The Most Scalable Agroforestry Practice

Austin Unruh of Trees for Graziers and John Kempf discuss how silvopasture — establishing trees in pasture for shade and feed for livestock — is the wisest and most scalable agroforestry practice

John Kempf. Austin, can you tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing and what got you here?

Austin Unruh. Absolutely. I run a company called Trees for Graziers. As the name suggests, our focus is indeed on silvopasture — integrating trees into pastures. 

It’s been a very circuitous route in order to get here. If you told me 10 years ago that I was going to be leading a silvopasture-focused company, I would’ve asked you what silvopasture was. I did not grow up on a farm. My dad grew up on a farm — a jersey dairy in Minnesota — and I came out of college wanting to get my hands in the ground and wanting to do something that could have a lasting impact in the natural world, and I wanted to do something involved with agriculture.

I had read Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard, and that inspired me to the vision of landscape-scale agroforestry — wanting to see agriculture that was both economically and also ecologically viable — that led to thriving both ecologically and economically. That was my guiding star, as it were. 

I started out doing work on riparian buffers. I’m located in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. For better or worse, we send the most pollution of any area down to the Chesapeake Bay, so there’s a lot of water-quality-related funding available here. That was my entry into agroforestry — through riparian buffers from a conservation perspective. 

Once I got into that, I had a number of clients who were also dairy graziers, and I was working with them to get trees established along their streams. And they said, “This is great, but how do we get trees established in a pasture? Our cattle need access to shade.” I had done some studies in agroforestry at that point and knew that there weren’t very many tried-and-true methods of getting trees established at any scale, for a budget that works for a farmer. You can get trees established if you fence out a big area and plant a big tree. But most farmers don’t have the kind of money to do that on a large scale. 

So, we just started experimenting with different methods of protecting trees and integrating them into pasture in a way that was minimally intrusive to the way that the farm operates. We don’t want to take the land completely out of production in order to get those trees established. We don’t want to have to change the way the farm is managed in order to get trees established. Also, given that we’re in Lancaster County, land goes for anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 an acre, so it does not pay in this area to take land out of production for five or 10 years until the trees are large enough to let the cattle back in. 

That was our start in the silvopasture world, and over the past number of years we’ve refined our techniques for getting trees established. We’ve also started to work to improve tree genetics. We’re also trying to find more funding for farmers so they can reduce the cost of investing in trees for a silvopasture system. 

Kempf. Can you tell us a little bit about the scale you’re operating on currently? 

Unruh. So far we’ve planted trees on about 400 acres, on 25 different farms — all active farms, so not hobby farms, not homesteads, not rich-people farms where they don’t really care about the production costs; these are all active, working farms, most of them dairies. About 90 percent of our projects have been within an hour radius of Lancaster County. We don’t have really big farms around here; they mostly range from 40 acres to 200 acres. We are now doing second- and third-phase plantings on several of our farms. We have another 12 or 15 projects next spring, and the speed at which we’re doing plantings is only going up from there.

Kempf. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has the third-largest Amish community in the world, so this is reflected in the smaller farm size and very intensive management. With $30,000 to $50,000 an acre land cost, there is no margin for poor management.