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- Within ten days, we'll be picking every single day
for about six weeks.
- As a farmer, Mark Shepard appears hard to pin down.
- We have four different spots
where springs have started again.
- He's obviously not growing acres of corn and soybeans,
and while he grows asparagus, he only has a few rows.
- We started out 20 years ago
with what's called "alley cropping,"
where you grow a row of trees between your fields.
- He grows hazelnuts and chestnuts,
so you could call him a nut farmer,
but that's only part of the story.
[nuts clinking together]
He's also growing apples, pears, berries, mushrooms,
and a dozen other crops.
[high-pitched whistle]
- Hi, piggers.
Come on, guys!
I'm passionate about the woods and trees
and plants and animals and all that.
How you doing, piggers?
- Mark Shepard sees himself
as a farmer for a new era of restoration agriculture.
- Why should we work and spend money and inputs and resources
trying to keep something alive that wants to die?
And why are we trying to kill the stuff that wants to live?
Why don't we figure out how to farm the stuff
that wants to live
and keep improving that system as it goes along?
Wow, that's good.
- New Forest Farm near Viola
is living proof of Mark's hypothesis
that you don't need big tractors and chemicals
to grow enough food to feed the world.
- How do we get those same staple foods for the human race
while not destroying ecosystems
but actually restoring ecosystems?
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- Mark and his wife came here in 1995 from Alaska.
- Mark Shepard: It was a farmed-out rocky, barren landscape.
- Mark's idea was to find species
that flourished without help yet still produced a harvest.
He planted apple trees, chestnut trees, and hazelnuts.
Then he left them alone.
- My maintenance technique--
I call it STUN, Sheer Total Utter Neglect.
- He selected for the heartiest and most abundant trees,
and he planted organic produce in between.
- When we got started here, most grocery stores
didn't even have an organic section for produce.
- What's remarkable is that
Mark can grow anything of quality on this land at all.
The slopes were highly eroded,
and the clay soils that remained couldn't hold much water.
Mark adopted a simple philosophy on water.
- If the rain falls on this farm, it belongs on this farm.
- Every alley has a ditch or swale next to the trees
to hold water.
[raindrops hitting water]
Overflow rain goes to what's called a "pocket pond."
- Actually, like, the key to the whole entire farm,
believe it or not.
- If the pond fills up,
water flows out to the ridges through another swale.
- Just two weeks ago, we got a 3 1/2-inch rainfall.
The neighbor's 60 acres of rain
just came roaring down our valley,
and in about an hour and a half, it was gone.
- Mark's rain never left his farm.
- This system is designed to capture the big thunderstorms.
- All the trees and water have an extra benefit.
Native birds, frogs, and insects have returned
and provide pest control and a little beauty.
- That's sometimes my best paycheck.
I really, really like the natural world.
And to hear all these birds singing in the morning.
To hear the frogs singing in the ponds.
- Acre for acre,
Mark's version of multi-crop or polyculture farming
doesn't produce as many calories as a cornfield.
But he says the equation is skewed.
- What are the true costs of running a system like that?
You look at the corn across the street
without the big tractors,
the big equipment, the fossil fuels used to run it,
the chemicals for herbicides and fertilizers and all that.
The system doesn't work.
- Mark has one tractor
and can run his farm without it if needed.
A windmill provides the power for his processing shed.
[wind turbine blades hum]
- We don't have to use fossil fuels if we don't want to.
- Mark doesn't say other farmers need to eliminate corn,
but adding trees can reduce erosion,
provide habitat and add a crop.
- So you still get your corn and your beans
and then you'll get extra
because we're going up into the third dimension
with our perennial plants.
- It works even better for pasture-fed cattle.
- With slightly shaded pastures,
the grass actually grows faster, grows longer,
and the cattle actually graze longer
because they're more comfortable.
- Now Mark is exporting his idea across the world.
- We can restore natural ecosystems all across the planet
while paying our bills as profitable ventures.
So I think what's surprised me
is how popular it has become.
- Mark says farmers are naturally resistant to change,
but he thinks his farm proves the system can work.
- Look at the economic development we can do
simultaneous with environmental benefits.
Come on, people, let's wake up!
Look at the opportunity in front of us.
It's really quite simple.
And we'll put another pond down there,
and then we'll send it back in through our hazelnuts.
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