 Welcome to this episode of Farming Matters, which is a video featuring North Central Region Sayers Farmer Rancher Grant and uplifting the work that they've been doing on the ground. And we are really, really just very grateful to have both Gaby and Maria from Zumwalt Acres in Illinois, who are here to share about their Farmer Rancher Grant project, investigating the ecological impact of pairing agroforestry establishment with biochar production. So thank you, Erin. Thank you both of you for having us. I'm Gaby and one of the co-founders of Zumwalt Acres. We started in 2020 and I've been involved since the beginning working on lots of different facets of the project. And I'm Maria. I joined Zumwalt Acres in the fall of 2021, and I've been farming with CA since then. And more recently in the past year, I've been more involved in some of the carbon capture research that we do at Zumwalt Acres. So the project that we're sharing about today is investigating the impact of pairing agroforestry with biochar, which was supported by the North Central Sayer. We're really grateful for the funding that this, that Sayer provided that allowed us to pursue this really exciting project. Zumwalt Acres is a regenerative agriculture community. We're looking at in Gelden, Illinois, which is on the unseated homelands of Kickapoo, Peoria, Cascoscia, Potta Boatami, Anasathees, Aquan Peoples. Our mission is to foster the next generation of farmer, scientists, activists working to build a better food system and tackle climate change. So that looks like farming about 20 acres of land as well as hosting apprentices each season. We have young people age around 18 to 27 coming and joining us on a three month to six month or longer basis and learning about farming. People come in with all different skill sets and then learn about the different research that we do, including this project as well as expanding to carbon capture, other realms of horticulture and agroforestry. And we have a mix of organic vegetables as well as hay and grains and trees in agroforestry systems. And so we're going to be focusing on our agroforestry and biochar today. So to give a bit of an overview on our project, we really wanted to find a way to implement agroforestry, capture carbon and utilize on farm waste products. And this project achieved all three of those goals by utilizing wood waste that we had on site to make biochar, which is a special type of burning wood essentially, so that the carbon that's in the wood is actually stored in a stable form rather than remitting when the tree decomposes and contributing to atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions. And that carbon is then stored in a stable form for hundreds of thousands of years potentially. So we used four different types of trees and shrubs, including apples, pears, persimmons, and hazelnuts and planted both control and test trees and then monitor tree health and tree growth over the first few years of establishment and will continue to do so going forward. Another part of the project was implementing agroforestry. So the way that we planted some of our trees was in an alley chronicling system, which means that we planted trees in rows and then between those rows were annual vegetables. So the trees are really small right now and aren't shading out any of the annual vegetables. There's plenty of space. And so we saw really good results and were able to implement that in a few different ways, including with our pear trees and our persimmon trees and that had benefits of reducing the need to mow and weed around the trees because we were already tending to that land. And once the trees are grown and start to shade out the region in, you know, 10, 20 years and we'll stop annual cropping or move to shade tolerant plants as the trees grow up. So in terms of biochar, we were using two different types of kilns, a Contiki open flame curtain kiln and then on ROCC kiln, which was developed by Dr. Paul Anderson who's in Illinois. And both of the kilns worked well. We basically just wanted to see what's what's the most effective way to produce biochar from a labor perspective and then also quality of biochar on a small scale on farm utilizing on farm waste products. And so we used mostly for this project we were using wood from ash trees that had died due to emerald ash ore going forward, we'll be able to use like tree prunings and other waste products from our agroforestry establishment, all of the woody material that usually is either burned in big burn piles or just decomposes naturally. We found that it does take a fair amount of manual labor to prepare the wood to produce a biochar and then actually produce a biochar. So that's an important note for farmers looking to implement biochar on site. But it does create a really amazing product as you can see on the right, that's a Contiki kiln. And that's a biochar that we would ultimately mix along with manure or some sort of compost, maybe soil to sort of annihilate it, fill it up with all of the nutrients and microbes that we want to be living in our soil mix that we then apply to the tree. We also sent in our biochar for analysis and saw like 80 to 90 percent carbon content in the biochar. So we're seeing good results in terms of carbon storage on a long term. Okay, thank you Bobby for that overview. I'm going to talk a little bit more now about the effects of the biochar on the trees and we have some data and some charts and graphs to share with you all. So overall we saw similar or increased growth rates in our trees that were treated with biochar as compared to our trees without biochar. And at the same time though, we recognize that our study was still pretty small scale. And so we think that this is a good area to research further into the effects of biochar application onto tree growth. Bobby, can you go on to the next slide please? So this is a chart of our persimmon tree growth. These trees were planted in the fall of 2021 and they were measured throughout that fall and then as well in the next growing season in the spring and summer and fall of 2022. And in this chart the trees highlighted in red are our experimental trees and the unhighlighted rows are our control trees. And we saw pretty significant growth in persimmon planted with biochar as compared to those without. I think persimmons were the trees that we saw the highest difference in growth rates across our experimental four varieties. And yeah that was like really encouraging for us and exciting data. Bobby, can you go to the next slide please? Thank you. And then as compared to our apple trees with apples we didn't see a significant difference in growth rates or like total growth. And this chart here shows the tree height over time. These trees were planted in the spring of 2021 and they were measured throughout the 2021 and 2022 growing seasons with the black trees. The black lines indicating our control trees and the red lines indicating our the pretty similar growth rates. Nothing too significant there. Yeah so you just want to thank Senator Jose again for your support and we're really excited to continue to monitor these trees as well as continue to establish more trees and produce more biochar and learn about the different ways that we can grow food in healthy and carbon negative ways. Thank you. I was I'm struck by a lot of things and like what would be like your ratio ratio to biochar to other things and in your mix when you establish these trees? We we aimed for 85 percent biochar and 15 percent manure to activate the biochar and then we would then mix that in with soil for our planting. We started off by adding the soil at the beginning like when we were first inoculating and then we noticed that because this way I would have like weeds seeds in it it was better to not and mix it in when we're actually planting. And were you top dressing that? It was actually like in the in the hole before the trees went in and then yeah for these trees up that was the case for all of it. For some other trees we've also used it as a top dressing. And how are your trees doing now? I mean it's been in well a year later really but overall they've done pretty well. I think a high percentage of our trees made it to the first spring after their first year of planting so we're really happy about that. We have we have had a few losses but I think overall they're doing pretty well. Are you experimenting kind of with the fencing thing because everything loves fruit trees in this climate? In 2021 when we were planting all of these trees we put tree tubes white plastic tree tubes around all of our saplings to protect them from deer and other things. And then as I started to get older and the tree tubes were also supposed to help them grow up straight and tall and also not have branches for their first like five-ish feet of the trunk. But as they got older we found that the tree tubes would also get really hot in the summer. And so they they weren't ideal for like all weather conditions. And so now we are trying to implement better fencing for deer protection. Are there any plants that don't do well in the alley cropping system because of the biochar? We haven't found that. We've used biochar with most of our horticultural establishments as well. It doesn't seem to like impact the pH substantially or really yeah have any negative impacts if it's like applied at a reasonable application rate. On those lines are there like other tips you would offer to other growers who would want to start on a similar path? I think we definitely recommend the alley cropping system especially because we have an over 1,000 tree iris forestry system on our farm. Having a lot of trees is a lot of land to manage and keeping the land around it. We did and mowed and irrigated is a big undertaking and for our alley crop trees like Gaby said before because there was horticulture production happening around them that wasn't that was one less thing on our to-do list and that was really great. Another suggestion is being prepared for the manual labor of biochar production. It does take a lot of time and effort and in the fall of 2020 the crew that was here then really created a lot of biochar and they spent a lot of that season burning biochar and that was a big help for our planting in the spring in the following spring of 2021. Is there anything that in your hearts that you want to share with our listeners and viewers out there now that are just feeling complete if you hadn't done it in this time together? I think one thing I would add is in selecting our trees we worked a lot with the Savannah Institute. They were super supportive of all of our agroforestry establishment and thinking about native plants was really important to us in selecting our tree crops and sort of balancing that with like what's marketable and what's like the labor of harvesting and what people actually want to be eating and all of those sorts of considerations that I think that there's so many exciting native Illinois fruits that are so underrated and reincorporating them into our local food system I think is really important and exciting and like ultimately makes the farming easier in many ways because they're well suited to thrive in our area and you don't have to go through hoops to accommodate the needs of plants that are not actually suited for our climate. In terms of marketing specifically and kind of that end of it like if we're going to plant all of these amazing fruit trees what are we going to do with all of the what happened? What are we thinking in a good way? I think the good thing about planting saplings is that we have probably at least seven years to start hyping people up to do the different fruits and nuts that we're growing and I also think that yeah I think people seem to like food and people seem to like to try different things that they haven't been able to try before and just tapping into those networks of who's interested in exploring different types of food and who is interested in cooking these things and how can we get these into smaller markets in the Chicago area or like in the mid-Illinois area is an exciting journey to embark down.