We're talking today with Austin Unruh, who is the tree grazier. A lot of people think that trees are just good for shade, but there are a lot of other uses. So let's start with how you got involved with trees related to agriculture with that live shop.
I wish I could say that it was a straightforward path, but this was very much a windy, organic way that I got to this point. I learned about, I grew up in the suburbs. My dad had grown up on a Jersey dairy in Minnesota.
But by the time I came around, the dairy was sold. It was out of the family. So I more or less grew up in the suburbs and I didn't have a farming background myself. I got interested in it over college, as many people do.
And I wanted to get into the field of, let's call it agroforestry, but I didn't have any opportunities in my area. And so I said, I want to start some kind of a business that allows me to get a foot in the door and then we'll see where it goes from there.
And so I asked around with people in the region and said, where is there a need that is currently not being provided? It's not being filled. And I learned that there was a need for folks to do maintenance on streamside conservation tree plantings.
So that's how I got into the field of planting trees on the farms. And before long, I had some clients who wanted to plant trees into their pastures. They were doing grass-fed dairy in particular. And they said, how do we get a tree in my pasture without breaking the bank and having enough trees out there so that I'm not creating a one tree where all the cattle congregate?
And at that point, there was no one doing this in any kind of systematic way. And so we threw all kinds of different stuff against the wall to see what would stick. And thankfully, I saw that if we can figure this out and how to do this in a way that's easy for farmers, this can really scale.
Like this, the thing that we're doing is great and it provides good conservation benefit. But if we can plant trees on the rest of the farm and figure out a way that this can be both an economic benefit for the farm as well as provide ecological value, and it really integrates into the business that the farm operation has, this can really scale.
And so over the years, we've figured out some good tree protection methods that allow us to get trees established in an actively grazed pasture and are really allowing us to then unlock a lot of opportunities for transforming the way that farms are run.
It's slow because we're working with trees. Trees grow slow. They do grow slow. So we're not yet there where we're seeing much of the benefit from the tree plantings that we've done, but we're moving in the right direction.
Okay, let's talk about how you go about putting trees in an active pasture. Yeah. Yep. So the main method that we use is based around a six foot tall tree shelter. So it's a plastic tube and a fiberglass stake.
And the nice thing about that is that fiberglass stake is an electrical insulator. I mean, they're both electrical insulators. And the stake has the flexibility to move. So what we do is we will install those and those will protect trees from browsing, whether it's from cattle or deer or sheep or whatever it is.
But then cattle can still rub on those and they could still push them over. So then we need to protect those tree shelters from cattle pushing them over. And we do that with electric fencing. So initially what I did was I just ran a single strand of electric polywire along the same height that you would to put up a paddock division.
And that worked. But then later on, we developed what we call the overpass system, which is you run that poly wire at six feet. So the same height as those tree tubes, you connect it to the top of the tree tube.
And then you run an aluminum wire around that tree tube. So then that tree tube itself, the outside of it, has electric fencing around it. So cattle can't rub on the tree tube itself, but they can move underneath that line of polywire that's strung at six feet.
So that way you can make your paddocks as large or as small as you want them to, depending on your operation and depending on your movement. And the only thing that cattle can't touch is that tree tube, and they figure it out pretty quickly.
That's great. Okay. Well, talk about the various roles that trees provide for producers with their livestock. Yep. So I like to think of trees as just tools on a farm that are going to do something that your other tools that you have access to, your forbs, your grasses, your legumes, that those cannot do.
So with trees, we can provide shade, and that's something that all trees can provide. But then we want to, ideally, we want to pick trees that are going to provide shade plus additional benefits. So the biggest one for us is being able to reduce feed costs at critical times of the year.
So if we, it's going to depend on where in the country we are and what kind of trees we have access to. But if we look at the amount of feed available at certain times of the year in our area in Pennsylvania, we're going to have a big flush of forages in the spring, and we're going to have a summer slump, and we're going to have another smaller flush in the fall.
And then we don't have anything growing during the dormant season. So can we use trees to secure our forage base during the summer and during the winter as well? And so the winter time, the tree that we look to the most is the honey locust tree.
It's almost perfectly built to provide additional feed during times of the year that it's needed most. The beautiful thing about that is that this tree is spending the entire growing season collecting solar energy and it's turning that, converting that into feed energy in the form of these pods that are full of sugar.
So then it'll drop those during November, December, January. Some trees will hang on to their pods until February or beyond. And they'll keep those in good condition. And those will drop and those can be added to the livestock feed base.
So providing feed during the winter months. And then for the summer months, we're looking at different tree fodder. So shrubs, trees, where the leaves themselves are going to be used for fodder. And oftentimes those are higher protein and in higher indigestibility than forages in many cases.
And I believe that that's due to the fact that the leaf itself does not have to hold the plant up. So like with forages, the whole grass has to be held up by the leaf, essentially. And with trees, you have a woody component that's doing that work.
And the leaves themselves tend to be higher digestibility and higher protein because they don't have to provide that structural strength as well. Now, which animals does that work with best? Could it be sheep or cattle or?
All of the above. Now, if I had goats, I would go really, really heavy towards those tree fodders. And if I had sheep, I'd go heavy towards them as well. But goats obviously are the ones that use tree fodder the most more than anything else, and sheep a little bit less.
And cattle are going to be the use them the least compared to the others, but still quite a bit. And the tree fodder in that case is going to be a really good backup feed source. So in the case of a drought or even just your normal summer slump, the ability to feed those tree crops to cattle or other ruminants is very valuable.
It's just that with sheep and with goats in particular, I would want to integrate those as a much more much more regular and more of the foundation of their feed, especially because of their parasite loads and those kinds of things.
I would go pretty heavy on those for sheep and goats. And then with honey locust pods, you're talking any kind of ruminant, but then also like pigs will eat them, horses will eat them, all kinds of things like honey locust pods.
Okay, and now we know about acorn finished pork. In Spain, it's called jamone verico. Is it only on cork trees in Spain or does that apply here? So in Spain, my understanding is they have two different types of oaks that they use.
One is the cork oak and one is the holm oak, which is more for the acorns, the big acorns that those drop. And we can do a similar thing here. In fact, I was reading not too long ago in a book called Lesser Beasts.
And I would highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in like the history of pork production and the history of pig domestication. That in the United States, for several hundred years, we produced more acorn finished, chestnut finished pork than any other meat here in the United States.
That was the most abundant meat and also the most affordable meat for several hundred years here in the United States because we were able to essentially let pigs roam on acorn and chestnut forests. And this is during the time when we had American chestnuts.
And so similar to the way that now there's so much open space, open pastures, where people just let their cattle out and they'll collect them in the fall sometime. We had a similar system where we had just so many acres of high quality mass producing woods that people would let their hogs run and they didn't have to fence them in during that time period.
They would just let their hogs run, they would do what they do, and then they would harvest them in the fall. So we had a very different landscape during that time period, and that allowed us to produce just an amazing amount of really high quality pork fed off of tree crops.
And so I look to the Spanish system as the only tree crop-based pork system that's in significant size in the world at this point. But because we have access to more different types of trees than they do in Spain, and we have better rainfall, like in Spain, we're talking 15 to 25 inches of rain, and most of that during the winter, not during the growing season.
We can get significantly higher yields and with a wider variety of trees than they can in Spain. So I think we can outdo the Spanish De Gesa system several times over. They're limited both by the water and also they're only using oaks.
So then they're subject to those masting cycles that oaks have where they're not producing the same amount every year. And we can do oaks, chestnuts, mulberries, persimmons, apples, the whole gamut of things that we have access to.
How can trees help during a drought? Yeah. So I like to think of tree fodder in particular as a bank, like a bank account where you stash aside this reserve. It's kind of like having, if you picture a grove of trees that is managed for their leaves as a reserve, it's kind of like having a whole bunch of hay bales sitting out there.
But those hay bales aren't going to go bad. They're not going to rot. They're not going to, yeah, they're going to continue to grow and get bigger and bigger every year. And then you can use them whenever you need them.
So you can access that tree fodder in one of two ways. So one would be by having livestock graze it themselves. And to do that, you would need to keep them in more of a shrubby form. Or you can have the fodder up high on the tree so that you're then cutting the branches off or in some cases even just cutting the whole tree down, which folks, which wouldn't be as much of a long-term sustainable option,
but it definitely works in the short term. But typically you would be cutting limbs down off of the tree in such a way that those limbs would then later regrow for future uses. So both of those work.
That one is called pollarding. What was it called again? It's called pollarding, where you're cutting limbs high off of the tree and dropping those for livestock to use. It's used quite a bit in parts of New Zealand as a means of soil stabilization.
Those trees are planted in such a way that their roots hold the soil and they reduce the chances of mudslides. And then the tops are used as additional feed sources. And so that's something that I would do, again, quite a bit more for sheep and goats because they like those tree fodders that much more.
But on a beef operation, I think it's a great way to have an additional layer of security for those times of the year when fodder is needed most, when hay is going to be most expensive. If you have a drought and everyone else is having to destock or buy in really, really expensive feeds, you have this source of perennial fodder on your own property that you can access.
Talk about silvo pasture, how to develop it and the benefits. Silvo pasture is really just the intentional, thoughtful integration of trees along with your pasture operation. So you can go to two different directions.
You can plant trees into an open pasture, and that's what we have the most experience with. Our area is mostly open ground, open pasture, open crop fields where land is being planted in or we're planting trees into those open areas.
Land goes for like $30,000 to $50,000 in our area. It's really, really expensive. But it's a lot of farmland. We have a lot of Amish, like small Amish dairies in our area. So there's a lot of competition for the land.
So there's not, we don't have a lot of brushy land growing up around our area. But in a lot of the country, you have woods that are in, let's say, poor condition. And there we might be interested in taking the woods and converting them to a silva pasture, like what Greg Judy will talk about quite a bit.
I know Joel Salatin does quite a bit of this as well, is converting woods to a silvo pasture system by thinning out those trees methodically in a very thought-through way. And then it really just depends on what resources you have, what trees you have.
I can't say that we don't advise on that very much because we don't have a lot of demand for it in our area. But in some areas, that's going to be the main way of developing sillable pasture is by taking the existing woods and deciding instead of clear-cutting it, we're going to keep a good number of those trees for the shade and whatever other benefits that they're going to produce.
And rather than having just an overstocked woods where we've got some timber and the rest is just all firewood grade, let's thin it down so that we're producing high quality forages underneath that. What about long-term care for the trees?
Yeah, and I'll give the caveat that we've only been in this since 2020. So we're about six years now since we've done our first plantings. And we do, and I think this is what has made us a little bit more unique than some of the other, if we were to just go out there and plant the trees and walk away and never see them again, we don't get the feedback on these plantings.
But what we do is we will plant the trees and it will come back for usually four years after we've done the planting and we're doing maintenance on those trees twice a year. It's not a lot of maintenance.
Usually it's some pruning if the tree grows a little bit weird inside of the tree tube because it is an unnatural environment that the tree doesn't really want to be in. But it's a necessary evil given that if it wasn't for that, you're going to get livestock eating it.
So if there's pruning that needs to be done, if there's just making sure that all of our trees are alive and we're documenting if anything dies, why it died, those kinds of things, over time, as the tree gets bigger, you'd want to remove some of those lower limbs because I think all of us have seen what a tree looks like when it's out in the open and it gets to be really, really wide.
Let's say a canopy that starts six feet off the ground and it's 60 feet wide and the shade is going to be right underneath that tree all day long. And so cattle are going to be underneath that tree all day long.
And what we want to create is we want to create trees with a high canopy such that they move the shade as much as possible throughout the course of the day so that the livestock are then moving to be underneath that shade.
We're not getting any one place that's getting overused. So that's something that you'd want to do over time as well. Obviously, if you're doing, if you're cutting trees for fodder, you'd have to clean that up and you have to manage them in a certain way that you're going to be able to get that high quality fodder year after year.
So those are the main maintenance items. In many of the systems that we set up for folks, especially if they're just set up for masting trees that are going to drop the feed and there's no cutting involved, there's no leaf harvest involved, those are the least labor-intensive systems.
And we've gone to the point where we started planting trees at higher densities with, let's say, an alternating a fast-growing shade tree, like a black locust or a willow or a poplar, with a slower-growing tree that was going to be there longer, a honey locust or a persimmon or maybe an oak.
And we've, so that we can get the benefit of that shade really quickly, but then also have those longer-term trees and just figure we're going to come through and we're going to cut out those fast-growing shade trees.
As we have developed our nursery and we're able to plant taller trees to start with, we're planting at lower densities, maybe 20 to 50 trees per acre. And that's allowing us to then not have to worry about thinning either.
So a lot of folks would rather not have to thin, but rather have less. It's an additional chore that if you have the additional trees that it's too much for the long term, you will have to come in thin.
So we ended up with a lower tree density because of that. And said, we're just going to put trees out there that are going to be there in the long term. So that removes one of the significant chores, one of the significant maintenance items that would have been there had we planted at a higher density.
Talk about your book. So thank you. I've got a book called The Grazier's Guide to Trees. So I put the first edition out, I forget if it was three or four years ago, but it's been a little bit now. And I really created it because I wanted a resource with like pictures and visuals to be able to share with our clients rather than me having to explain the whole thing anew every time that I met with someone.
So I said, let's put a resource together. So a little resource with a couple of diagrams turned into eventually a book. So I just self-published that a number of years ago, and we're in the rewriting phase right now as we talk in the middle of February, rewriting to have it published as a little bit nicer, a little bit more cleaned up book with additional more recent insights that we've gained over the last number of years that we've been doing this.
And there's quite a bit of new material in that book. And that's going to be published through Acres USA. Hopefully, I don't know, by the middle of the year, that new edition will be available. Okay.
Well, we want to thank you for talking with me and look forward to more articles by Austin in the Stockman Grass Farmer, both the print and the digital versions. And look forward to the book coming out.
So thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
