- So on our panel we have
Vance Haugan from Crawford County Ag Agent.
We have Randy Mell from La Crosse's Natural Resources
Educator and Basin Educator.
We have Otto Weigand who's up from Washburn,
Burnett, and Sawyer counties and we have have
Mark Rickenbach who's a professor of forestry and
in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.
Well what is silvopasture?
Silvopasture is a pretty simple concept.
The question is how to do it well.
The idea is that you're combining timber production,
livestock production, and forage production
on the same site and you have to do it in a way that
does a good job managing all three of those
elements and that's what the challenge is.
The idea is that the trees provide some long-term
returns, economic returns, and the livestock and
the forages give you some annual returns.
So silvopasture is one of five agroforestry systems.
The US Department of Agriculture defines these
five systems.
The categories are a little bit arbitrary because
sometimes you have a system that is more than
one system, or the boundaries between the systems
are a little unclear.
The other four systems are, windbreaks is probably
the most common and the best known.
Riperian buffers.
Something called alley cropping, which is where
you put your, grow your crops between rows
of trees or shrubs.
And forest farming.
And then silvopasture, as I said, is the fifth one
and the one we'll talk about most today.
One of the things, you know, agroforestry systems
by combining different production types,
can bring extra economic, environmental, and social
benefits, but because you're managing so many
different systems at the same time, they can be
more challenging to manage.
And then we have a lot to learn in terms of how
to do them well.
So silvopastures,
now we're going to kind of turn our attention
to silvopasture and to Wisconsin.
There are sore of two different approaches
to how to establish them.
They can be done by planting trees in an open area,
in an open existing pasture or
you could do it in a sort of blank space, in a field,
where you would plant the trees and establish
the forage at the same time.
The other thing you can do, and this is what tends
to be talked about a lot in Wisconsin, is that you can
thin existing woods and establish forage
in those woods and then bring your livestock
into those woods, so those are two different ways.
Another thing that we do see a lot in Wisconsin
is what I would call silvopasture systems
by happenstance, things that are sort of remnant savannas,
where you have some open grown trees in a pasture
and those can be then managed as a silvopasture as well.
Now I don't know if those of you in the audience
have heard of silvopasture.
There's a good chance that you haven't because although
it's a pretty accepted practice in the southeastern US
and also in the northwestern US,
it has not been talked about a lot in the upper midwest.
But Wisconsin farmers do have and value trees
in their pasture, and they graze woodlands, and we'll
go into that a little more detail in just a moment.
We just haven't talked about how they do it,
and why they do it, and maybe how they can improve
the management of it.
And before we go any further, it's important
to clarify that silvopasture is not just turning your cows
in the woods.
When you turn your cows in the woods,
decades of research have shown that you can have
lots of very bad environmental outcomes.
It can cause damage to trees.
It basically stops new trees from growing up.
There's not good forage for the cows, so it's not
really good for the livestock.
It can cause erosion and compaction
'cause forest soils are sensitive and more vulnerable
to those issues when they have livestock on them.
And it can speed the spread of invasive species.
So there can be a number of reasons why you don't
want to do just plain cows in the woods, but that's
not what silvopasture is.
Silvopasture requires management to prevent those problems.
One of the reasons that we're really interested
in silvopasture is because, as I said, Wisconsin farmers
are already grazing the woods quite a bit.
So about 19% of farm wood lots are raised in Wisconsin.
And in fact, this is pretty typical for the upper midwest.
Surrounding states have even higher rates
of grazing in their farm wood lots.
Iowa is highest, 30%, so it's happening.
So perhaps we should address the issues of how
to do it better.
So in Wisconsin, we have not talked about
silvopasture very much and that's because
of this legacy, because of this knowledge of the damage
that can be done by livestock in the woods.
However as we've seen, it's happening, and so
that's why we really want to turn to improving
our management.
Why are people grazing in the woods?
There's a whole bunch of reasons.
One of the first ones that's mentioned is that
Wisconsin's property tax law
gives a tax break for agricultural land uses
to try to keep taxes from being a cause of conversion
of agricultural land to development.
So to try to preserve our agricultural land.
But one of the perhaps unanticipated consequences
of that is that if you own woodlands, you pay
substantially less property tax on them
if you have livestock graze in your woodlands
than if you don't, and so that's one driver.
But there are many other reasons that farmers
choose to use their woodlands
for pasture.
One is that there's a lot of value to shade.
Livestock do better if they're protected from heat stress.
And conversely, in the winter, trees can
protect cattle from wind and so can
provide shelter for them outdoors.
There's also a problem in that farmers want
to make use of the land that they have, and they want
their woodlands to be productive for them economically
and so by using the woodlands for an area for grazing,
they can get economic returns from that land
which otherwise wouldn't be available
to them on an annual basis.
Some other things that are straight out
environmental benefits is that people are interested
in silvopasture in order to restore savanna habitat,
which was a key type of habitat in southern Wisconsin
before European settlement and
people see silvopasture as one possible way
to manage their lands in order to encourage
this type of habitat structure.
Other things that people have mentioned is
they like having, adding the component of income
from trees to their farm, and they see it as a
savannas or silvopastures as a good hunting
type of habitat.
And then some farmers simply like trees.
So as I say, we have not talked about silvopasture
a lot in Wisconsin.
There are some of us who have started these conversations
and we've come up with some preliminary management
recommendations, and I want to stress that they're
preliminary because we're really just starting
the research for our area.
The research that's been done in the southeast and
the northwest is of interest and we draw from that,
but of course our trees are different,
our soils are different, our climate is different, and so
we can't just assume that we'll have the exact
same results.
So a couple of preliminary recommendations.
There are times when silvopasture's not appropriate.
If your trees are casting a deep shade and if you
don't want to thin in order to create more light
and if so, their grass won't grow there.
That's not a silvopasture; those are woods and
you probably shouldn't have livestock in there.
There are many landowners whose woods are in some
kind of legal agreement that precludes grazing
and so obviously those sites are not suitable
for silvopasture.
And then there are a whole lot of other
environmental considerations.
If soils are too wet or slopes are too steep,
those sites might be too vulnerable to erosion
for silvopasture.
If you have flora in your woods that you want,
that are sensitive and that would be displaced
by establishment of grasses or forages, then that
would not be an appropriate site for silvopasture.
And then other other I really, the two other things
I want to stress is,
one of the big challenges that we have yet to solve is
what about regenerating, bringing up the next
crop of trees?
That is not the time, when you're trying to establish
your next crop of trees, until they get to a certain
size, you need to keep the livestock out of there.
So that's not a time, in sort of the life cycle
of your forest to bring livestock in.
And then the final thing in that, I can't stress that
enough, and we'll get to that again, is that
the grazing has to be managed very carefully
because it is a more sensitive system.
So this is, in a way, the sort of converse.
If you're going to establish a silvopasture,
there's some things you have to look at.
You have to look at the amount of light.
Is there enough light for your forages?
What trees are there now, and how big are they?
That will determine whether you need to thin.
And are they big enough to have livestock in there
and not be damaged?
Where are you in that regeneration cycle?
Are you trying to preserve the next crop of trees
or are you early enough in your cycle that you
have 20 years yet before you're going to be thinking
about establishing the next crop of trees?
Look at your soils.
Another consideration is whether you need
to manage plants or control plants that might be
toxic to livestock.
And then finally, what is the timber potential
of the current stand?
And that will effect how you manage it.
Then those recommendations have all been about thinning
woods, which as I said, is the thing we hear about most
from Wisconsin farmers, but there are farmers
who have established silvopasture by planting
in open pasture and
one of the questions that people tend to ask is,
"Well, what trees should we plant?"
And the answer is, it depends on what you want.
Is shade your primary goal?
Is firewood your primary goal?
Are you interested in trying to raise nuts?
So all those things will determine, and we don't have
a simple answer yet.
Another thing is, what is your site like?
Obviously, certain trees are adapted to certain types
of soils, to certain types of sun exposure, and
they're lots, where you are in the state, there are lots
of other considerations.
So these are some of the things to think about.
How will you set up the trees?
How far apart will you do your rows?
Will you plant a single row of trees,
or a double row, or a triple row of trees?
Those are things that the answer is,
it depends on what you're trying to achieve and
we don't yet have specific Wisconsin research.
But there is some national research people can look to.
And protecting young trees from livestock is another thing,
another challenge when you're establishing
in existing pasture.
As I said, it's really important to manage the grazing
in a silvopasture system.
We would recommend only using rotational grazing
with silvopasture.
At this point we would recommend that any
silvopasture paddock also includes some open pasture
so that it wouldn't be an entirely silvopasture pasture,
you know, it wouldn't, there would be open pasture
as well as treed areas.
Again, a preliminary recommendation is to have the
water source be away from the trees so that there's
a motivation for the livestock to move in and out
and they don't just park themselves under the trees.
It's very important to note that one tree or just a small
group of trees is not a good idea because then you get
too many livestock congregating in one space
and that kills the grass, it can also be a vector,
it can also encourage disease transmission
between the animals, so the trees need to be
spread out enough that the animals are spread out
enough so that they're not damaging one spot.
And then livestock type is an important consideration, too.
We, I have been talking mainly about cattle,
because that's of course, that's the primary thing
we think about, we have a lot of farms that have
either beef cattle or dairy cows and heifers that
may be turned out to graze, but there's a lot
of silvopasture that uses sheep.
People have talked, people have used goats
in some situations and
having your poultry grazing could also be considered
silvopasture.
One of the things that has come up sometimes is
I've talked primarily so far about assuming that it's
farmer, the farmer is also the landowner, but there
are some landowners who are interested in having,
potentially having farmers graze their woods,
either to manage them, to turn them into savanna,
or maybe for tax reasons, and particularly in a situation
like that, it's really important that there's good
communication between the person who will be
managing the livestock and the person who owns
the land, to make sure that their goals are aligned
and that each of them understands what is involved
in that kind of arrangement.
So we really recommend that those goals be clarified.
But even if silvopasture is being done on a person's
own land, it's very important that that person think
in advance about what his or her goals are.
So as I've said, we have many questions.
When I did some interviews with both farmers and
resource professionals, some of the key things
that they said is that we need demonstrations
and examples of silvopasture right here in Wisconsin
that we can look to and they said we need information
on economics.
We need information on the cost of establishment
and management and what the potential profit sources
might be.
Everybody wants information on species.
We've mentioned that you want information on tree
species, but also what kinds of forages do best
with a little bit of shade.
People are interested in knowing how to establish
and how to manage for savanna.
People are very interested in knowing what is needed
to protect young trees.
We need to know, there's, one of the main reasons
people are interested in grazing is as a tool
to control brush in woods and to control
invasive species.
So people are very interested in knowing how
to use grazing as a management tool and
to make sure it doesn't actually make the problem worse.
What sites are suitable, as I mentioned, and
what are the markets for silvopasture products?
So we've started some research there.
I'm involved with with Mark in a research project
where we're establishing some silvopasture in some
farm woods at the Lancaster Agricultural Research Station.
Another graduate student is establishing silvopasture
on a farm and a third student is doing case studies
in a variety of farms that are doing either silvopasture
or some kind of grazing in the woods.
Another student is doing research on using goats
to manage invasive species.
There's a bunch of research that's just starting.
There's also research, again Mark Rickenbach is part of that
on whether grazing can be used as a tool
for savanna restoration or restoration of public lands.
And so they're things are starting to happen.
And at this point I would like to turn it over to the panel
and ask Vance to start with some of his observations
about what he sees on the landscape with farmers.
- So I want to talk a little about Crawford county.
We have about 35% of the folks are self-identified
as rotational grazers.
I'd say that'd be both beef and dairy cattle in Crawford
county, one of the highest percentages in the state.
Crawford county is also 49% forested.
However, as Diane mentioned, pre-European settlement
of the majority of Crawford county was grass savanna.
Now there's some demarcations based on the Wisconsin River
the Kickapoo River and the Mississippi, but the point being
is that we have a lot of opportunity to utilize
some of the existing now-forested areas
that then could come back into productive pasture
without having some environmental difficulties.
The other thing that I wanted to mention is that
we also have a huge number of trout streams
in Crawford county and I've been working with Trout
Unlimited and we've been taking a look at putting
together grazing near trout streams so riperian grazing
or grazing by moving water, that will hopefully
improve stuff.
Now the idea is that we reduce the number of trees,
we increase the amount of grass, and that it holds
the soil better.
And for those of you who remember 20 or I guess it's
almost closer to 30 years ago, when the state legislature
was going to outlaw all grazing by streams.
Sometimes without research we can have some
very unexpected consequences.
Thank goodness that legislature did not,
legislation, excuse me, did not get through the legislature
but we have a lot of opportunities for doing grazing
in our area and in addition with that, and the other thing
that's done quite a bit with riperian areas is then also
using some of those areas as shade paddocks
that then can have long term, long, long term
rest periods, which again, adds to some of the environmental
benefits for our grazers.
- Thanks, Vance.
- Hello, my name is Randy Mell.
I work as a major resource educator over in La Crosse
in the Driftless Area.
I've been a forester for about 43 years now.
I started off as a forester in the state of Minnesota,
in the southeastern corner of Minnesota and
there managed a number of state properties and
also worked with a lot of private land owners, so what I'm
trying to bring to you today and everything is
a forester's perspective of cattle in the woods.
Of course when I was trained was back in the late 60's
early 70's and the training still continues for foresters,
wildlife biologists and forest ecologists, that cattle
in the woods are not a really good, good ecological remedy
and of course that's our biggest background, but
through the years, me working with restoration
of woodlands that have been destructively grazed,
I know the resilience that can happen once the cattle
are either removed or they're properly grazing in those
areas and here our opportunity, like Mansa said, is that we
have a savanna, tall grass savanna, as a natural element
a natural forage and natural ecosystem in the southwestern
part of Wisconsin and that particular savanna is
larger areas of open grass, tall grasslands,
scattered areas of oak groves and of sometimes
even just scattered individual trees, is what was
recorded in past histories and that particular savanna
was a very, very strong type of ecological system.
We see it as an opportunity here too because that
it's a very, very small percentage of that prairie,
natural prairie, still exists now and we've lost an
awful lot, so ways that we can bring that,
those types of either assimilated savanna back,
or portions of those types of ecosystems back
I think is very important to the, especially the
southwestern portion of Wisconsin.
Just because foresters and ecologists and wildlife
biologists have been trained against cattle in the woods
doesn't mean that they can't adapt.
They're working all the time with working lands.
Foresters know what that is.
Those are Christmas tree plantations,
helping people with a thinning
of their property or planting black walnut groves,
just strictly for veneer products
and these are fibery for that matter, fast growing hybrids
for fiber and or for energy production.
So these particular working lands can actually be
installed in a planting process and everything
with a private woodland owner if their needs are that.
The issue with that, though, is that there is very few
foresters have actually experimented
with a planting process
and it would involve getting to know the
local agricultural agent, different forage specialists,
a number of grazing specialists, just knowing the livestock,
the type of livestock that you're going to be using
in your woods, would then help you prescribe
what types of trees to plant, and or how to maintain
those plants in health, those trees that, in health,
if they were planted in an open prairie, or how far
down to thin your stands, what type of stands
would actually be relevant to a conversion, to a savanna
type, and a grazing process, so not to say that it
couldn't be done, it just is going to take a little bit of a
philosophical change in terms of the foresters.
I don't know if the wildlife biologists and or forest
ecologists would go along with that type of working land
scenario.
They're really more interested in either migrating
other wild animals and other wildlife that's in that area,
and or the forest ecologists of the other rare and
endangered or other species in other communities.
That might be fragmented or segmented or
damaged by grazing.
But just identifying those particular areas on a private
land and then identifying those areas that would
be best suited for a silvocultural pasture treatment,
I think are definite possibilities in the future.
- Thanks, Randy.
And Otto has contributed some slides
of some of the things that-- - [Otto] Yes.
- Are happening in his area.
- Okay, I might mention that Sawyer Colony, where this
particular farm is is more than 80% forested.
The other two colonies I work in
are more than 60% forested.
We have a lot of trees.
In this particular case, this is a multi-species,
multi-enterprise type of operation.
The main feature here is dairy sheep.
And it's three women that run this farm,
a mother and two daughters and they cleared out
some pine plantation areas for silvopasture.
This particular area here is located near the buildings.
It's kind of square.
I think they intend to use it for, you know,
middle of the afternoon, summer kind of shade
for the sheep, just mainly to rest in.
They've cleared off another area along one of the edges
of their farm and it's a long, narrow area,
similar to this pine, and I think what they're trying
to do is to run different paddocks into this area
so that the sheep can go in there whenever they want to,
but most of the grazing will be out in the open.
The issue with pine is you have to clean up the floor.
The soil is acid to begin with, and then if you have
all these pine needles down there you have to clean that
all up and I don't know if they're going to put lime in
or what they're going to do but they're going to try
to, you know, get some grasses established
if they don't grow by themselves and I think they'll
have to use a little help here.
We have a bison farmer who's been working actively
with extension.
Diane's been on it, the farm, and Joanna Newman,
the forage extension specialists from River Falls
has been out there several times and the forester's
been involved, Jason Fishbock, who, you know, is one
of our ag agents, myself, we've been involved
with this farmer and he is doing a number of things.
He's cleared out some of his wood lots.
He's got a bit of everything but it's more oaks and
more aspen and he's been observing his bison
over the years and he sees that the bison will actually
browse at certain times of the year, oak leaves and aspen
sprouts, aspen twigs, with leaves also.
So he's doing an experiment on this.
He's got three different paddocks set up with his bison,
different times of the year, trying to figure out what is
bison are interested in,
why they're interested in it.
The photograph down below is an area that he just
cleaned off recently and they're still cleaning up the weeds
and the brush in there.
Another bison farmer, the previous farmer was in
Burnett county, this one's in Washburn county.
And he's got mostly oak and he's cleared off
very large areas for the bison.
He's after, what we're after is
about a 30 to 40% canopy cover.
The thing is, of course, once you clear the outer trees
out, these trees are going to umbrella over, so he's
going to have to do some thinning on that,
to maintain this.
He's got a very vigorous grass growth
under these trees.
His issue is that he's contracted his bison
with Northstar Bison.
They will pull the bison when they need them.
They'll bring them when they need to bring them in.
So his regime with his pasture's a little bit sporadic,
so you know, it might be grazed more heavily,
or in this case there's not any grazing going on
at this particular time.
The next one, this is Mike Miles is in Polk county
and he's got beef on the rotational grazing system.
He's got about a dozen animals.
He's put in key lines to capture water that's running
off of his side hills so he took a little tractor
and a moldboard plow and made these furrows and
he's fenced them and he has since planted
hazelnuts in those furrows and he's going to have
a tree crop, a tree nut crop in there and the photo
below shows these key lines, you know, this is
about a year after, how much they've grown up.
You can't see the trees yet, so he's still working
on that issue but he's trying to capture water and
he's trying to get them on his trees.
He's taking the neighbors' water, but he's not
letting the neighbor downstream get any of his water,
so it's an interesting situation.
So that's kind of my, those are the examples.
We have probably at least 10 people who are
doing silvopasture in the three counties I work in.
Maybe a dozen that have formal, intentional
projects going on right now.
- So again, my name is Mark Rickenbach and
I really come to this issue through Diane and
really from a place of thinking about where forest
and forest policy is and the policies that we develop
in the state and how they incentivize behaviors that
we don't have good answers for, and I think grazing
in woodlands is a good example.
We're creating an incentive, a huge incentive,
for landowners to graze woodlands and the response
that we get from the forestry community is,
"Well, don't do it."
And so I think this is an opportunity in this project
to begin to explore is, under what conditions can we do that
because what you've seen kind of with the presentations is,
we know it happens.
There's examples of it where people have done very well
in ways that most people would define as being a
sustainable way of doing this, yet we don't have guidance
for others in how they might think about that.
And I think this is kind of a disconnect between the
forestry community, who has an interest in kind of
maybe thinking more about traditional forestry and
plantations and things like that, meeting the agricultural
community and that's already a difficult divide
in this state.
Things happen in the forest, things happen in agricultural
fields, and never the tween shall meet.
And this is an example where they are meeting and
we don't have good guidelines for how to think
about that and so I think with this project and the
various projects we've talked about, is it's really
a chance where extension could play this role that
we expect extension to play.
There's people with experiences.
We're actually looking at research that's going to
start to develop what might eventually turn into kind of
guidelines we have more science behind, which would
be really useful because I think what we have is,
we have a void of information, so people can do anything
and there's very few people who can judge what is a
sustainable practice, what is a sound practice, versus
those that are simply, "That just looks like enough cows
"in the woods that I'm going to give you the tax rate
"for grazing your woodlands."
And so the way I think about this is, this is the beginning
of a process to think about so developing that
knowledge base, developing a dialogue about what
are the right practices, what practices do we like,
which are going to be sustainable, both ecologically,
socially, and economically and then maybe thinking
about, "Okay, best management practices."
Developing some tools to actually help farmers and
others think about, "Well how do we go about grazing
"different kinds of woodlands?"
We could think about assessor training.
Because right now, assessors don't have anything on which
to go by to say as, "These lands are being raised in an
"appropriate way."
Would an assessor say that rotational grazing
of woodlands is an adequate stocking
of cows in a woodland?
We don't know.
And lastly, the other place is, and I've seen this happen
in forestry in moving practices is, organic standards.
If we can develop research that informs kind of
what we think is a sustainable practice,
those can weed themselves into non-governmental ways
that we regulate behavior through things like certification.
So, with that I think this is kind of a neat project and
look forward to the questions and conversation.
- Well thank you very much and let's thank our panel.
(applause)