Sun filters through the branches of a patchy forest canopy, allowing light to fall on the understory below. There, smaller trees and shrubs make their home in the mottled glow or choose the dimmer regions in the shadows. Through their branches, the occasional bird flits below the canopy, distant calls ringing through the air.
All around you, layers of forest tangle and interact with each other. But as you walk, you begin to notice the details. How the canopy is thinned enough to let that light fall through, in regular enough intervals to hit the understory trees below. How mushrooms grow along the bark of only certain species. How patches of bare ground wind through the space almost like a path. Most of all, you notice the tree overhead is adorned with dark red fruits, one you’ve seen for sale in the store.
It looks like a forest and feels like a forest, but these trees, and the plants beneath them, were carefully chosen and planted by human hands. And they were chosen to provide. With berries, nuts, ornamentals, and fruits, you aren’t just standing in a forest, but a farm.
Forest farming is a method of growing canopy trees over an understory of smaller trees, shrubs, and other plants. These farms use the interactions of multiple species to put nutrients into the soil, build resistance to disease, create niches for individual plants to thrive, and even sequester carbon.
Generally, forest farms live on relatively small plots of land compared to the sprawling fields seen in modern, industrial agriculture, taking up only a few acres. To make the best advantage of this space, one suggested strategy from the USDA is for forest farms to focus on high-value crops that thrive in the shade of overhead trees.
The broad leaves of ginseng spread over its sought-after roots, surrounded by fallen black walnuts from trees overhead. Ferns grown for ornamentation could cover the forest floor, while mushrooms grow in the spaces between, or along the trunks of trees.
By growing layers of food and productivity, forest farms make up for what they may lack in horizontal space by stretching to the sky.
Forest farming on the map
While some forest farms may harvest some of their trees periodically for lumber or grow ornamental plants in the understory, others may focus wholly on “food forests” of entirely edible plants.
Since its inception four years ago, one of these food forests has been steadily emerging from Founders Park in Carmel, Indiana. With the aid of grant money from the Fruit Tree Foundation, the park planted roughly 1.5 acres of trees, shrubs, and other plants – all of it edible, and all of it native.
The Founders Park food forest envisions an overstory of walnut trees, pecans, and persimmons. As their fruits and nuts drop, they bounce off the branches of understory trees like paw-paws and serviceberries, before landing among the chokeberries, elderberries, and hazelnuts below.
“We’re really focused on native plants,” said Michael Allen, the Parks and Natural Resources Director at Carmel Clay Parks and Recreation. “And when it comes to focusing on native plants, we want to plant things could benefit not only the critters, but also the people, the visitors, in different ways.”
But a forest doesn’t grow overnight, and Founders Park has had its fair share of struggles getting off the ground. The land where the trees are planted used to be a rock quarry, and the thin, impoverished soil is far from ideal. Many saplings have established slowly, or died. The project requires patience, Allen said, and may take several tries to take hold in the drier, less rich soil. While Carmel Clay Parks and Recreation certainly isn’t abandoning the project, they hope to expand it to other parks that may offer a better habitat.
Even with a rocky start, these beginnings can pave the way for a mature forest. Growing a forest farm from scratch is hard work, but the strong, hardy systems prove to be worth the effort.
James Panyan, founder and master gardener at Grow with Gordon, has his own food forest growing right in his backyard. After five years, it’s reached this point of stabilization.
“If I just moved out of the country for 10 years and came back, I’d be able to come and eat hazelnuts, and apples, and eat some asparagus in the spring,” he said.
His own food forest started with the simple philosophy that “every bit of land should be more than just grass.” At first, Panyan added plants largely at random, mostly native species sourced from a local conservation office. After that, the goal became to diversify as much as possible, and soon the forest grew up from the ground. With endless species and ways of layering them, Panyan said his forest is only one of a million possible combinations.
Five years later, it’s still going strong, and now he can introduce his success to other parts of the community. Grow with Gordon focuses of bringing “naturalistic landscaping and sustainable food systems” to their clients, according to their website. In some cases, that mission can look like swapping out rocks for mulch, but it can also be bringing a mini food forest to a client. And sometimes, it can be both. For a woman who was interested in laying down mulch and getting some new plants in her yard, Panyan saw an opportunity to go a step further. He offered to donate a food forest package, and she was on board.
“So now she has elderberry bushes and currents and a peach tree back there,” Panyan said. “We’re trying to merge what I think of as permaculture and food forests (with) traditional landscaping.”
These systems that depend on diversity, natural processes, and species interactions to cultivate food are called agroecosystems, and they’re far from a new concept. While they don’t always directly pull from indigenous practices, the two undoubtedly share a host of similarities, as Kat Anderson writes in her book “Tending the Wild.”
Far from the hands-off, hunter-gatherer approach often associated with Native American’s relationship to the land, indigenous people engaged in a variety of harvesting, pruning, burning, and managing the food systems they took advantage of.
“When the first Europeans visited California, therefore, they did not find in many places a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness, but rather a carefully tended “garden” that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting,” Anderson wrote.
Part of this management is when, how, and how much is harvested to ensure the ecosystem continues to regenerate in a healthy way. In industrial agriculture, these aren’t considerations – just pull everything out of the ground all at once and be done with it. But for forest farming, the rules of sustainable harvest very much apply.
Instead of agriculture being the antithesis to wild, untouched ecosystems, the two can work together, as they always have. Forest farming inhabits this middle ground, creating a place where ecosystem and agriculture can coexist.
Ecosystems you can eat
While monoculture farm systems may be vast and complicated in their own ways, they’re largely predictable. But planting a food forest means preparing for the trees that don’t grow, and saplings that just can’t take root.
According to Panyan, who specializes in permaculture, agroforestry, and regenerative agriculture, the distinction lies in the difference between complicated systems and complex systems. While they may sound like the same thing, they’re quite different.
Industrial agriculture is an example of a complicated system. By following a specific set of actions: planting the right seeds, giving them the right combination of nutrients, spraying them with the right pesticides, harvesting it all, and processing it, you know what the end result will be. In Indiana, that result is often some form of corn, then turned to oils, syrups, or flakes. There are still many pieces, but these pieces slot into each other in predictable ways, like the turning cogs of a machine.
Panyan’s backyard, in contrast, is a complex system. It holds a lot more uncertainty. The components are introduced, and he can ensure there will be some level of success. Trees will grow and bear fruit, but the subtleties aren’t entirely up to him. Every interaction between the plants, the insects around them, and the soil they grow in adds another layer of complexity to create a living, changing system.
“I’ve introduced fifty-five different plant varieties,” he said as an example, “And they start to work together, but the outcome is uncertain. … I couldn’t tell you at the beginning whether my peach trees are going to do better than my pears, because the soil itself is too complex.”
This uncertainty may make forest farming seem like a risk, but the science shows it’s well-worth the effort. Where turning forested land into agriculture fields degrades soil health, bringing it back has the opposite effect. Trees bring with them robust carbon storage systems, sophisticated webs of nutrients in their roots, and higher levels of organic matter in the soil. Through this, they aid not only each other, but all the plants in the farm.
But the trees are only one part of the forest farm equation. All the plants interact to exchange nutrients in the soil, strengthening each other all the while. Just their diversity is another asset – diverse systems are well-known for their resistance to disease and pests, while being more attractive to welcome pollinators.
Together, the plants make an ecosystem. Conditions in the over and understory overlap, and networks of roots and nutrients below do the same. A gradient of conditions is created, one that rewards diversity by giving every plant a niche it can thrive in.
Indigenous land management acknowledges that these ecosystems aren’t weakened by interaction with humans but strengthened by it. By harvesting certain plants in careful, strategic ways, they aren’t just able to grow back next year, but return stronger.
“For many native shrubs and trees, repeated pruning or burning was not only harmless but beneficial as well,” Anderson writes. “Their repeated resurrection, while appearing to take tremendous energy, may have paradoxically kept them young and vigorous.”
Regular disturbance, whether by natural means or from human hands, increases the diversity of ecosystems as well. By wiping the slate clean, the endless battle of competition between organisms is reset, preventing one species from outcompeting the others and driving them to extinction. Instead, multiple species move into the newly created blank spaces, filling them with diversity.
A network of roots
Indigenous people in California didn’t make the distinction between managed and wild lands we do today. Even now, the term “wilderness” is seen in a negative light. It’s a label not for land left unharmed by humans, but land left unaided by them, left to fall into disrepair. But both the plants and people are benefitted when the boundaries of wilderness are blurred. Prosperity and connections with nature are forged in the space in between.
“When intimate interaction ceases, the continuity of knowledge, passed down through generations, is broken, and the land becomes “wilderness,”” Anderson wrote.
Forest farms can regenerate the soil and pull carbon from the atmosphere, but for some they have an additional benefit: bringing nature and ecosystems to communities.
“Overall, people just have this strange disconnect from their food,” said James Panyan.
By bringing it into their yards, he hopes to bridge this gap. In another part of Indiana, Michael Allen hopes to do the same by bringing it to their parks.
“I always call (community parks) a gateway to a bigger, broader understanding of natural ecosystems,” Allen said.
As a small food forest, he understands the trees and understory plants at Forest Park won’t ever be filling grocery store shelves. But that doesn’t mean they have nothing to offer to the people and ecosystems around them.
“Maybe someday we can provide a place where people can do some actual foraging, and help offset some of the things that may be missing from people’s diets,” he said. “But also building a connection with the land is important to us.”
Forest farms offer that connection with something universal: food.
So, as you walk through that forest, with the light filtering down and subtle paths through the trees, remind yourself to stop, look around, and find something to take for the road. Both you and the forest itself may be better off for it.
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