Mark Shepard: Agroforestry & the Eco-Farmer

Your farm’s woodland areas have the potential to become new profit centers while at the same time requiring minimal management time. Learn from this renowned permaculture practitioner the difference between agroforestry and silvopasture, see real-world example of multi-species grazing amidst wooded areas, and learn of ancillary crops such as mushrooms. You’ll never look at a patch of trees the same again.

Mark Shepard is a Wisconsin-based permaculture designer, agroforester and ecological farming consultant. He and his family have transformed a typical 140-acre row-crop dairy farm into a permaculture-based perennial-agricultural ecosystem using oak savannah, successional brushland and Eastern woodlands as ecological models. In all, they have planted 100,000 trees on this property. The result is one of the first and finest farmscale models of permaculture in the United States. Their farm features chestnut, hazelnut and fruit trees, a variety of other fruits and vegetables, and chickens, ducks, pigs and other animals. He is the author of Restoration Agriculture and the subject of the new video Restoration Agriculture in Practice.

Recorded at the 2014 Acres U.S.A. Conference, Columbus, Ohio, Friday, December 5, 2014.