 The following are excerpts from interviews with today's pioneers, forest farmers who are cultivating high-value specialty crops under the protection of a forest canopy that has been modified to provide the correct shade level. These forest farmers are deriving income today, while high-quality trees are being grown for quality wood products tomorrow. To succeed at forest farming, you must know your product, know your forest, and know your market. The phrase, you can't see the forest through the trees, really rings true if you're not looking at individual plants and individual species, then you're missing an opportunity that exists. Fully half of the forest land in the state of Illinois is on row crop farms. It's the back 40 that nobody looks at like it's an asset. I mean there's a million ways to survive. It takes a while for the plants to become established and mature, but once they do, it's essentially going in and digging out. We're turning wood into high-value food, so we're getting a huge benefit out of that. Depending on the species, I can go in after commercial harvest, take what they have left. They can take off the veneer logs and everything else, and take what they've left in the wood lot and make as much or more money off of it as you can the logs that you removed. It's all in the way you cut it and the way you market your product. It's not white oak or red oak or one great big thing. It's all the small things. It's all the pin blanks, the gun stocks, the turning squares, the hobby wood. It's the unusual things that you make and market from low-grade logs. If you're willing to do that, you get all of the pie instead of just a piece. Keep it small, keep it simple, keep all the money at home. Don't buy any more equipment than it takes to get the job done, but then go to work and do the job. Stick a smile on your face, have a positive outlook, be enthusiastic about your product, show people about book matching, about the highly-figured woods that you're cutting. The stuff that everybody else calls garbage, you call it something else. This is figured wood. This is domestic exotics. This is hobby wood, not scrap, and market your products that way. If you're willing to do that and if you're willing to talk with people, it's amazing what will happen. When we first started out, it was a matter of generating enough publicity. Frankly, publicity is free. Advertising is expensive. So I'm not bashful, so I said about generating publicity. Start at the local Lions Club. They'll feed you. And you get to talk about stuff you love. Do a news release. News releases are very, very important. You go to any kind of a seminar or program, an educational event. You go right home and you write about that educational event. I attended, thus and such, at Cape Gerardo, Missouri and there was X number of people there and we learned about and include a picture of yourself and or product and send it out to all the local newspapers titled news release. You would be surprised how many of them will print that. What is that? It's publicity and that's free. One of the keys to success here at Elixir Farm is diversity of the economic base. And so that includes seed production, plant production, growing of specialty crops for contract clients as well as ecotourism, educational programs and any other way we can figure out to make a living. The thing about specialty crops in general is it takes a special person to pull it off. You just can't get rid of 500 acres of corn and replace them with five acres of basil or some other crop that you might have seen on TV or heard about in the newspaper. And before you even put a plant in the ground you want to spend at least a year researching the status of the market and really dig and find out what is happening behind the scenes research and do it from a multidisciplinary standpoint. So you have to look at medical literature and chemical literature and pharmacological literature. You also have to look at forestry literature and horticultural literature and even economics and business literature in the dietary supplement marketplace. You have to be doing a lot of research. You have to be incredibly vigilant. You have to be passion and perhaps slightly insane. This is an interesting piece of property. This track of ground qualified for a CRP conservation reserve program. The stand we're standing in right now is 14 years old and as you can see with 14 years of growth we've actually done pretty well. We've grown good sized trees and we're finally to the stage where the trees are tall enough that we're getting a lot of understory of needle fall. Our emphasis on this particular farm is to find money in the short come before we harvest the trees and that opportunities come about in the process of baling pine needles which is a market that we found out or learned about down south and it's not well known in this area but people are beginning to learn about it. Everybody always comments on how neat the yard looks and I think it's due to the fact that it's pine straw. I use it cosmetically because a plant really shows up with that as the base. I use it to keep my weeds down. I use it to feed my azaleas because it's high in acid and they like that very much. I use it because it has a soft look. You get one lady out of 20 to start bedding with pine needles. In three years you got all 20 of them because her azaleas will get brighter, that slight acidity pop, they're all add muriatic acid all that to their ground. All they got to do is put that on her and it works. They drive, we sell probably 1,500 bales a year to people that come to this place here and pick up trucks, buying 25, 30 bales at a time. If you can get past the first 10 years, you can, in this area our experience says you can begin to turn enough money to keep up with basic land payments and some revenue. I'm not going to tell you it's an easy way to get rich because everything we do is very labor intensive and there are a lot of hardships that we've endured but it's been a very rewarding experience and it's been a learning experience. Okay, the really important thing to remember about shiitake production is once you inoculate that log, that log is good for the whole production cycle until it becomes a spent log. So you only inoculate a log once in its life, right at the beginning and then you have to really maintain that log at about 35% moisture content and they need to be kept in 80% shape. These are the logs here that have just been newly inoculated and these will stay in this configuration for approximately one year until the spawn is taken over completely the sapwood of the log. You can see this portion of these where all the sugars are that the mycelium actually lives in and spreads in. These logs as I said are ready to go into production as soon as the weather settles down we'll be taking these, some of these out into the laying yard which is over here and then some of these will be going up in the greenhouse which is behind here and it will go start their full production life. So it is like milking cows, sometimes you have to come out here and pick twice a day. So watch your product because if you don't pick them correctly then the next day you come in and all the mushrooms are all the way open and flat and then maybe it rained and you've lost your top quality mushrooms. So you do have to watch your crop especially in the hot weather because they grow so quickly. I've got a few of the nice Ozark Forest talking mushrooms. And then we market directly to chefs, catering companies, private country clubs, specialistic food shops, wine and cheese shops, whole food and wild oats, supermarkets and also a few Schnooks supermarkets. A great thing about them though is because they've grown outside and not inside in some sawdust like some other operations. They provide something that is different in the fact that they're dynamic to the season. When it's really hot the mushrooms look different than when the weather is just right. Also in the spring and in the fall you get these growth spurts and you get a mushrooms called a Donco mushroom that has a very distinctive pattern and texture and much more like the real thing. We've become part of a chef's collaborative where they promote local farms and local food products in the restaurants. You see that on the menu. They won't just say shiitake mushrooms on the menu with steak, they'll actually say Ozark Forest shiitake mushrooms and then you know you've really educated the chef and then the person who eats the food and then they go to the supermarket and they will see the product, the produce department at the supermarket and they'll see the name there again and the connections made. And that's what it's all about is making those connections. Everybody was gardening so it was just fun to walk the neighborhood and see who was doing what. And one day on a lamppost there was a flyer saying come Saturday 8 a.m. plant sale and we got there and it was John Marlon's house and then to discover that he was turning the money over and his children had been working with him and it would go to their school activities. It was really wonderful. Playing with the wildflowers actually came with an idea that I had when I was younger. I wanted to have a Kool-Aid stand like a lot of kids did. I wanted to sell something just for fun and so my dad actually suggested you know hey why don't we start playing with the wildflowers a little bit and growing them. In this area is where we propagate our mayapples and our bluebells and once you get a bed like this established you almost feel bad about charging money for the plants because essentially the propagation process is just weeding out the excess plants that grow here and we get about four hundred dollars per year from the small area alone. Our marketing strategy was mainly flyers around town. We also had a database which I maintained with several names about four hundred names of people locally and around the area. For bulk we can sell in either spring or fall. Again you get the plants when they're small you put them all in a tray and then you can just ship them to the institution or developer that's going to buy them. We have worked with the Mylons since about the year 2000. We've met them before that and we've been talking to them but in the year 2000 we had the gift given by Kyle Megasority to fund this work. The university is actually very pleased with what we are seeing here. We're very pleased with the level of maintenance that we've had to do. We've really done nothing more than just add a thin layer of mulch I think once or twice over the last four years. It took a little education on our part to not try to maintain more than what we have done but that's a nice problem to have so we've been very pleased with that. We've been pleased with how things have developed over the last four years. It's a little slower I think than what a typical landscape would do but that's okay because we think it's going to end up lasting longer. They're so easy to take care of. They kind of take care of themselves. They end up seeding themselves season to season. We never know where a seledine poppy is going to pop up next and that's I think the fun part of it. And then when you have too many you can you know pot them up and give them to the girls school teachers or things like that as a mother's day gift or something. What we've shown in some of our settings is if a farmer would have a small plot in the woods that he devoted to say may apples or another plant like that you could on a sustainable basis take hundreds of plants out of relatively small area annually provided you did it carefully and didn't disturb the soil in such a way that you've got garlic mustard or other invasive plants taking over. So it's a matter of being careful with what you're doing and I'm talking here about small plots in a woods not entire woods because we've got woods in Illinois where most of the native wildflowers have been eliminated. We've been doing this for 10 years and our surplus has only gone up with tremendous sales so I think if you if you play your cards right and most importantly learn the plants then you'll have no problem. There are many different types of forest farming practices. Each one is particular to the producer, woodlot, product and market. However they all utilize the forest to create an environment for specialty crops today while growing trees for wood products tomorrow. By knowing your product, the forest and the market you will increase your chances of success. Forest farming practices create economic opportunity and take pressure off our natural forest ecosystems. It may be illegal to harvest wild plant populations found in the natural forest. For more information about forest farming and other agroforestry practices contact the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry. This video was made by the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry within the College of Agriculture Food and Natural Resources.