When farmers in cold climates take a well-earned winter rest, their communities still want local produce. Grocery chains provide food through winter, shipping goods from across the world, but this is expensive and can weaken local self-reliance and food security. Having no local options makes a town more dependent on outside food sources that the community does not control, and it reduces the amount of dollars staying local. It also renders Fairbanks less food secure because, like other rural towns in cold climates, it is at the end of a long, tenuous supply chain with a high chance of disruption from too much snow on hundreds of miles of roads to shipping delays as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. A lack of local produce during winter also means many farmers lose income from fall to spring.

Sam Knapp, a farmer in Fairbanks, has found a way to bridge that gap by building his own affordable, accessible cold storage. This has allowed him to sell his produce through one of the country’s harshest winters. He combines a science background with experience running his own farm, and after speaking with cold storage innovators across the country, he is sharing what he has learned in his new book, Beyond the Root Cellar.

Knapp has a B.S. in chemistry and physics. “My first job out of college was doing thermal modeling as an engineer. It is in my wheelhouse to think about heat transfer and phase change.” He then experimented with cold storage running a farm in Michigan. Knapp used Google Scholar to review studies on the storage needs of each vegetable he wanted to grow. For example, Knapp found that winter squash stores best after curing outside, which involves healing and hardening its rind, but curing will not happen in colder and wetter climates. To make up for uncontrollable wet and cold weather, Knapp introduced humidity control measures into his storage plans.

In 2020, Knapp moved to Fairbanks to start Offbeet Farm. There, he found farmers using root cellars and other cold storage techniques that were costeffective at temperatures well below zero degrees. But few farmers, if any, stored for more than a month or two. “Most farms here sell out by early September.”

So, Knapp set out to build a structure on his 1.5-acre farm that could store his produce through the entire winter, a time when temperatures drop to -40 degrees for weeks on end. The structure is 25 square feet, and looks like an ordinary outdoor shed, but it rests on specialized concrete forms that encase insulation and act as retaining walls. He now runs a successful over-winter Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and sells his produce through March.

“I built this building myself, and the total infrastructure cost was about $55,000. I have the capability of storing 35,000 to 40,000 pounds of produce.” With around 120 CSA customers, Knapp currently stores 25,000 pounds of produce, and he plans to expand each year.

Knapp says cold storage provides additional revenue streams and work-life balance; both are hard to come by for small farmers. “Farmers around here get half the year off, and they enjoy that, but their growing season is intense. It’s rough. It’s hard to make it through that time. I rarely feel burnt out from farming.” With cold storage, farmers do not have to harvest and sell all of their produce within the short growing season. It also helps balance self-care and family.

Storability varies by product: While Knapp has found that he and his customers are still eating their cabbage into the summer of the following growing year, storing his onions has proven tougher. He is still searching for an onion varietal that can store well after almost 24 hours of sunlight during the subarctic summer, followed by a cold and damp fall.

Every farmer experiments, and Knapp is no exception. He’s made some surprising discoveries. For instance, Knapp had not anticipated the warmth made by the vegetables themselves. After being picked, vegetables still respirate, (that is, metabolize carbohydrates), and produce heat as a byproduct—so much so that even when outside temperatures hit -10 degrees, Knapp has to cool the unit to lower the inside temperature down to 32 degrees. “This last winter, there was one time when it was -25 out, and my cooling fans were turning on.”

While Knapp is proud of his innovations, he still relies on more established farmers in the area for best practices in storing and selling produce at a commercial scale through a Fairbanks winter. “Half of it is hard research. The other half is talking to other farmers.” Building cold storage also comes with up-front investment and risk. “It seems very risky at the start, (to put) all this money down to get into it in the first place.”

To learn how others got over this risk and technical difficulty, Knapp interviewed cold-storage innovators from Winnipeg to North Carolina in Beyond the Root Cellar. It also shares practical know-how, ultimately showing that cold storage is within reach for all farmers. For example, readers learn that many farmers can take advantage of their existing summer storage facilities.

“Many people are primed to do this already,” he says. “You can start storing 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of produce by investing a couple thousand bucks just converting some space you already have.”

Never one to get ahead of himself, Knapp also points out that, in every interview, he heard the same touchstone: “Start small.” Knapps book, Beyond the Root Cellar, will be released November 14.

The post Meet the Modern Farmer Cracking Cold Storage in the Coldest Places appeared first on Modern Farmer.

They are tulip snails, a mollusk found in the sandy bottoms of shallow pools along the south eastern coast of the US. And while they may not be the typical fare you expect at a swanky seafood restaurant in the US, at Seabird, they sit proudly alongside menu classics such as crab, yellowfin tuna and oysters. 

Seabird, in Wilmington, NC, is a sustainable seafood place that utilizes foraging to get many of its ingredients—and to act as an opportunity for education. Rather than rely only on farmed fish or wild caught fish that is shipped from ports across the world, Neff tries to work with local food, which can create a bit of uncertainty in the menu. Ordering 50 pounds of swordfish from a distributor is a fairly straightforward process. But with local fishing and foraging, you’re working with a wild population, and you’re not guaranteed to find what you set out for. You’re also limited by the seasonality of the food. 

 “I think everybody knows that tomatoes or okra or cabbages are seasonal,” says chef and owner Dean Neff. “But I don’t know that everyone knows the seasonality of oysters or speckled sea trout. Being able to have conversations about that and about sustainability with seafood was important to us.” 

Neff opened the restaurant in 2021 with his partner, and he started working with foragers to access local ingredients at sustainable levels. That’s when he met Ana Shellem of Shell’em Seafood, a coastal forager and sustainable fisher who works along the coastline of Masonboro Island. Shellem began foraging five years ago, after many years of harvesting wild shellfish. As a conservationist, Shellem is careful when and where she harvests, only bringing in what is in season and in small quantities. “When you eat wild and in season…I only eat oysters in season, even though with farmed oysters, you can eat them year round. But I think everything is at its finest when it’s in season. Eating a tomato in the winter is not as exciting as eating a tomato in the summer and appreciating the flavor profiles.”

Most shellfish seasons have to do with their cycle of breeding and molting, normally coinciding with water temperature. For instance, stone crabs along the east coast are out of season in the summer months, when the crabs will molt, shedding their shells and pumping the warm sea water in and out of their bodies to create new exoskeletons. It’s when the crabs have shed their shells that they can mate, creating nests for their egg sacs. That mating and molting will be done by October, and the season will pick up again then. It’s similar for lobsters. Over the summer, lobsters will migrate into warmer, shallower water to feed and molt, which makes them easier to catch. However, a lobster without its hard shell is trickier to transport, so the peak of lobster season is often earlier in the springtime or in December, before the waters get too cold. 

Each organism in the ocean, just like on land, has a season of rest, regrowth, or stasis, followed by a season of abundance. As consumers, we’re often used to eating strawberries in January or oysters in June. But to truly be aligned with seasonality, Shellem and Neff say, is to widen your palate and embrace other options. 

“It’s amazing to work with James Beard chefs that are educated and able to experiment with obscure things, like the tulip snails that Dean’s been working with, or North Carolina whelks. The seaweeds I get to bring him are really fun, like the sea bean or prickly pear cactus,” says Shellem. “I’ll even drop off samples so they can make a staff meal, just to educate their staff as well. It is so much fun to see so many people so passionate about the same thing with the same goal.”

But here’s where it gets tricky. Eating seasonally or prioritizing local foods is not just about trying new things. It’s also about learning what the limitations are and sometimes, living with disappointment. Foragers on land, for instance, will only take a certain number of mushrooms in a patch, to ensure sufficient regrowth. For Shellem, the same principle applies to seafood. She gathers what she needs for her restaurants and leaves the rest to flourish. That can make for an uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table. “When we were first opening, we explained to the servers that we’re going to run out of a particular fish tonight, and for some people that gives them anxiety,” says Neff. “But I think that should make you happy. Because that’s the nature of a sustainable restaurant; supplies are limited. We will be constantly changing.” For Neff, leaning into that change, and getting his customers used to it, is key. 

For Shellem, the lesson is more blunt but arguably more widely applicable. “I think if people could be more comfortable with being told ‘no’ sometimes, that would be awesome.” 

As for the tulip snails, Neff says they’ve been popular, and they’ve even had customers come in specifically looking for the snails. “We had people come all the way from France, not too long ago, and they said their main agenda was to eat at the restaurant,” which Neff concedes is a lot of pressure on one dinner order. However, it also means his message is spreading. “It meant so much to them to try [an ingredient] so unique that they’ve never had before.” 

The post Meet the Modern Chef and Forager Duo Bringing Snails to the Menu appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Buoys are a key component of aquaculture and fisheries—there are hundreds of thousands used in the United States alone. The buoy market, already a multi-billion-dollar industry, continues to expand by 5.5 percent each year thanks to increased interest in aquaculture farming. These buoyant orbs come in all shapes and sizes and help to moor lines, mark objects, and signal navigation. In the long history of ocean farming and exploration, we’ve used wooden buoys, cork ones, and iron ones. But today, the majority of buoys on the ocean are made from styrofoam or other polystyrene and polyethylene plastic compounds. There are thousands of buoys in use for weather and navigation alone, and every lobsterman and oyster farmer uses several dozen at a minimum.

Lost plastic buoys float on the currents and join the tonnes of plastics that now cover as much as 40 percent of the world’s seas. Bits and pieces of plastic buoys break off or disintegrate in the ocean sun, joining billions of pieces of microplastics that end up in our seafood.

You cannot have aquaculture without buoys—but you can have buoys without plastic. Sue Van Hook had a lifetime of expertise in fungi when she joined Ecovative Design as the mycologist in 2007. Ecovative Design is a technology company focused on using mycelium—the fine white vegetative filaments of fungus—to solve human needs. After discovering early on in her research that mycelium would float, Van Hook quickly realized the potential for creating buoys.

“My grandfather turned his lobster buoys on a lathe in the ‘50s and ‘60s on North Haven Island,” says Van Hook say, remembering her very first introduction to aquaculture’s wooden floatation devices. “I watched him do all that, all those years ago, and we helped paint the colors on and all of that stuff. And then I watched the whole ocean turn to Styrofoam, which at the time seemed fine, right? It was cheaper. They didn’t have to go through all of that labor of crafting this beautiful thing individually, and they lasted a long time.”

As an adult, Van Hook had become a professor of environmental studies and focused on mycology, which she taught at Skidmore College for 18 years. Now observing the buoyancy of mycelium, it didn’t take her long to remember her grandfather’s lobster buoys and their shift to Styrofoam—and to realize the environmental impact of an ocean full of Styrofoam buoys. She set to work designing and growing mycelium buoys.

Now the founder and CEO of her own company, Mycobuoys™, Van Hook has pioneered the fungus alternative to plastic buoys. To make her buoys, Van Hook will take a rope of pasteurized hemp and inoculate it with a low percentage of mycelium wood rot fungus. The fungus will then grow, spread and take up whatever space it is given to fill. Originally, she used empty soda bottles, and today, she has prototypes up to the size of mooring buoys more than two feet in diameter.

Van Hook has run into challenges finding the perfect fungus for the job, and she continues to work on the durability of the buoys. “We use wood rot fungus,” she says, explaining that the type of mycelium that creates sturdier, more perennial mushrooms like reishi is more suited to the job than the lawn fungus that grows many culinary mushrooms. She has tested dozens of strains of fungus, and she continues to work through varieties in buoy trials.

Currently, Van Hook’s Mycobuoys™ are being tested at 11 oyster farms, shellfish hatcheries, and ocean schools throughout New England and New York. Her goal is to be able to guarantee the buoys for a full season before offering them for retail sale.

Abigail Barrows was one of the first oyster farmers to trial Van Hook’s Mycobuoys™. Barrows has a background in marine biology and studies ocean microplastics. In 2015, she bought the lease on Deer Isle Oyster Company with a goal of turning it into a plastic-free oyster farm.

“We were blown away by the process,” Barrows says of her early experiences with mycelium buoys. “It was really exciting to grow something and then have this product which is so functional. And we were pretty excited about the potential application as we started our sea trials.”

The greatest challenge for Mycobuoys™ and those trialing the buoys is their durability. In addition to their hard plastic bodies, many of today’s buoys have thick toxic paint shells. To create a durable shell for a Mycobuoy™, both Van Hook and Barrows have experimented with natural paints that will protect the buoys from the sun, curious birds, and the hard use inherent in ocean farming.

“We are still looking for a more rugged coating,” explains Barrows, who has used pine tar and linseed coatings and linseed based paints on the buoys. “That would give them more robustness, because boats are going to bang into them, so we need to protect them for more than a season.”

“We are trying to find that beautifully environmentally friendly coating to prolong the life of the buoys,” says Van Hook. Today’s plastic lobster buoys do not last forever—at least not as functional aquaculture tools. Most lobstermen and oyster farmers will use a buoy for 20 or 25 years. Van Hook’s goal for Mycobuoy™ durability is a little bit shorter.

“My ideal business plan is that we grow the buoys every year,” she says. “You buy your buoys at a reasonable price, you have it out there floating your cages for a year, and at the end, we buy it back from you and dry it, grind it ourselves for fertilizer or you could compost them in your own garden.” Van Hook uses old mycelium buoy prototypes in her garden, where she never has to add fertilizer or composite thanks to the nutrition of the fungus. 

“You wouldn’t have to store [the buoys] in your driveway or your yard,” Van Hook continues, referring to the large piles of buoys that spring up on fishermen’s lawns during the off-season, “where all that UV light deteriorates the polyethylene plastic that they are currently using faster.” 

Recent legislation in South Korea will ban the use of styrofoam buoys by 2025, and Van Hook believes that other nations will soon follow. Van Hook hopes her buoys will retail around 10 percent to 20 percent above current plastic buoy prices and believes increasing restrictions on plastics will only make the mycelium option for buoys more appealing. Styrofoam and plastic buoys average between $20 and $50, depending on size, while the cost of Van Hook’s buoys will depend on the ability to scale up production and the solution to the problem of a durable coating. Those interested in helping Van Hook trial Mycobuoys™ can reach out to her via her website for 2025 buoys.

As oyster farmers such as Barrows continue to trial buoys and Van Hook expands to more shapes and sizes, the future of Mycobuoys™ is bright. On her quest to reduce ocean plastics, Van Hook may have stumbled on to an answer for more than just buoys.

“There is just so much potential here,” says Barrows. Plastics can be found in almost all fishing gear, from nets to floatation systems in boats. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is almost half what is called “ghost gear,” fishing plastics lost overboard or abandoned. In addition to Mycobuoys™, Barrows works on prototypes of wooden oyster cages, and she sells her oysters in compostable beechwood bags from a new company called Ocean Farm Supply. “We need to think outside of the box, in terms of using them for mooring balls, other kinds of floatation, other marine systems such as replacing styrofoam boat hulls and marine docks.”

The post Meet the Mycologist Stopping Ocean Plastics, One Mushroom Buoy at a Time appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Kieffer founded Shifting Tides in February 2023 to teach people about intertidal ecosystems—the unique space where the ocean meets the land, which transforms hour by hour as the tide flows in and out—and how they impact our day-to-day lives, especially when it comes to what we eat.

Kieffer leads visitors on tours of the Oregon coast, where she harvests and then prepares a meal with wild seaweed and shellfish right on the beach. I had previously obtained a state license for the right to harvest with her-/rather than merely watch—so, after she demonstrated the proper technique, I was handed a small knife and we worked side by side to carefully remove mussels and gooseneck barnacles from a massive triangular rock slick with saltwater. Enthusiasm radiated from Kieffer as she offered advice and information, but it was frilly neon green seaweed that caused her to truly light up. 

“In Oregon, the seaweed harvest season is from March to June 15th, with a limit of a one-gallon bag of seaweed per day and only three bags per year,” says Kieffer . “The regulations are such that you need to use a knife or scissors to remove seaweeds, and it is actually illegal to pull the holdfast, or root-like anchor, from the rock. This allows them to regrow year after year. It does regenerate quickly, but we should never be harvesting all of what a given area has and should be leaving plenty intact for wild species to utilize.”

Seaweed is a key component of what Kieffer considers to be “climate cuisine,” which includes foraged and farmed foods that positively impact our climate. A primary example is the wild bull kelp pickles that she makes and serves to those who join her with Shifting Tides, which have a pleasantly vinegary, spicy flavor and firm crunch. Participants also have a chance to try the dulse seaweed that she farms and pan fries in olive oil for a delightfully crispy, salty snack. During my tour, I sampled the dulse before and after Kieffer cooked it, and I liked it in its raw form, too—mildly briny in taste and slightly chewy; reminiscent of the sea, but not so different from terrestrial leafy greens. Given the versatility of this specific seaweed, she uses it in and on all kinds of foods, including homemade pasta, vegan Caesar salad dressing, and everything bagel seasoning. 

Seaweed is the primary focus of Kieffer’s work as an educator, forager, and farmer. When she is not leading Shifting Tides tours, Kieffer works as part of a small team at Oregon Seaweed, a local seaweed farm where she has been helping to grow a variety called Pacific Dulse since 2021. Much of their seaweed is sold fresh (about $15 per pound) or dried to nearby restaurants and home cooks, but it is also available for worldwide shipping. As plant-based and environmentally conscious food trends become more widespread, Oregon Seaweed is well poised to address the growing global market demand for seaweed, which was valued at more than $17 billion in 2023 and is expected to double in the next decade. 

“One of the things I love about both of my jobs is that there are not two days in a week that look the same,” says Kieffer. “With Oregon Seaweed, some days I’m outside on the farm all day, cleaning tanks, drying and packaging seaweeds; others, I’m at restaurants teaching chefs how to cook dulse, or at markets talking to customers about it; others, I’m on the computer all day answering emails or dealing with online sales. For Shifting Tides, it’s the same—there’s so much time outside at low tide teaching people and cooking with folks.” 

Kieffer’s schedule ebbs and flows depending on both the tides and the tourism season. In good weather, she may have tours scheduled 10 days in a row and a workshop every weekend. Each of her roles has its own particular responsibilities, but there are clear throughlines between them. 

“Being that seaweed is a less popular food in our culture, a lot of my work with seaweed is teaching people how and why to use it,” says Kieffer. “The topic of eating seaweed is a segway into so many other amazing conservation efforts around food. 

“Regenerative aquaculture is giving back to the environment, rather than just taking from or having a neutral effect on it, and requires no or very minimal inputs to grow food,” explains Kieffer. “Seaweeds, for instance, require sunlight and natural nutrients; no freshwater, herbicides, or pesticides. They are removing carbon dioxide from the water through the process of photosynthesis as well as excess nutrients like nitrogen, which can have positive effects on the local ecosystem.”

The dulse that Kieffer farms at Oregon Seaweed, for example, has the capacity to sequester one pound of carbon for every four pounds of seaweed grown. Out in the wild, Kieffer harvests about 10 different varieties of seaweed, including: nori, kombu, wakame, sugar kelp, pepper dulse, and sea spaghetti. Several of these will be well known to sushi lovers, but few people would know where to buy the seaweed on its own, let alone what it looks like in its natural form. 

Given her sense of perfect ease while navigating the hidden nooks and crannies of Cannon Beach, I was surprised to learn that it was not Kieffer’s native habitat. She was born in New York City and came to Oregon as a teenager. Soon after, she began working for an environmental education company in the intertidal ecosystems. She immediately fell in love.

“I grew up in a family of chefs, restaurant owners, cookbook editors, and overall food lovers, so I was born with a deep connection to food whether I realized it or not,” says Kieffer. “As soon as I moved to the beach, I got away from food service and began working alongside our oceans. I learned so much about food systems and ultimately what goes into getting food from the ocean to our plates.” 

On my visit to Cannon Beach, Kieffer pointed out starfish smaller than my thumbnail suctioned to shells latched to the rocks around tide pools. She told me about sculpin (a type of narrow fish with a wide mouth) that live among sea lettuce and camouflage themselves to match their green hue.

Since founding Shifting Tides over a year ago, Kieffer has explored the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest with people of all ages from all over the country. “At the beginning, it was mostly people from Oregon. Now, by partnering with some hotels on the coast as well as destination management organizations, like Travel Oregon and Oregon Coast Visitors Association, I have been teaching many people who aren’t from the area at all—college students from Wyoming, executive groups from Tennessee, couples from Texas.” 

While visitors may not have access to the same exact wild seafoods when they return home, they come away with an understanding of regenerative food systems that is applicable anywhere. 

“There are so many people working hard to bring food from the sea to our table in a way that is sustainable and helps coastal communities,” says Kieffer. “Telling stories of the people, practices, science, and conservation along our coast over a meal of foraged and farmed seaweeds is truly a dream.”

Kieffer’s dream is the reality that we need. As I watched her sautee seaweed on a portable seafoam green grill just yards from where we had harvested it, I felt a kind of hope that is rarer than a blue-sky day in Oregon. There is no single, simple fix for our food system, but Shifting Tides shows the valuable work already being done and invites us to join in.

The post The Bounty Between the Tides appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Trout need lots of clean, fresh oxygen to thrive,” says Walker, 34. Some grass is good, but too much can deplete dissolved oxygen, slow waterflow and clog drains, “which stresses the fish. And calm fish are healthy fish; healthy fish are delicious fish.” 

This is part of Walker’s annual maintenance routine at Smoke In Chimneys trout farm, which opened in 2019. He’ll spend the day weeding and cleaning, then harvest the remaining fish in the next week or so. The pond then gets a break from production to naturally incorporate or filter out excess nutrients from the ecosystem. In the fall, it will again be loaded with thousands of baby trout. They’ll start their lives here, then cycle through a dozen similar impoundments—that together hold more than 20,000 fish at various stages of maturation—for about two years until they’re ready for harvest. 

“It takes a stupid amount of labor to do it this way compared to big commercial aquaculture operations,” says Walker. “But this is the only way to raise trout that consistently taste like they’ve been pulled fresh out a mountain stream.” 

That’s because the pond is part of a restored, 1930s US Department of the Interior gravity-fed trout hatchery and research facility in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains that was abandoned in the early 1990s due to budget cuts and remoteness. Here, there are no electric pumps, plastic tanks, antibiotics, mechanical agitators, recirculated water, chemical additives or computer monitoring. Water comes from a pristine, 54-degree spring that gushes from the bedrock at 2,000 gallons a minute. It is carried to the ponds through a series of pipes and concrete raceways that mimic natural trout streams, then empties into an adjacent creek. The shale-bottom impoundments are lined with native plants, surrounded by pollinator gardens and selectively managed forest. They’re filled with naturally occurring microbes, insects, amphibians and crustaceans. Walker and two employees hand-survey populations monthly for signs of illness or stress. They harvest and process about 400 whole trout a week, then pack them in coolers for shipping to restaurants and individual customers.

“There are a lot of small-scale trout producers in the US, but this is truly a diamond-in-the-rough situation,” says freshwater aquaculture researcher and current US Trout Farmers Association president Jesse Trushenski. Most similar facilities either vanished during the big-ag-fueled Blue Revolution of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s or are still used to supplement native wild trout populations for fishing. Then there’s the production side: The nation’s largest commercial producer—Boise, Idaho-based Riverence—churns out more than 22 million pounds of trout a year compared to Smoke In Chimney’s give-or-take 120,000.

This is a small, extremely high-end facility operating on historic infrastructure, says Trushenski. “If other commercial facilities [like the Walker’s] exist, there can’t be more than one or two.”

Walker also touts Smoke In Chimney’s sustainability versus typical fish-focused commercial aquaculture farms. On one hand, he likens his farm’s production methods to the inland freshwater equivalency of regenerative livestock farming. 

“This approach is without a doubt going to affect a net positive environmental impact,” says Trushenski. The system acts like a natural waterway, using gravity and hydrostatic pressure to move perfectly balanced water from a limestone aquifer. It requires no electricity or additives to operate. It’s effectively a restored habitat for depleted natural fish populations where, like rotational grazing, trout cycle through different impoundments as they grow and mature, nurturing their needs while playing a supportive role in the overall ecosystem. A percentage of newly hatched fish escapes into the nearby stream, bolstering habitat and wild populations. 

Meanwhile, more farm-raised trout on the market means less extractionary pressure on local streams. It also helps balance the increasing gap in wild-caught seafood production due to overfishing, climate change and human population growth.

“This is an ecological win-win,” says Trushenski. “You’re boosting stream health and native fish populations while making inroads on a problem that is only going to get worse with time.” 

Walker appreciates sustainability and historic novelty—and leverages both to market and tell the story of his trout—but he’s more concerned with the quality of product the method yields. And testimonies back up his claims. 

“There’s this rich, nutty, buttery decadence. It tastes clean and refreshing, like spring water,” says Patrick Pervola, research and development chef at Michelin-starred Washington D.C. eatery, Albi. “This is some of the best fish I’ve tasted in my career. It rewrites what you think of as possible for farm-raised fish.”

But despite all the benefits—and roughly 2,900 miles of native wild trout streams—Smoke In Chimneys is one of about three other commercial trout farms in Virginia. And the others are tiny by comparison and sell almost exclusively to family friends or at local farmer’s markets. That means, by Trushenski’s estimate, about 95 percent of trout consumed in Virginia comes from production strongholds like Idaho, Washington or North Carolina. 

She says the problem stems from issues around education. 

First, most seafood consumers have never tasted wild-caught or truly healthy farm-raised trout, and that lack of exposure leads to decreased demand. Second, Virginia focuses aquatic agricultural resources on marine seafood, so there are no dedicated high school or collegiate-level educational programs for inland freshwater aquaculture. And would-be farmers can’t pursue opportunities they don’t know about.

“To put it into perspective: When I started out, I called around to agricultural extension offices at [the state’s leading universities] and there was literally nobody there that could tell me anything useful about farm-raised trout,” says Walker. “I had to rely on old books from the 1930s I dug up on eBay, rangers working at hatcheries, farmers in other states and trial-and-error to figure it out.”

But Walker remains undaunted. He and wife, Shannon, spent a year sifting through regulatory red tape and launched a small USDA-inspected processing plant near the farm. They work tirelessly on social media and with restaurateurs to educate eaters about the virtues of healthy, farm-raised trout. 

Walker has also joined the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Aquaculture Advisory Board and is in talks with administrators at the new Virginia Tech Aquaculture and Seafood Production Facility. He’s using the position and access to advocate for increased resources around gravity-fed inland freshwater aquaculture. He envisions a future where Smoke In Chimneys has expanded to include one to two dozen sister farms and helped dramatically increase trout consumption throughout the state and Mid-Atlantic. 

We have “the natural resources and the market potential is there,” says Walker, noting $67.5 million in USDA-reported 2018 sales at farms in the top two US trout-producing states alone. “All we need is the support to help us get the ball rolling and tap into that potential. And I don’t plan to quit until that happens. I want to remind Virginians why trout is our state fish.”

The post Meet the Modern Trout Farmer Using Gravity to His Advantage appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“Our vision is a strong, resilient, environmentally sustainable and equitable local food system,” says Virginia Ortiz, GoFarms executive director.

Ortiz sees GoFarm’s role as a hub that takes care of the logistics of supporting small farms and feeding the community. 

Building community partnerships is a crucial element, and GoFarm works with other food access organizations such as Hunger Free Golden and JeffCo Food Policy Council to reach more people and create a broader base of resources.

Founded in 2014, GoFarm started with its local food share program (essentially a CSA curated from multiple farms). More than a decade later, it has become an organization that trains and develops beginning farmers and creatively tackles the problem of how to get affordable, fresh food to the community. As a nonprofit, it is able to fundraise for grants and donations to support its programming and supplement that with revenue generated through produce sales. 

GoFarm’s incubator farmer program gives beginning farmers access to a quarter acre of land for the two-year duration of the program. The farmers receive all the training they need to plan, plant and manage a farm—regardless of their background. 

“The average age of current farmers is 55 to 59, and we know that, over the next 10 years, half of current farmers are going to retire, which means that we need to develop a new base,” says Ortiz. But she points out that there is a “tremendous need” for agricultural education.

“Part of our goal is to change the paradigm of farm ownership. Currently, in Colorado, there are approximately 34,000 farms and only one percent are owned by people of color. Yet, 95 to 98 percent of farm workers are people of color, primarily Latinos,” says Ortiz, who shares that she comes from a long line of farmers and farm workers. She says she is proud that, in the farmer development program, 50 percent of participants are people of color, 65 percent are women and 40 percent self-identify as LGBTQ+.

Moses Smith of Full Fillment Farms was an engineer who had gardened before taking GoFarm’s 20-week course and joining the incubator program. “The important thing was the Whole Farm Planning course that really focused on what it takes to actually grow food,” says Smith.

“One of the biggest benefits is that they not only provide us with land access, which is very hard as a starting farmer, but they also give us a market avenue,” says Ann Poteet of Three Owls Farm. As incubator farmers are establishing their businesses and learning how to generate their own markets, they sell produce back to GoFarm. 

GoFarm’s local food share program feeds anywhere from 500 to 800 members each summer. Members come every week to pick up their share from a few different locations where GoFarm has refrigerated shipping containers to store food after it’s delivered by farmers. Plus, GoFarm takes Chuck out and about in Denver and Jefferson counties every week to ensure they can reach underserved populations that are challenged with food insecurity, disability, transportation and other barriers, such as the communities living in designated food deserts in south Golden. 

“I have an interest in nutritional insecurity,” says Poteet, who was a nurse practitioner before starting her farm. 

“It’s been really inspiring,” says Smith about being able to see his food nourish the community through GoFarm. 

But farmer’s market prices can be high, as producers need to be fairly compensated for their labor and costs. “Customers were clear to us that having access to healthy food was critical to them and affordability was a barrier,” says Ortiz. So, in 2022, GoFarm found the funding it needed to implement a new solution that goes even further to improve accessibility for the 2,600+ households it reaches. 

Customers at its mobile markets can choose from one of three price tiers to shop that day, depending on their needs. For example, bags of mixed greens have three prices listed: $2 (purple), $3 (green) and $4 (orange). And the microgreens are even cheaper, at $1, $2 or $3 for a box. Pasture-raised eggs can be $3, $5 or $7 a carton. 

“You are what you eat,” says Kaylee Clinton, a first-time GoFarm mobile market shopper. “I just feel better about myself when I eat fresher.” As inflation has hit grocery stores, she says that SNAP has helped make food more affordable and she appreciates that GoFarm lets shoppers pick their price point. “I really love it. I think it’s great for everybody.” 

“Typically, I either buy green or orange. I like buying orange when I can. It’s good to have the flexible pricing,” says Ed Gazvoda, who has been shopping at GoFarm for years. “I want to live a good, long, healthy life, so it’s a personal thing, but I just love the food.”

Jess Soulis, director of the Community Food Access program, highlights that accepting SNAP’s DoubleUp Food Bucks—where shoppers essentially get a 50-percent discount—is just one way to make food more affordable. The group also partners with WIC’s Farmers Market Nutrition Program, where participants get a credit to shop. Through its market locations at Littleton Advent Hospital and Juanita Nolasco Senior Residences, the program offers shoppers $10 worth of produce for free. SNAP/DUFB account for 13 percent of its mobile market sales, but all of these incentives combined are closer to two-thirds.

“We’re building this beautiful, vibrant, local food system and we don’t want to replicate the injustices and inequities that are so prevalent in the existing food system,” says Soulis.

The vision continues to grow. The only limitation? “Infrastructure,” says Ortiz. GoFarm is currently seeking out refrigerated warehouse space along the I-70 corridor between Golden and Montbello. 

“That area is important because we need to make it accessible to farmers along the Front Range,” says Ortiz. “With that refrigerated warehouse space, we could easily source from more farmers, distribute more food and serve more communities.”

The post Meet the Nonprofit Training Farmers and Feeding a Whole Community appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Dzap’l Gye’a̱win Skiik translates to busy eagle or an eagle who gets things done. A perfect name for Jacob Beaton. As an Indigenous businessman from the Tsimshian First Nation, he never imagined himself farming or teaching others. He lived a quintessentially suburban life with his wife and two sons before devastating wildfires and floods in B.C. inspired him to start thinking about climate change and food security for his family. 

In 2018, they bought Tea Creek, a 140-acre farm outside the village of Kitwanga in northern B.C. With the intent of keeping most of the property forested and only farming a few acres, they settled into farm life. But Beaton had to learn from scratch. He turned to YouTube videos and started visiting other small organic farms throughout the Pacific Northwest and as far away as Europe. 

“Farming, ranching, field base food production were a big part of Indigenous culture in this region that got wiped out by the Indian Act,” says Beaton. When the act was enacted in 1876, it took control over land rights and access away from Indigenous populations, which blocked most agricultural opportunities. “Immediately, from day one, our First Nations friends local to the area started dropping by, really excited that we were farming,” he says. Some remembered stories their grandparents and great-grandparents had told about farming in the area and asked Beaton to come to their communities and teach them.

But he was busy learning himself and, as he put it, there’s only one of me to go around. In 2020, the pandemic struck, and with food sovereignty top of mind for Indigenous communities in the region, it quickly became clear to the Beatons that they could do more to help their community and it was time to expand. Developing the Food Sovereignty Training Program, they invited Indigenous people interested in learning how to grow their own food to Tea Creek. 

Providing skills training in a culturally appropriate and empowering way is not an easy thing to do, but Beaton is “the eagle who gets things done.” 

Realizing that whatever was taught at Tea Creek had to translate into marketable skills and employment opportunities, Beaton enlisted support from SkilledTrade BC. Working with  employers, industry and government, Skills Trade BC approves non-public training providers, such as Tea Creek, to train and certify individuals who meet industry and government accreditation standards in their trade of choice. Tea Creek is able to offer apprenticeship programs and train an individual all the way to Red Seal certification. Recognized as the interprovincial standard of excellence in the skilled trades, it is the highest level of training in the country. 

Programs run from January to November, and they are open to Indigenous peoples 16 and up at no cost. Meals are provided and bunkhouse accommodation is available. All programs have Indigenous instructors and include carpentry, safety training, first aid, drone mapping, heavy equipment operation, cooking, horticultural training and administration. 

Tea Creek is not a school with desks and classrooms. The land is the classroom. All courses are held outside as much as possible. Instructional cohorts are small, ranging from three to six people. This creates better opportunities for instructors and mentors to connect with trainees who in turn receive more hands-on learning experiences. 

Arriving at Tea Creek in 2020, Sheldon Good was 23 years old when he learned to repair and operate tractors. He says the experience at Tea Creek motivated him to get up during the day and do things. “The environment is really welcoming and there are really nice people taking care of everything,” he says. Acquiring skills he otherwise wouldn’t have learned, he now works at a sawmill.

Tea Creek though is more than learning to operate a backhoe or tractor. The farming methods taught here include best practices from regenerative and conventional farming. This includes learning how to make fertilizer from compost and using a tractor to till the soil. Beaton’s business savvy has him insisting that trainees leave Tea Creek with a range of economically viable farming skills. With food sovereignty top of mind, traditional Indigenous crops such as corn are grown alongside kale, broccoli and lettuce. In 2022, the first crop of Ozette potatoes was harvested. These fingerling potatoes, renowned for their nutty flavor, were brought to the Pacific Northwest from South America by Spanish settlers 200 years ago. Grown primarily by First Nations peoples, they were rarely known outside of Indigenous communities until the late 20th century.

In 2023, Tea Creek hosted Farmstand Fridays where 20,000 pounds of fresh mixed vegetables were distributed to Indigenous families and communities. Tea Creek also prepares and serves 100 hot meals per day to trainees and staff using vegetables from the farm. 

In 2021, Tea Creek’s first year of accredited training, 33 people graduated from Food Sovereignty Training programs. Last year, 292 Indigenous people enrolled in training programs and more than 140 graduated from at least one course. 

“Tea Creek, can solve Canada’s farmer shortage. If funded and supported in a real way, Tea Creek could be scaled with multiple training centers across the country.” Jacob Beaton

It’s estimated that, by 2033, 40 percent of all farm operators in Canada will retire. Two-thirds don’t have succession plans in place. 

“Tea Creek, I’ve been told,” says Beaton, “in the area of agriculture, outputs more people in a year than any other agricultural training program in the province.” With a waiting list of 75 First Nations from the east to west coasts eager to learn, there is no shortage of enthusiasm. 

The legacies of Canada’s Indian Act, though, are far reaching. Canada’s residential school system stripped Indigenous children of their cultural identity and language. This has caused intergenerational harm that continues to be experienced through ongoing marginalization and systemic racism.

In 2023, 93 percent of Indigenous youth attending programs at Tea Creek identified this historical trauma as a factor in their mental health challenges. Through the peer-to-peer counseling Tea Creek offers, the sense of belonging and the purpose it provides through its training, 100 percent of trainees 30 and under, in 2023, reported improvements in their mental well-being. This is Tea Creek’s real success. 

“Before I got here, I was really in a dark place,” says Justice Moore, who is featured in the film Tea Creek, part of CBC’s Absolutely Canadian documentary series. “I was getting to the point of, just, no return. That’s the only way I can put it. I wouldn’t be here if Tea Creek weren’t here. That’s a fact.”

This story is part of our Future Farmers series, highlighting the joys and hurdles of a career in agriculture today. You can read more of this series here. 

The post Meet the Farmer Training Indigenous Youth and Revitalizing a Culture of Food Sovereignty appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I started from a young age, when I was about six years old,” says Ayvar de la Cruz, recalling her earliest experiences of harvesting salt from the area known in the vicinity as Las Salinas. “I began with my parents, then continued with my brothers, then with my children from when they were eight.”

The work of harvesting usually begins in February or March and carries on for three or four months, depending on the weather. The members of the Ayvar de la Cruz family are the only remaining residents of the region to continue harvesting salt in the traditional way, which is done completely by hand with the help of tools made only from local, natural materials, rather than relying on modern equipment. It begins by mixing a rustic concrete from sand and clay to form shallow square basins at the edge of the lagoon. Those lagoons are then filled with both freshwater and saltwater, before lime (in its mineral powder form) is added to the small pools to help separate out the salt from the water. A special rake called a tarecua facilitates this process. There, the mixture dries in the sun over the next five or so days and the salt is collected once the water has evaporated. 

“We start at six in the morning,” says Ayvar de la Cruz. “We start early because when it’s cool, you can move forward without getting so tired. At midday, the heat becomes very strong.” A break is taken from around 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM. When the sun is less intense, the work continues until all the light is gone, around eight in the evening. 

The days are long and the work is hard, but Ayvar de la Cruz focuses on the experience of being in this extraordinary environment. “You feel the fresh air and cool water of the mangroves. It is a feeling of freedom and tranquility.” 

At a distance of 90 years or so, she can still describe with impressive clarity the sensations of that first encounter with the salt flats—the feeling of being carried in her father’s arms and on the back of a donkey as they made the journey there and, later, to the closest town, Petatlán, to sell the salt, as well as its dazzling whiteness when arranged into a mound across mats made of palm fronds after harvesting. 

Over the last decade, all other salt producers in the area have modernized the process. One of the most significant changes has been the implementation of plastic sheets as the base for the drying areas, which makes production go more quickly.  

“Salt made using plastic can be sold for much cheaper and it hurts our local market,” says Ayvar de la Cruz’s son, Don Alejandro. “We don’t market our salt as artisanal, but everyone knows around here that we’re the only ones doing it the natural way.” 

Ayvar de la Cruz laments that the salt flats are now permeated with a “plastic smell” and her son notes that workers often leave their equipment in the lagoon out of season and, when hurricanes hit the coast, plastic pieces can end up elsewhere, endangering local wildlife. The surrounding mangroves are a key habitat for a diverse array of plants and animals, including shrimp, fish, crabs, pink herons, deer and coati (a kind of badger), as well as a type of tree known colloquially as salado (“salty”) because it survives in saltwater. 

In 2006, the Ayvar de la Cruz family was contacted by a new hospitality business called Playa Viva. Its owner, David Leventhal, was planning to construct a resort nearby founded on the principles of regenerative tourism, and he was interested in learning about the local ecosystems and community. Playa Viva hoped that collaborating with residents such as Ayvar de la Cruz could help create a space that would allow visitors to experience the beauty of this stretch of the Mexican coast, while also having a positive social and environmental impact that would linger longer than they would. 

In 2013, Playa Viva instituted the Regenerative Trust, with environmental and social goals that range from restoring ecosystems to raising endangered species for release and donating school supplies to children. Two percent of all earnings from guest reservations are channeled into these local programs.

One of the primary programs funded by the Regenerative Trust is as ReSiMar—short for “Regenerating from Sierra to Mar”—which refers to its area of focus, between the Sierra Madre Mountain Range and the Pacific Ocean. Through ReSiMar, Playa Viva aims to regenerate the entire ecosystem of this watershed. Sourcing ingredients from sustainable fisheries and other small businesses that depend on the watershed, like that of the Ayvar de la Cruz family, is part of this effort. 

Playa Viva committed to buying the salt for its restaurant exclusively from the Ayvar de la Cruz family and, when it started welcoming guests to Juluchuca a few years later, it also offered tours of Las Salinas together during the salt harvest season. This relationship with Playa Viva has been a vital source of support in the family’s efforts to carry on harvesting salt as their ancestors did and it has given them a chance to share their work with foreigners for the first time. 

ReSiMar also records vital information about the watershed to understand the scope of their impact and determine which aspects need the most attention. In 2023, the ReSiMar team tracked water quality, focusing on pollution in the form of plastic packaging and glass bottles. From there, they identified a need for improved ecological education and recycling programs, so they focused on bringing students to the watershed and establishing a town community center. “Water studies provide essential baseline data on the quality and quantity of water during both the rainy and dry seasons,” says Levanthal. “We then compare this data year after year to observe changes.”

With nearly a century of memories to draw on from living in this part of the Guerrero region along the Pacific coast, Ayvar de la Cruz also holds within her the history of this place. She knows the plants and animals that are at home in this unique tropical ecosystem, the natural rhythms of the seasons and how to work with them to harvest salt in a way that the local community has practiced for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. For this reason, it is all the more striking that, in 2024, for the first time in Ayvar de la Cruz’s long life, unusual weather patterns caused a rupture in the timeline of this historic tradition. 

“Every year, there is a rainy season and the lagoon fills. Then it empties and the salt flats are left dry, ready to be worked. It’s a natural cycle that always happens,” says Alejandro Ayvar, the youngest of Ayvar de la Cruz’s six sons. He and his brothers, along with their three sisters, have assisted their mother with the salt harvest on and off since their childhood. “This season, the lagoon did not empty adequately and the areas where salt is produced did not get dry enough.” 

The unseasonably late rains that caused the local estuary system to overflow and Las Salinas to flood during the normal harvest time is just one example of the consequences of the climate crisis as they are being experienced in this part of the world. 

“It’s not the same anymore,” Ayvar de la Cruz says of the local climate in recent years and how this affects the salt flats. “The temperature of the water has changed a lot and it takes more time to harvest the salt.”

As the climate changes and the younger generations of the Ayvar de la Cruz family find more financially stable prospects in other fields of work, the future of this tradition remains uncertain, but Ayvar de la Cruz’s legacy will not soon be forgotten. Her singular connection with this local environment and her commitment to this historic way of harvesting salt is commemorated in a mural on a building near Las Salinas, painted by a visiting artist about six years ago. 

There is value, too, in simply having a conversation about salt, considering its place of origin and the people who harvested it. For as challenging as it can be to create systems that preserve our ancient food practices, it is easy to at least preserve the memory of them. 

“Thank you for coming to make me happy,” Ayvar de la Cruz says at the end of the interview. “To remember is to live again.” 

All interviews have been translated from Spanish into English with the assistance of Ximena Rodriguez, Juan Carlos “Johnny” Solis and David Leventhal.

The post Meet the 97-Year-Old Salt-Harvesting Matriarch appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Plant-based milks have proliferated in the marketplace over the past 15 years; a 2020 study notes that they accounted for 15 percent of all milk sales and 35 percent of the plant-based food category, totaling $2.6 billion in sales.

And there are a lot of milk alternatives out there. Almond, pistachio, macadamia, hazelnut, walnut, cashew, peanut, soy, pea, potato, oat and hemp are just some of the options for anyone forgoing traditional dairy. Yet, pecan milk has been largely absent from the plant milk space. 

“I feel like pecans haven’t had a place in the market because no one grower or conglomerate had a significant supply of nuts to make the milk into a national or global product,” says Kortney Chase. Growing up in southeastern New Mexico, her family would harvest pecans from their farm and make creamy milk from the buttery-tasting nuts. The family would add it to cereal or drink it straight. Years later, Chase wanted to share her love of pecan milk with the world, so she launched Pecana, in late 2023. 

People have tried to introduce pecan milk into the plant-based space before, with varying degrees of success. In 2014, Houston’s MALK Organics became the first brand to make pecan milk, although it was later discontinued; the company now makes almond and oat milk. In 2015 and 2016, Atlanta became home to Treehouse Naturals and Pecan Milk Co-op, respectively. The former is now the only brand manufacturing canned pecan milk.

Pecana sources its pecans directly from its own farms—those same orchards in which Chase grew up. A third-generation pecan farmer, Chase’s family started Chase Pecan in Artesia, New Mexico, in 1986. In 2003, Chase Pecan relocated from New Mexico to San Saba, Texas, the self-proclaimed “Pecan Capital of the World.” The Hill Country town is home to what may be the oldest fossilized pecans on record; the remnants discovered on the banks of the Colorado River in San Saba are estimated to be at least 65 million years old.

But, the pecan holds a special place for Texans in particular; in 1919, it was declared the state tree because of its role in Texas heritage, economy and culture. Pecans were also a crucial food source for the indigenous peoples of the region, whose upriver trade routes expanded the nut’s habitat and eventual agricultural terrain. But pecan growers in Texas have faced hardship in recent years due to climate change, crop input costs, water expenses and lack of labor.

Chase Pecan is now the leading grower of pecans, with 13,000 cultivated acres comprised of tenant farmer-occupied estate orchards and small family farms in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, with roughly 3,000 acres of that land dedicated to organic farming. The company specializes in the Pawnee (a large, buttery variety popularized in the western states by Kortney Chase’s father, Richard) and Western Schley (a small, crunchy variety) pecans. It’s also one of the largest manufacturers of pecans, harvesting an average of 20 million pounds of nuts annually, which ensures Pecana gets a consistent supply.

 After graduating college in 2011, Chase set out to learn the manufacturing side of her family’s business, as well as doing sales and market research. “I would look at certain products like nut milk and wonder why they weren’t made with pecans,” she says.

It wasn’t until the pandemic, however, that Chase began formulating a “commercial nut milk that I wanted to drink.” While higher in fat and calories than almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts and cashews, pecans make an indisputably creamy milk and, unlike oats, they don’t require the addition of canola or sunflower oil to yield a product with an equivalent consistency. 

Because pecan milk is so new to the marketplace, there’s little data comparing it to other plant milks, but its lower environmental imprint and the crop’s long production cycle bode well for the future of the industry. Pecan trees take five to seven years to bear fruit, but they produce for up to 300 years. By contrast, almond trees don’t bear fruit for three years and have an average production span of 25 years, while English walnuts bear fruit in four to seven years and have a 30-year production period. 

Pecans are also wind-pollinated, which means the trees can reproduce without human or insect intervention. These cross-pollinated trees yield larger, higher-quality orchard nuts (commercial pecan varieties are hybrids developed through controlled pollination). 

Almonds, by contrast, require pollinators for reproduction. California produces 80 percent of the global almond crop, which is aided by the importation of European honeybees, which then compete with and displace native species. Imported bees also die in large numbers due to pesticide exposure, parasites and disease. 

Regardless of the type of plant milk you consume, “all tree nuts and legumes are, generally speaking, far more sustainable from orchard to manufacture than any milk from an animal,” says Dana Ellis Hunnes, a dietitian and assistant professor at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. “However, the degree of sustainability for one nut or legume to another varies as some are more water intensive than others, but tree nuts are a carbon sink because trees pull carbon out of the atmosphere and into their roots. Plant milks also require 50-percent less water and up to 10-percent less land than cow’s milk and produce minimal greenhouse gasses.”

While dairy milk shouldn’t be demonized, it does come with a more significant environmental footprint. “The primary reason is that you have to feed a pregnant or lactating animal more food, and this is inefficient,” says Hunnes. “When you consider the water use, emissions produced by the animals themselves and land use, plant milks will always win.”

The post Meet the Pecan Farmer Who Wants to Change the Plant-Based Milk Scene appeared first on Modern Farmer.

He grew up in north-central Massachusetts, an area Shepard dubs “the industrial wasteland,” where plastic and manufacturing were a way of life. “The river at the bottom of the hill where we lived ran different colors every day, depending on what color dyes they were dumping into it,” says Shepard. When the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire, the young Shepard asked his mother why it made the news. “I said, ‘Ours catches fire once a month,’ and she explained to me rivers weren’t supposed to do that.” 

An environmental awareness began to stir in Shepard. He got a degree in ecology, and then, in 1989, secured a piece of land in Alaska, five miles away from the nearest road and 300 miles away from Anchorage, and discovered most of his food was shipped from Seattle. That supply chain didn’t make sense to Shepard. “I was surrounded by blueberries and lingonberries and all kinds of different food products that the indigenous cultures ate for time immemorial. So I thought, why not redesign my ecosystem?” 

Shepard is now 35 years into his program, with hundreds of properties he’s restored across North America, all bought and paid for, free and clear. He operates his farm as well as a diversified enterprise based on smart real estate investments, selling plants, consulting and selling large, whole-sale quantities of a handful of native and non-native plant crops, such as hazelnuts and asparagus. 

Combining principles from permaculture, agroforestry and ecology, Shepard pioneered what he calls restoration agriculture. This new method of farming produces food in a way that restores land and ecosystems by establishing natural communities based primarily on native, perennial plants that are high in nutrients, carbohydrates, protein and oils. 

Shepard’s intentionally designed Alaskan ecosystem, supplemented with animal proteins, supplied all his food while enhancing, not degrading, the land, and he realized that restoration agriculture, a system based on native, perennial plant crops, could work anywhere. “I got good at it,” he says, “and took it right to the corn belt.”

In 1995, Shepard acquired land in Wisconsin that was degraded from years of intensive, industrial agriculture. He put his restoration skills to the test and reintroduced native food crops, including oaks, cherries, hazelnuts, chestnuts, apples, gooseberries and fungi. By restoring the Midwestern plant communities that were present before industrial farming, Shepard noticed increased soil fertility and a better appearance–it also stored water more effectively. 

His methods stand in sharp contrast to farming annual crops, which destroys soil and existing perennial ecosystems. “You plant seeds that grow for a few months, and it’s done,” says Shepard. “You’ve created a desert, and there’s no longer a rich, abundant ecosystem.” 

Shepard’s method manages ecological succession to optimize ecosystem health while using far less labor than traditional farming. “Right now, my ‘farming’ is that I’m a glorified hunter-gatherer, except I don’t have to go out looking for things,” he says. “They’re right where I planted them and they stay within fences. It’s really wonderful.” 

Instead of buying into traditional farming, Shepard carved his own path in a way that felt meaningful. “I wanted to help accomplish massive ecological restoration, at scale, as fast as possible,” he says. His advice for farmers who want to change to a perennial agriculture system is to start researching perennial plants that would naturally co-exist in one’s ecosystem. Plant some of those plants right away, and more over time while still relying on annual crops to make ends meet. He recognizes that it’s difficult for small-scale farmers to make a living, but his methods prioritize restoring ecosystems and using creative, diversified income sources to support the cash flow from farming.

The post Meet the Midwestern Farmer Restoring the Land by Growing Native Plants appeared first on Modern Farmer.