Courier New;Cambria Math;  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)