving the public — like turning them into cider. Fermentation is considered a kill step in many states.
Acres U.S.A.: So the ideal system may be to harvest from the trees yourself for processing and then to let your animals eat whatever drops.
Greenman: Yes. That’s ultimately what I do. I have some trees that are designated pick trees and some trees that are designated cider. But the clean-up has to happen to eliminate diseases that over-winter.
By the way, I should mention that FSMA — the Food Safety Modernization Act — is an issue here. There are exemptions if you make $25,000 or less in gross profits for your farm, but they have a 90-day exclusion rule between when animals were in your orchard and harvest.
This is why a fruit harvester is helpful. I bought one from Greece that’s used to catch olives. It wraps around the tree and you shake the tree and it funnels them right into bushel baskets. My inspector was fine with that, because the fruit never hit the ground. It also takes very little time — less than to pick them up off the ground.
That’s what I recommend. The technology is so simple, but it’s just not in the United States.
Acres U.S.A.: Let’s say you’re planting an orchard simply to feed livestock. Are you going to use apples alone? Mulberries? What is the ideal mix? Do you arrange it so that everything that drops in June is in one area, and then July, etc.? How much do you vary those different types of trees?
Greenman: It’s increasingly more important. The goal for me is to gradually offset my feed cost. Feed is gonna do nothing but go up. It’s not gonna crash.
In trying to create more complete diets — diets that will help us to get off of a lot of grains — increasing diversity is important.
For pigs, the limiting amino acid in protein is lysine. Almost every pig feed has lysine in it, because it’s not really available — except in soy, which a lot of people don’t want to feed their animals.
Hazelnuts, for example, have a decent amount of lysine. There’s some in pears. There are a lot of different foods that have a decent amount of lysine, that together — if fed as a salad, basically — you would be nearing in on what you need. You don’t want to treat them like prisoners, where they just get one thing every day. My pigs will not eat more than three pounds of apples a day each. They just won’t do it.
But it’s harder to give them that diversity earlier in the season.
Also, you want to avoid dwarfing rootstocks. Anything that has to be staked you would want to avoid. Most of the smaller rootstocks aren’t going to be strong enough to hold up to a pig or a cow, if you ever wanted to have them roam free underneath the trees — even at maturity. You’d always have to have a fence up around them. The same thing for sheep or any livestock, really.
Also, the size of the tree is generally directly related to the size of the root system. Smaller trees have less of a root system, so they’re just not rooted in the ground as firmly — which is also why they take more inputs. They can’t fish the soil for what they need. I’m talking about apples, but this applies for other fruits as well.
Acres U.S.A.: So, you’re maybe feeding your pigs a little bit more supplemental grain in May, June, July?
Greenman: Right. I’ve been heading down the road of leaf fodder as well, as a supplement. There are tons of leaves early in the season, or I can ensile them over winter.
Acres U.S.A.: Would you primarily do that with mulberry leaves?
Greenman: If you were to combine mulberry leaves and hazelnuts together, they would come real close to matching soy — especially a hazelnut press cake, like after you press them for oil. Hazels can produce more oil per acre than soybeans. I have a feeling that in the future that’s gonna be more of a thing.
Acres U.S.A.: Do you ring your pigs in this system?
Greenman: No, I don’t. That’s pretty controversial. I’m not against it, but I haven’t had to do it yet because I instituted an emergency paddock.
This is something I would recommend to everybody — to have a dedicated set of emergency paddocks and a dedicated winter paddock. Places that you can literally light on fire — to reduce the parasite load. The emergency paddock helps you deal with climate instability. I can get four inches of rain in a day or two days, and then all of a sudden the whole place has been rooted, because pigs go after worms, and worms come up when it rains.
You cannot have that happen in your orchard. It’s terrible. All their poop and piss becomes integrated with the roots a lot faster and will cause disease problems.
The best thing for an emergency paddock is perennials with rhizomes — perennials that run. If they are fire tolerant, that’s great too. Pigs are disturbance based. If you can have your emergency paddocks be set up for disturbance — to thrive on disturbance — then that’s important in terms of the sustainability of your land.
Acres U.S.A.: How different would an orchard system like this look if you just planned to graze cattle in it, as opposed to trying to feed pigs?
Greenman: Not very different, really. The only difference is that for pigs, I would probably allow the main scaffolding or lateral branches coming off the trunk to be lower. Otherwise cattle are just gonna eat them. Whenever something eat the tips of a branch it causes the whole branch to stiffen up. Next thing you know, the cows’ eyes are poked out.
And of course rotational grazing will have to be used. If not, they’re just gonna hang out underneath the trees all they want.
Grazing cattle in an orchard provides shade for most of the year. But it also provides pretty nutritious forage during drought months, or whenever.
That said, there’s an orchard in Auburn, Alabama — a chestnut orchard that I’ve gone to for the last two years to harvest seed nuts — and they put cattle in there years ago. Those cows are eating those Chinese chestnuts. We’re just don’t know what they can handle.
