If all goes according to plan, a lot will have happened here in the country between my writing this (in late March) and this issue arriving in your mailbox. I’m scheduled to receive and plant over a hundred fruit and nut trees — apple, cherry, chestnut, plum, paw paw, peach, etc. — and just shy of three hundred berries — everything from blueberries, table grapes and raspberries to haskap, seaberry and hardy kiwi.
We’ve already planted a few perennials — the first of the strawberries, some Jerusalem artichokes and a few ornamentals like hostas and daylilies.
Planting perennials is particularly gratifying to people like us who moved every three years for the past two decades. Impermanence was one of our defining characteristics. And we weren’t that abnormal — the Census Bureau estimates that the average American can expect to move nearly a dozen times over a lifetime.
Putting a tree or a shrub in the ground that, Lord willing, will be there ten or twenty or even eighty years from now gives my wife and I a sense of rootedness that we haven’t had since we left for college — and that our children have never experienced.
Perennial cropping systems provide growers roots — literally — that can deliver substantial agronomic, ecological and economic benefits.
It makes sense at the beginning of this issue of Acres U.S.A. that focuses on perennial crops to briefly look back to the intellectual forefather of perennial cropping systems: J. Russell Smith.
Smith was a professor at Penn and Columbia whose global travels exposed him to the problem of soil erosion, caused by overuse of the plow. His 1929 book Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture features numerous photos demonstrating the problem, from the American South (“How the Cotton Belt goes to economic Hades” he captioned one photo of a huge gully in Georgia) to China, Syria and beyond.
But Smith also observed places where erosion was not a major problem. In Corsica and other Mediterranean islands he encountered hills planted in grafted chestnuts, olives and other nut-bearing trees. These places practiced “the soil-saving tree-crops type of agriculture.”
Smith proposed the establishment of an “Institute of Mountain Agriculture” to discover appropriate tree breeding stock, breed hybrid plants, test the trees and disseminate them to farmers. Interestingly — even back in 1929 — he had no faith that the federal or a state government could successfully implement such an endeavor.
Smith’s institute never came to be, but a number of organizations exist today that generally follow his original vision. Several of them are highlighted in this issue. The Savannah Institute works to establish agroforestry practices throughout the Midwest; the Land Institute is working to breed perennial row crops, including Kernza; and Mark Shepard’s New Forest Farm is one of many private operations participating in breeding work for tree crops and helping to establish markets for them.
Nearly a hundred years since J. Russell Smith began advocating perennial crops, they may finally be gaining ground within American agriculture — rooting farmers and growers even more closely to their land. And that’s the view from the country.
