I’m quite wary of agriculture influencers and gurus, and the incestuous infinite ponzi scheme of permaculture design courses. My sense is this course will be different. I’ve been following Erik’s work for a while now, he doesn’t seem content to imitate or stagnate. Exciting, experimental stuff

Temperate Syntropic Workshop — Black Creek Farm & Nursery

Join Roger Gietzen and Erik Schellenberg for a 4 day interactive training session. Learn the theory and practice of syntropic agroforestry in a temperate climate at Black Creek Farm in Highland, NY. W...

bcfnursery.com

Bad news: local and global water cycles are fucked, and that may be worse for climate stability than rising CO2. Good news: restoring local water cycles is way more actionable than nagging multinational corps to stop burning fossil fuels, and it has real, local, immediate positive impacts

Lord help me, I am so tempted by the beautifully rebuilt bright blue 1940’s Ford two-row corn planter on Facebook marketplace 🥵

Came home today to these boys casually slapping together a marble staircase… ok go off

There is not enough #woodpasture content here on Blue Sky, because there is not enough wood pasture in this world. Here are some wood pasture videos. And go, create wood pasture. Thorny, diverse, and (nearly) wild. ptes.org/wppn/videos-...

and their selective browsing was negated by differing selective browsing traits of other herbivores. Forests would be more open, and retain high floral diversity. Now without other herbivores, their selective browsing is concentrated, and we end up with novel "deerscapes."

Interesting conversation on deer. One thought I've had is that the high abundance of deer might be a surrogate replacement for herbivore biomass which was once occupied by a diversity of herbivores. When more herbivore species were present, deer numbers were checked by food competition+

This weekend — pruning my Malus breeding orchard (80 unique clonal genotypes, plus 100 seedlings), and winnowing the rest of my flint corn so I can have some good eats the rest of the week 🌈

We need free-flowing rivers! “Giving rivers more room to move can represent a mutually beneficial solution for both the freshwater biodiversity crisis and flood hazard management as climate-driven extremes escalate.” www.nature.com/articles/s44...

The ecological benefits of more room for rivers - Nature Water

This Review synthesizes the ecological features and processes that arise when rivers are given room to move. Understanding these interactions will support more sustainable decisions that weigh river e...

nature.com

Of all the things happening in the US, this is genuinely one of the most terrifying to me

Ben Wikler@benwikler.bsky.social · 2y ago

Generations of dedicated public servants have, unseen by the general public, done all kinds of extraordinary things that benefit all of us—like preserving the genetic diversity of crop species that sustain humanity. Musk is blindly slashing it all. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/o...

Order plants from our plant sale! Pickup is May 17. We’ll be open for orders until April 14. www.whistledownfarm.com/s/order

The best trees around are going up for sale. Seriously. The best. These boys are incredibly meticulous about genetics, + they have grown some insanely vigorous stems (deep spading, gonzo quantities of woodchips, + pasteurized human urine from the Rich Earth Institute will do that) www.yellowbud.farm

Shout out to da best barn cat, Galaxy. Still well under a year old and already showin the voles who’s boss

In 2021, I found a feral crabapple that remains my fav Malus find to date. Tied for 2nd place 🥈 for ‘best quality cider’ + 3rd place 🥉 for ‘best in show’ in @gnarlypippins.bsky.social 2nd annual pomological exhibition 💯💯💯🍎🍎🍎🍎

Livestock as a biological pest control: Experimental validation for oak savannas 🌲🧪 Suggests a new livestock management would increase the availability of healthy acorns, thus increasing the farm capacity and the economic profit by up to 20% 📈🌎 🔗 doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Not domesticating / co-evolving with mammoths and mastodons when we had the chance is the greatest mistake of human history. I wanna ride around on an elephant and prune trees lol

Dynamognathus@dynamoterror.bsky.social · 2y ago

All familiar plant and animal lineages on those continents were shaped, for most of their history, by living alongside elephants. Humans included. For many living species, the absence of proboscideans since the early Holocene is a recent and drastic change they’ve had to survive.

I often hear it said that silvopasture won’t work as well in temperate zones vs the tropics because we have less light due to the suns angle of incidence. What’s missing from this simple analysis is 1) tree phenology 2) canopy architecture and 3) management. Not all silvopastures are created equal.

my PDF collection grows stronger by the day 😈 Arundinaria gigantia — our native bamboo — might be the most productive native source of ruminant fodder in the US. Evergreen, 15% crude protein, and it will hold onto that protein through the winter.

Intensive silvopasture made it into a mainstream news outlet, although the language isn’t fully there — it is worth really differentiating between bog standard silvopasture (where trees do little but provide shade) and intensive silvopasture (where trees are generating substantial fodder)

NPR@npr.org · 2y ago

Clearing land for cattle and cows is the single biggest driver of rainforest loss in the Amazon. This "hotel for cows" in Colombia offers a solution.

❤️‍🔥

The Culling Wind

On moving with intention and fixing shit

open.substack.com

Going through the walk-in cooler this morning to make sure all the babies are doing OK as we get towards the end of winter. 4000+ trees in here, mostly chestnut and yellowbud hickory, plus 150 lbs of chestnut seed from select parentage. A few thousand more trees on the way. Spring will be busy!!

fyi there’s like ~650,000 acres of direct-seeded, direct-browse intensive silvopasture with leucaena and tagasaste in Australia, ~120,000 acres with leucaena in Latin America, and they are doubling, tripling, 10xing carrying capacity for cattle operations. A scalable and real alternative to feedlots

This is a rare, balanced analysis of a very important question (what is the true energy return on energy invested for various modes of food production?)

Eating oil

Revisiting the energy - food nexus

open.substack.com

Hybridization as the dominant mode of macro evolution makes a lot of sense to me. aligns with punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record, and the documented origins of domesticated species. Nice to hear McCarthy - often dismissed by the mainstream as a crank - approached with genuine curiosity

Dr. Eugene McCarthy

Zero Input Agriculture · Episode

open.spotify.com

Organizing biomass in my very playful and experimental home orchard. All the hay was decades old insulation in our barn loft, full of pigeon and mouse manure (used to be a potato farm so the barn needed temp regulation). White pine and black locust are from two mature trees in the yard I limbed up

Resharing the agroforestry starterpack for new followers interested in planting trees on working lands

I’m fascinated by these super dense, highly diverse, aggressively pruned “syntropic” agroforestry systems. I’d say there is still much to learn about translating the principles into scalable versions, but the principles are sound and the results undeniable.

Syntropic Agroforestry - Spring pruning

YouTube video by GrowBack

youtu.be

How do we design canopy complexity and species diversity into temperate orchards and agroforestry systems, without overcomplicating management, sacrificing yields, or driving up installation costs? This is the question nagging me basically every moment of every day 🙃

John D. Parker@johndparker.bsky.social · 2y ago

new Ecology paper alert: we use 2 tree diversity-ecosystem function experiments to show that tree diversity increases productivity through increased canopy complexity (as measured with NEON airborne Lidar) #treedivnet esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Between this and the Jena experiment it’s becoming increasingly hard to justify monoculture!

Julia Koricheva@juliakoricheva.bsky.social · 2y ago

Tree diversity increases carbon sequestration #TreeDivNet 🌳🌲 scienceblog.com/tree-diversi...

I just got in touch with a guy in Missouri who planted a 2000’ hedgerow of Amorpha fruticosa ~7 years ago as a fodder bank for his Katahdin sheep. Today, he’s getting 6x the grazing days as the adjacent grass pasture, and he’s seen the OM increase 10x from 0.4% to 4%