Expanding Agroforestry without funding

Cancelled grants? I'm planting anyway.

This week, we received official word that the USDA under the Trump administration was cancelling the Expanding Agroforestry Program, a grant that our farm was selected for last fall and was slated to receive funds for this spring. The grant was under the Biden administration’s “Climate Smart Commodities” program, endeavoring to support farmers in scaling up tree planting as part of a climate solution.

We had been working with a technical service provider through the Savanna Institute who was helping us define our plan: expansion of both our chestnut and apple plantings, and new plantings of fast-growing species like mulberries, poplars, and willows in the sheep pasture which would offer browse and shade to the sheep and would draw carbon down into the soil much more deeply than our current cool-season pasture does.

The grant was going to pay a rate that would cover not only the cost of the trees (hundreds of them!) but also the labor of planting and maintaining them for the first few years. As a farm that has been planting trees every year out of the income that we make from growing vegetables, we were relieved to be seen in the work that we’ve done and grateful to be supported in expanding and bettering it. Trees don’t make an income for a number of years and so the question of how to fund a planting at scale is huge.

As a young farmer, the idea of planting trees was what motivated me to access land ownership and to view farming as a long-term possibility for my life. Trees are so obviously good. They are rooted to a place and grow for years, both responding to the conditions of their place and also creating what that place becomes. They eat the air, incorporating carbon into their bodies and ultimately giving it to the soil, which makes the soil more alive and fertile. They produce fruit! Food for people, for livestock, for wildlife.

I think of the trees that I plant as a gift to the future. Many of them will outlive me, so long as I get them through these first years. The creatures, human and not, who inhabit this place after me will benefit from their shade, their food, and the healthier happier soils they create.

At Tent of Nations, the farm I lived at this winter in Palestine, the primary crops are all perennial: olives, grapes, figs, almonds, even apricots. They represent a legacy from the past and a promise to the future—they represent culture. Because of that, the trees themselves are targets for Israeli state aggression, with thousands of trees uprooted or burned over the years. The Palestinians replant, whenever and wherever they are able.

For a few months, we thought we would be supported economically for the gift-work that our farm is doing, of planting and tending trees. Having the Expanding Agroforestry Project funding withdrawn is not going to stop us: we planted 24 new apple trees this week, anyway. Hopefully someday those apples provide us with some income, maybe even enough to make up for the money we spend on the trees themselves and our labor caring for them. But tree planting, for me, is a spiritual practice more than anything, a practice of tending to a future that is abundant and generous and humane and resilient. A culture that can neither be legislated nor bought, but must be grown.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative

I’m proud to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Each Sunday, Julie Gammack shares a roundup of articles that collaborative members have written in the past week. Check out the most recent roundup, here.