The word for today is "Silvopasture"
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
The farm, just outside the University of Rhode Island’s main campus, is owned and operated by the university for research, teaching, and extension programs. It is actively farmed. Eighteen acres of the property are used for pasturing cattle, sheep, and other animals.
But if a new project planned for 54 acres that were recently
made available to farm goes well, Peckham Farm may look more like a forest than
it does bare fields in the next decade.
In recent years, URI natural resources professor Laura
Meyerson and Peckham Farm manager Coleman Replogle have been teaming up to
bring a new kind of pasture to the farm, one that combines forestland with
pasture into a hybrid called silvopasture.
“It’s a bit like the savanna,” explained Meyerson to ecoRI
News on a recent Zoom call. “You are integrating trees into a grazing pasture,
but also creating a forested edge, just this continuum of forest.”
The practice is rooted in traditional ecological knowledge from the Indigenous tribes of the Americas, according to Myerson. It’s still used in the southeastern United States and South America.
Farms such as Wild Harmony Farm in Exeter practice silvopasturing,
but Meyerson said the Peckham Farm project is the first to study the practice
as a method of ecological restoration.
Under silvopasture, grassland is peppered with trees and
other foliage to provide ecological benefits and new, traditional habitats for
species such as birds and bats, while still providing a nutritious, varied
grazing diet for cattle.
The 54 acres that Meyerson and her team have been planting trees on has only come back into use by Peckham Farm and URI recently. Up until 2022, the university leased the acreage to sod growers for decades.
Decades of sod farming on the property had taken a deep toll
on the land. Sod is harvested by rolling it up, and every time the growers
harvested sod a little more topsoil was taken off the property.
The same year the field became available, said Meyerson, the
land saw a spring of sustained, heavy rains, leaving the newly available fields
prone to flooding with no topsoil or vegetation to soak up the runoff. Eroded
sentiment from the fields washed into nearby White Horn Brook and ultimately
into Narragansett Bay.
“This is an opportunity to begin to restore the soil … add
in organic matter from the plants, add in organic matter from the cows,”
Meyerson said. “It’ll stop the erosion. It’ll stabilize the soil. It’ll
stabilize the water.”
The process starts with Meyerson and her students planting
native trees — American chestnut, oak, and pawpaws — from seed. They grow the
trees in a URI greenhouse for the first two or three years to guarantee a
higher survival rate.
After the trees have had time to grow, they are planted in
the 54 acres behind Peckham Farm, where they are secured, maintained, and
looked after. To date about 500 trees have been planted in the silvopasture,
with plenty more to come.
“We have to maintain them, we have to weed them, we have to
water them when it’s been dry like it has the last couple of summers,” Meyerson
said. “I have this big water wagon we got from a grant. It’s fantastic, it’s a
lot of fun.”
Cows, meanwhile, will still use the silvopasture as if it
was regular pasture. Trees have the added benefit of providing protection from
the heat in the summer, as well as the cold and the wind during other parts of
the year.
The hope is for the planting part of the project to be
completed within the next five years. Bringing the silvopasture to maturity and
restoring the previously depleted acreage will likely take a lot longer, up to
10 years, according to Meyerson.
Part of the problem, she said, has been money. There was
little money attached to the project, meaning trees got planted more slowly.
Sourcing the tree seeds originally was a much bigger cost, and Meyerson said
her team at one point scooped acorns from the university president’s lawn.
The American
Chestnut Foundation donated chestnut seeds, and a public-private
partnership with Tree Pro resulted in the company donating 300 tree shelters,
worth some $30,000, for the project in 2024.
The new pasture, said Meyerson, provides an opportunity for
studies. She said she’d like to understand how native species benefit from the
spatial arrangement with the trees, and how to make enough suitable habitat for
species such as brown bats.
“If there are endangered species, for example, we want to
know what we can do to help them,” Meyerson said. “This is a way that we can do
that. If we’re able to ask these questions in the next phase, we really need to
help species A, B, and C. How can we do that?“