 Hello everyone and welcome to Farming Matters. I'm your host, Erin Schneider. I work with the North Central Asian Sare program and I have a farm in South Central Wisconsin. And I am always delighted to be here with you today. And I could not do this show without Marie Flanagan. Marie. Hello. Marie is our producer and director of Farming Matters. And I'm excited to pass it off to Abby Johnson. She's with Oxhite Farm in Michigan. And she's here to share the story of her project about promoting farm sustainability with complimentary intercropping of English walnut, peaches, and sheep. So, Abby, I'm gonna turn over to you and I'm excited to learn like what drew you to why sheep, why peaches, why, you know, why farm, right? No, I'm just kidding. Okay. I'm excited to hear about your project. There is a question sometimes, a why farm, but I think we all come back and enjoy it in the end. There are days. Starts with my husband and my family here on our farm. I definitely couldn't do it without him and without our kids. And everybody kind of has their role and place and we get a lot done together. So just to kind of frame our farm, we are located in the Northern Lore Peninsula of Michigan and we sit about five miles off of Lake Huron. Now you wouldn't normally think about this area of Michigan being very good for fruit, for specialty crops, but it is this proximity to Lake Huron and it's, we sit on a very high ridge and we've done some temperature monitoring and we find that we tend to stay about five to 10 degrees warmer than most of our surrounding areas because of our location. In addition, we do get some benefits from sitting on that ridge is our air really never stops moving. So we avoid some of those thermal inversion nights that others might experience further inland. And we also tend to stay cold longer in the spring. And I think this is really good for our trees because everybody stays sleeping until we're ready to grow. We don't get those really strong temperature shifts where you might have 60 or 70 degree temperatures and then drop down again to 30. We stay cold longer, but when we do warm up, we're gonna be good for the season, the growing season. We're kind of got us started on doing that silver culture of planting trees. We did a SAIR project in 2017 where we tested out different chestnut cultivars and intercropping of, I would say basic intercropping of forage between those trees. And so this first got us kind of thinking about tree crops and what can you do while you wait? I think it's a big hurdle for people is you plant a tree and you have to wait for it to produce. And that's a long time, especially with a high value. It's an expensive crop to plant. And while you're waiting, what are you gonna be able to do? And so with our chestnut plantings, initially we did just, hey, between those trees. And that for this latest project with the walnuts and the peaches and the sheep, we challenged ourselves to think a little bit further on that. So this is just a general overview on what we planted into this planting with the peaches, the walnuts. The walnuts are spaced about 40 foot apart. And this is where finally you would want a mature walnut grove to be. So having that 40 by 40 spacing will give a mature tree plenty of space to be productive. They shouldn't be crowding each other. They should be good for a long time. But at the same time, when you have a 40 by 40 foot spacing, there's a lot between those trees and a lot of land that is tied up before you're actually getting walnuts. And so we were thinking, well, what could we plant with those? But walnuts also are unique in that they produce juglone which is inhibitory where it's gonna be killing things that grow with them. However, peaches are tolerant of that juglone. And so that's how we kind of settled on peaches. Again, we planted a lot of different cultivars of peaches just so we had a good spreading our risk out, I guess. If you knew one was gonna do well, hopefully would get a good idea in addition to spreading the season out with the varieties that we planted, there should be probably about a month's time span where you're getting peaches a month to a month and a half. So with peaches, they're highly perishable. You're gonna want that extra time to be able to handle them and harvest them. Now, granted, this is a small, this is really small scale in comparison to people who have acres and acres of peaches. But ultimately the peaches are not our end product. The walnuts is where we're going. The peaches are helping us get there. I have a question about peaches because I don't know much about them. Are they grafted onto rootstock? They are. They are grafted on rootstocks and we chose peaches that were grafted on rootstocks appropriate for Michigan. And that's one thing that's really important when you're planting peaches is to choose varieties and rootstocks that are appropriate for your region because peaches require a certain number of chilling days. And that's very variety dependent. So the varieties that we have in Michigan have a more chilling days required before they wake up versus the peaches that you might find grown down in, let's say, South Carolina. Those are gonna have a much shorter chilling day requirement because obviously they don't get enough cold days where they would need that. So yeah, those are very important considerations again on what you're planting to make sure that it's appropriate for your region. So this is some photos of us establishing the planting. One thing I wanna point out is just that when putting into planting, especially an expensive planting, like fruit or nuts or any really tree, planting trees is expensive to set them up for success. Getting a good quality hole dug. We mix compost in our holes. We're putting drip irrigation right next to the trees, protecting the walnuts. You can see they're in the tree tubes there. So they're being protected from deer. We protect them from rodents. We pretty much do battle with all the things that could kill the trees. One thing we have found is that the deer don't really care to eat peaches very much. So we haven't had to do a lot to kind of protect the peaches. We'll notice that they'll come over and have taken a few leaves off, but not to the devastation that a lot of other tree species experience. If you leave an apple tree just out in the open, you won't have an apple tree the next day. So peaches tend to have a little bit, they're just not as palatable perhaps. So that's been an interesting observation with the peaches. So here we are. This is in the first summer after planting. So these photos were taken in August after planting and you can see the walnuts are starting to come out of the tubes. Our peaches are having good pushing, good growth. And this is how we utilize the space for the sheep to graze. Ideally, I like to graze the sheep because what they're doing is they're going in there, they're reducing that volume of forage, they're recycling nutrients for the trees to be able to then use. And they just generally have a positive impact on those areas. That said, we do intensive grazing so that the sheep are only on one section for one day. And we don't return to that section for at least four weeks and it's usually more like six weeks before we come back. And this is a point also I'd like to have is that when you're incorporating these different systems, you have to know what the requirements of each system is. So in my mind, there's at least three systems in place with a sheep system, peach system and the walnut system. So each of those are different requirements. The sheep are gonna require additional space to move based on stocking. I mean, if we did a small play at a small area and I would see that you could have maybe a fewer sheep and be able to move them more around in the area. But the important point is they can be, instead of being a benefit for the system, they can be a detriment if they're overstocked or you're leaving them in one area too long or if they're left up against the trees, then they become the reasons for failure. Additionally, the sheep require stored forage. And so that's another, I guess, in your crop system is we did take some hay from between the trees. Again, though, when you're taking a crop like, hey, you have to be considerate that you've removed nutrients from those areas and it's important to return the nutrients again, whether that's in the form of manure or other fertilized sources. So here we are in the second summer. So this is two years in. We were just really amazed at how fast everything grew. I'm always amazed. You know, you plant a tree and it's like, oh, we're gonna wait a long time to see anything happen. But really, we were really impressed with how rapidly the peaches and the walnuts both grew. And with that said, I think it's important to have a vision for your intercropping, to know where you're going. If you look at the natural porous system, it's left undisturbed. Ultimately, we talk about reaching a climax community where you're gonna have just a couple of different species that dominate the canopy. In the same way, we're kind of doing that here where we've picked walnuts to be our dominant species ultimately in the end. So we are going to continue to focus on having walnuts achieve that. And so we're not gonna make decisions to support, we're not gonna be cutting walnut trees down so our peaches can spread more. But ultimately we'll be cutting the peaches down at some point because the walnuts are shading them out or they need more space. What we view is, and again, we'll have the walnuts will be shading out the grass. We're not gonna have as much forage in the future. But that's ultimately where we wanna go. And the peaches are providing a bridge to get there. The forage, the sheep are providing a bridge to go that much further and in a way also, they're providing a safety net. So if we do have walnuts that die, we still have peaches and we still have forage there. And we might be able to add replanted walnut trees for if we have the peaches all die, well, we still have our walnuts that are coming up. We still have hope for the peacher. We're able to still use the area for grazing. Abby, in this photo, it looks like there's a orchard in the background. Is that? That is, that's our chestnuts. Yeah, those are all chestnut trees in the background there. And then in this too, you talk about systems. Is that a windbreak you planted or was a bear or is that just part of the forest or edge on your land? Or? On that side, it's just maple trees. That's the beginning of our forested acres. We do have some windbreaks. We continue to cut. Some of what, as we have more trees, we continue to cut some windbreaks down just to allow better air drainage and air flow through the landscape. I guess I wanted to make a point of again, knowing your systems. And also if you choose to incorporate livestock systems with tree farming or silviculture, they're gonna have their own unique set of challenges and if you're not willing to spend the time to learn about how to properly care for sheep or if you don't have that background or experience, perhaps that's not the best intercrop scenario for you. If you really just like to take care of trees and plant plants, there's probably other things you could put in between your trees versus the sheep. I enjoy the sheep. I grew up, I have a background with sheep. I grew up on a sheep farm. It took me 10 years after leaving the farm to wanna have sheep again. But, so I enjoy the sheep and they do require a certain quantity of time every day. Here's just a couple more pictures of trees waking up this spring. And we did have trace quantities of peaches this past summer. I would anticipate that we will have the trees producing, I would perhaps even some marketable size quantities of fruit this next year. So you can see that well in three years, I'm starting to get a product already off of the acreage versus waiting just for our walnuts. So I think that's really an important point is just that we're trying to, it's a bridge. How do we ease that burden? How do we help with that transition? It's a hard transition sometimes when you're expecting somebody to make a big investment and then not get anything for a long time. So we, again, we found the tree growth from both the peaches and the walnuts to be very impressive. This is the picture of basically the same peach tree from when we planted it and year, not even year one, like this is summer one. And then summer, at the end of summer one. So this is all one year, essentially. We're seeing 20 to 30 inches of terminal growth on the peaches and 35 to 45 inches of terminal growth on the walnuts. And this is another point I wanna make. When you are establishing a tree planting, the quality of your trees planted is important. We were short a few peaches on our original planting and I was at the farm store and they had a couple peach trees there and I was like, oh, I'll just grab a couple more peach trees we'll finish this planting off, it'll be great. They died. They were so much unknown about how they had been handled up to that point. They were alive when I put them in the ground but they just didn't have the best start versus the ones that I had bought from a reputable source. I had controlled how they were handled prior to planting and made sure that they were planted in a timely manner when I did receive them. And so that is really important for success is to be able to get your trees from a quality source. It's easy just to grab trees but not knowing what their history is can set you up for failure. And I do my best to maintain a blog that kind of outlines our journey at the farm and highlights our different projects and hopefully shares what we've learned. Yeah, so you're welcome to follow along on our journey at oxheights.com. I wanted to ask you a little bit about like, because this was a project kind of focused a little bit on the establishment and sequencing side of it. I think we continue to learn and grow and change how we do things over time. And we've accepted the fact that the way we do things today is not the way we're gonna do them tomorrow and it's not the way we did them yesterday. As far as like the peaches go jumping in and saying, well, let's see if it works. We actually have had peaches just a couple, not 60 peach trees, but we've just had a couple on our farm for at least the last 10 years where we've gotten consistent peaches from to the point where we'd be confident that, yes, we could have a consistent product produced every year. And again, looking towards the future, and well, it's not something we will, you know, in 10 years we won't have these peach trees producing potentially, but it's something that we could set up maybe in five years, another planting with peaches and walnuts as we start to, if we want to expand that you can kind of stagger, I guess, your establishment where you could have it more long-term. And it's not such a quantity that I feel would be insurmountable to market. We've already connected with some of our local orchards who have apples, but they don't have peaches. And so they, you know, offering that to their customers is really appealing to them. And because we are so far out of a normal fruit region, there aren't, isn't a lot of competition for fruit sales. Are they like sold before you even harvest? I feel like I wouldn't just be like, I don't know what it really is. I think it's awesome. Just a little bit I've done so far, it's, you know, I have people calling me before they're ripe now. So I feel confident that the marketing side will kind of come somewhat naturally. What would you recommend to other farmers who are, you know, maybe daunted, they want to try perennials because it may work in their system, but they're really daunted by that. Or like, how did any advice you'd have that came out like about applying for a grant or getting started in this? I think if you're unsure on what will work well in your site, I would go ahead and encourage people to plant sentinel plants, you know, get something in the ground, get an idea, give it its best shot to grow. You know, if it dies, you want to know it died because it's not in a good spot. Knowing your soils and being really just conscientious of your climate and what is going to be successful for you. So kind of mashing up those things, getting some trees in the ground to know what the process is like. The first year we applied for a stair grant to do the Chestnut project, we didn't get funded. However, we decided to go ahead and put 10 trees in the ground. And we learned so much from just putting those trees in the ground on what it was going to take to support them, what it looked like to plant the trees, and then to say, yes, you know, they survived year one. I think, you know, we can move on in somewhat hopeful that it will work. So those things I think are important. And there are different grant funding options out there. I think there are going to be more, especially with some of the climate smart initiatives that seems like there is a lot of funding that's coming up available. I know we're hopeful to get some of that to do some plantings, but that's to even think somewhat creatively about where your projects might fit in and who could help with the funding for them.