Please take my critique of this information as coming from someone that is passionate about conservation, sustainable food production systems, and forestry. I am whole heartedly a proponent of silvopasture. But what I saw in this video leaves me greatly discouraged. Our eastern forests and the wildlife that depend on them are already the victims of excess nitrogen deposits, tree diseases, reduced interior forest habitat, forest diversity, and reduced fungal and vertebrate diversity. The prospect of taking a northeastern hardwood forest (or any typical northeastern forest, save certain stand types like oak/red cedar forests that emerged from grassland/savannah and a history of fire suppression) and converting them to pasture is one more example of the destruction of forest health. I noticed on this farm that all the hophornbeam and eastern hemlock was taken out in favour of 'higher value' tree species. If you pay close attention, you will notice that our forests are arranged in species guilds. For instance, the sugar maple, yellow birch, hophornbeam/ironwood, eastern hemlock association (as seen in this video) not even to mention the rich understory and ground cover layers. There is a reason that forests develop into guilded ecosystems. In many cases, the various species are providing mutually supportive roles to one another through their contributions in terms of litter and biomass deposits as well as their differing rooting habits and nutrient requirements. All of this is tied together through the mycelium network and also through naturally forming root grafts that occur beneath the soil's surface. When we eliminate 'low value' species, we are knocking out the gears from a very well arranged system. As we convert these systems to a grass dominated ground-cover, we change the fungal and bacterial communities, compacting soils, and also importing great quantities of nutrients through deposition of manure when we import hay bales for bale grazing. This specific forest community is not adapted to this type of ecology. If you see any healthy timber producing hardmaple stand, you will notice a thick (up to 6" or more) leaf litter layer, with a varied and temporally distributed phenology of various understory plants, each adapted to exploit nutrient, moisture, and light resources at different times during the growing season. The leaf litter layer is rich with mycorrhizal fungi, saprophagous fungi, and numerous plant and animal species that support an equally diverse set of higher trophic levels. We see the polar opposite of this diversity and interconnectedness in this video - a nearly sterilised forest system. We have destroyed far too much of our forests to be continuing the destruction. It's time to pivot to regeneration. On offer is a vast quantity of badly degraded cropland ripe for regeneration through perennial and silvopasture systems. Take a neglected pasture or crop field, plant it in a diversity of microclimate adapted warm and cool season grasses, forbs, wild flowers, shrubs (e.g., hazel, buffaloberry, willow, alder, nanny berry, red-osier dogwood, sumac), understory plants (apple, pear, saskatoon berry, raspberry, blackberry, mulberry) and overstory species (black locust, black walnut, buartnut, chestnut, black cherry) and maintain the system in a patchwork of closed canopy, open canopy savannah, and grassland, and begin emulating the natural systems that have evolved since the last ice age. Nature has built in wisdom through her storage of knowledge in the form of the genetic double helix, DNA methylation, and the interaction of each genome with each other genome. If we think we can somehow improve on 10,000 years of finely tuned self-perpetuating systems, we are mistaken. Please please please, do not convert forests to pasture. Rather convert unhealthy pastures to regenerative systems, some of which might benefit from a nudge toward the silvopasture/savannah pattern. And by all means, participate in the ecology of the remaining forests. Harvest the forest's wood sustainably, collect her mushrooms, and hunt within the forest for food. There is much we can gain from a healthy forest (though at times and for a time, it may make less $$$ than a barren monoculture of corn, soybeans, and winter wheat). But one thing is for certain, if you walk away from the forest and 'neglect' her for a year, a decade, a century, or a thousand years, you will come back to something that is still a very finely tuned and self-sustaining system. The same cannot be said for other types of landcover. The forest is where the forest belongs; it may sound tautological, but after all, had the conditions not been there for its perpetuation, we would not be walking into a forest but rather something else.
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Terrific video - but the sound goes up and down later. Anyway, thanks for the information over time. Excellent!
Great video, thank you
thank you much appreciated
Would you please re record part 2 the sound quality was in and out and took away the information.
hi,I would like information on which trees can be fed with leaves for cattle and ovine
Thanks
Please take my critique of this information as coming from someone that is passionate about conservation, sustainable food production systems, and forestry. I am whole heartedly a proponent of silvopasture. But what I saw in this video leaves me greatly discouraged. Our eastern forests and the wildlife that depend on them are already the victims of excess nitrogen deposits, tree diseases, reduced interior forest habitat, forest diversity, and reduced fungal and vertebrate diversity. The prospect of taking a northeastern hardwood forest (or any typical northeastern forest, save certain stand types like oak/red cedar forests that emerged from grassland/savannah and a history of fire suppression) and converting them to pasture is one more example of the destruction of forest health. I noticed on this farm that all the hophornbeam and eastern hemlock was taken out in favour of 'higher value' tree species. If you pay close attention, you will notice that our forests are arranged in species guilds. For instance, the sugar maple, yellow birch, hophornbeam/ironwood, eastern hemlock association (as seen in this video) not even to mention the rich understory and ground cover layers. There is a reason that forests develop into guilded ecosystems. In many cases, the various species are providing mutually supportive roles to one another through their contributions in terms of litter and biomass deposits as well as their differing rooting habits and nutrient requirements. All of this is tied together through the mycelium network and also through naturally forming root grafts that occur beneath the soil's surface. When we eliminate 'low value' species, we are knocking out the gears from a very well arranged system. As we convert these systems to a grass dominated ground-cover, we change the fungal and bacterial communities, compacting soils, and also importing great quantities of nutrients through deposition of manure when we import hay bales for bale grazing. This specific forest community is not adapted to this type of ecology. If you see any healthy timber producing hardmaple stand, you will notice a thick (up to 6" or more) leaf litter layer, with a varied and temporally distributed phenology of various understory plants, each adapted to exploit nutrient, moisture, and light resources at different times during the growing season. The leaf litter layer is rich with mycorrhizal fungi, saprophagous fungi, and numerous plant and animal species that support an equally diverse set of higher trophic levels. We see the polar opposite of this diversity and interconnectedness in this video - a nearly sterilised forest system. We have destroyed far too much of our forests to be continuing the destruction. It's time to pivot to regeneration. On offer is a vast quantity of badly degraded cropland ripe for regeneration through perennial and silvopasture systems. Take a neglected pasture or crop field, plant it in a diversity of microclimate adapted warm and cool season grasses, forbs, wild flowers, shrubs (e.g., hazel, buffaloberry, willow, alder, nanny berry, red-osier dogwood, sumac), understory plants (apple, pear, saskatoon berry, raspberry, blackberry, mulberry) and overstory species (black locust, black walnut, buartnut, chestnut, black cherry) and maintain the system in a patchwork of closed canopy, open canopy savannah, and grassland, and begin emulating the natural systems that have evolved since the last ice age. Nature has built in wisdom through her storage of knowledge in the form of the genetic double helix, DNA methylation, and the interaction of each genome with each other genome. If we think we can somehow improve on 10,000 years of finely tuned self-perpetuating systems, we are mistaken. Please please please, do not convert forests to pasture. Rather convert unhealthy pastures to regenerative systems, some of which might benefit from a nudge toward the silvopasture/savannah pattern. And by all means, participate in the ecology of the remaining forests. Harvest the forest's wood sustainably, collect her mushrooms, and hunt within the forest for food. There is much we can gain from a healthy forest (though at times and for a time, it may make less $$$ than a barren monoculture of corn, soybeans, and winter wheat). But one thing is for certain, if you walk away from the forest and 'neglect' her for a year, a decade, a century, or a thousand years, you will come back to something that is still a very finely tuned and self-sustaining system. The same cannot be said for other types of landcover. The forest is where the forest belongs; it may sound tautological, but after all, had the conditions not been there for its perpetuation, we would not be walking into a forest but rather something else.
You are free to do that in your own forest. As for me and my forest, we will make food.