Mechanizing Agroforestry — with Bob Walker

Rowan Reid is an agroforester from the southeast of Australia. He’s been planting and growing trees since the 1980s, and spurring forestry and fine woodworking in a region that didn’t have a whole lot of it. Today we talked about Australia’s forest types, eucalypts, pruning timber trees, reaction wood, pine plantations, growing your own lumber to build your own house, keeping sawblades sharp, The Master Tree Grower Program, and farm networking to share ideas and perspectives.A huge thanks to Rowan for joining us from Australia. If you’re interested in growing timber trees, you have to go read Rowan’s book Heartwood: The Art and Science of Growing Trees for Conservation and Profit. It’s is both highly informative and accessible. It’s tangible use case in planting, pruning, and harvesting trees on farms, for both use on the farm and local or regional sales of value-added wood products. Rowan really exemplifies how with a great knowledge base and a great network, you can make farm forestry work really well.

Black locust is a fast growing hardwood, native to the Allegheny Plateau and surrounding bioregions in the eastern half of the United States. The wood is highly durable, and rot resistant, and lasts 2-3x as pressure treated wood in contact with the soil. Robi Decking is a company that mills, processes, markets, and distributes black locust decking to all 50 US states and throughout Canada. Today, Robi’s founder Zach Rike joined us to dive into the uses of black locust, the downsides of tropical hardwoods, why pressure treated pine means planned obsolescence, the nuances of building with black locust, how much creativity you want in architecture, and more.A huge thanks to Zach Rike for joining us on Plant The Trees. Zach closed a lot of loops with this podcast, and it’s great to hear from one of the foremost users of black locust in the United States. Like he said, check them out at RobiDecking.com — both Jeremy and I have built with and experienced their products and we are extremely satisfied. If you’d like to plant trees on non-forested land that you own or manage in the United States, don’t hesitate drop us a line at propagateag.com. If you have questions for us or a guest, about agroforestry, send us a message on social media or comment on this episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

An audio-version of our written article: https://www.propagateag.com/blog/the-nuance-of-invasive-speciesThe Threat of Invasive SpeciesThe American Chestnut (blight) and Climate AnaloguesNative to when? → Black Locust's native rangeThose who live in glass houses... Introspection without despair.What can we do? Narrative vs. Action.Agroforestry Systems as an actionable next stepIntro:Invasive species are non-native plants, animals, fungi, and pathogens that spread aggressively and disrupt native ecosystems.Documentary films on invasive species abound. Complete with dark humor and foreboding music, one memorable film featured cane toads in Australia. In 1935, 100 cane toads were introduced for pest control. They swiftly became a fleet of 200 million toads. These frogs are 6-10 inches long, and have toxic glands behind their head which poison the animals that attempt to eat them. When these predators die, the ecosystem loses balance: animals that would have otherwise been their prey explode in population. Invasive animals can be extremely problematic, given how fast they move. Domestic cats, introduced to Australia with British colonization, are responsible for the extinction of 29 species of mammals indigenous to Australia. After broad habitat destruction, domestic cats are the #1 cause of bird death in North America. Stateside, feral swine are responsible for $1.6b in damages to the agricultural industry. Burmese pythons are decimating native mammal populations in the Florida Everglades. Alien invasive animals, fungi, and insects make for a loaded term: invasive. Trees and shrubs can also be invasive, even though they move more slowly than animals. But there’s nuance here. Today we’ll unpack invasive species.

Amelia Baxter is the CEO and co-founder of WholeTrees. WholeTrees Architecture and Structures uses structural round timber (literal whole trees) to create durable, functional, aesthetically-breathtaking buildings and features of the built environment. The company was founded in 2007 to develop and sell products and technologies that would scale the use of underutilized or waste-trees in commercial construction. This increases forest revenues, and offers green construction markets a new material for the 21st century.Whole trees uses species from the classic conifers to rot-resistant white oak and black locust.We talked about how round timber can be dramatically stronger than milled lumber, designing buildings that feel like forests and how wood naturally calms the nervous system, how black locust behaves more like stone than it does wood, profit plus ecological balance as the definition of prosperity, and how structural round timber can re-shape rural forest economies.Please welcome Amelia Baxter.

Costa Rica has one of the highest standards of living in Latin America. Quite a few years ago now, they dissolved their military and placed their focus on services. Not just education and public health, but ecosystem services. Water quality, flood mitigation, biodiversity, weather stability…Scott Gallant is an agroforestry practitioner based in Costa Rica, and has worked there for over a decade. Today we dove into the agriculture, agroforestry, and agrotourism of Costa Rica. We talked about how trees create experiences, and how recreation might be the most accessible ecosystem service for farmers.We talked syntropic farming, and making it accessible. Understory and overstory tree crops, perennial vegetables, how we experience some of the best food you can grow.How do you design agroforestry for a hospitality operation? Where is the overlap between agrotourism in Costa Rica, The United States, and Italy? Without further ado, please welcome Scott Gallant.

We’re planting all of these trees, many of which carry the goal of ecological benefit: conservation, regeneration, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood mitigation, relative homeostasis in weather and climate. But what does intact nature really look like in the forested biome (biomes) of the Northeast United States? The Mid Atlantic, Great Lakes, the Humid midwest? How can we know? How can we get there?There is no one answer, and often many answers are inherent, given that diversity is the spice of life and the spice of the forest.Ethan Tapper is a forester from Vermont.He’s an internationally-recognized ecologist, and bestselling author of How to Love a Forest. An Audobon-endorsed forester, Ethan works with landowners to steward forests for both wildlife habitat and income.Ethan works as a consulting forester across Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine, and served as the Chittenden County Forester from 2016-2024. Ethan stewards Bear Island, his 175 acre forest, homestead and sugarbush in Vermont.

Darren J. Doherty, founder of Regrarians, is a pioneer in modern regenerative agriculture and agroforestry in the anglosphere and beyond. He’s planned hundreds of farms across Australia, New Zealand, The United States, Vietnam, India, The Country of Georgia, Mediterranean Europe, and beyond. Today we’ll dive into the mechanization of planting trees. Trees are permanent infrastructure, so you want to plant them in the right place, the first time, and in the most efficient way possible. Often that means mechanization, from soil preparation and simply marking where the trees go, to understory management and fertilization. He has been a trusted advisor of Propagate since we started the business 10 years, and without further ado, here is Darren Doherty.

How do you further mechanize tree planting? Where are the leverage points? How do you get the trees on a perfect grid or a Keyline grid, at inch-accurate, GPS-guided intervals? Can you mow, subsoil, rototill, seed, and mark all in the same tractor pass?Bob Walker is a core member of the Propagate Team. He has decades of experience farming, and I’m really thrilled to finally get him on the podcast, because he’s the guy that makes all of our work truly efficient and effective.Here we’ll dive into soil prep, tree planting, and a whole lot more.

Jeremy Kaufman, together with our CEO Ethan Steinberg, and I, started working on Propagate in 2016. 10 years later, we have some insight into planting trees on farms, not without the standard battle scars of entrepreneurship. Today, we walk through why trees need to make money, the financial and economic bottlenecks in agroforestry, working with farmers and not replacing farmers, Jeremy’s family business in the wood products industry, and why black locust and chestnuts stand out.

It’s one thing to plant trees. And stewarding a chestnut ecosystem is a multigenerational endeavor. Today we’ll dive into chestnut yields, harvest and post-harvest processing, predatory wasps and soil nematodes, chestnut buyers & markets, and a lot more. This might be the most information-dense episode yet. Dr. Amy Miller is a wealth of knowledge, and we’re thrilled to bring this conversation to you.Route 9 CooperativePropagate Website