With the ongoing concerns with the B.C. forest industry maybe it is time to consider another approach to managing our working forest land only for trees.
It has also been suggested future forests should contain deciduous trees which are not as flammable as the coniferous monocultures and provide a greater biodiversity of plants and animals.
In a 2014 article by Lisa Palmer about agroforestry she suggests combining livestock grazing and agriculture with tree cultivation can coax more food from each acre, boost farmers’ incomes, restore degraded landscapes, and make farmland more resilient to climate change.
The article entitled: In the Pastures of Colombia, Cows, Crops and Timber Coexist, she describes how cattle rancher Carlos Hernando Molina has replaced 220 acres of open pastureland with trees, shrubs, and bushy vegetation.
She describes how his land in southwestern Colombia more closely resembles a perennial nursery at a garden centre than a grazing area, but he still has cattle. Native, high-value timber like mahogany and samanea grow close together along the perimeter of the pasture. Strung with electric wire, the trees act as live fences. Leucaena trees, a protein-packed forage tree, grow in the middle, and beneath the leucaena are three types of tropical grasses and ground cover crops like peanuts.
The process is called Silvopastoral production systems (SPS). They include various land management approaches, such as planting live fences with woody species (trees and shrubs), forage banks, scattered trees in pastures, grazing on plantations with timber or fruit trees, and windbreakers, among others. The plants provide Molinas 90 head of cattle with vertical layers of grazing, leading to twice the milk and meat production per acre while reducing the amount of land needed to raise them.
SPS combine timber and fruit trees with pasture grasses and legumes to support animal grazing. Such systems are especially beneficial when they include shrubs and trees with leaves edible for livestock, as these components are pivotal for the economic and sustainability success of SPS. His operation is part of a trend globally to diversify and promote systems more environmentally friendly.
Lisa Palmer also has another article in Nature Conservancy's summer 2020 edition called Finding Peace about 44,000 acres of Colombia's forests protected by a conservation agreement and 94,864 acres of barren pastures that have been transformed by planting 3.1 million trees.
However, despite SPS' reported benefits, adoption rates globally remain low likely due to a more complex management scheme. I am not suggesting that SPS would be practised on very much of our working forest in B.C. but could be useful on intensively managed forests and certainly on areas developed for wild fire protection zones around urban areas. It is recommended for degraded farm land or areas damaged by natural forces. It is more likely that private land would be more suited as well as grazing leases, wood lots or community forests or other crown land where livestock are already utilizing the land through the grazing permit system.
After having worked on a research station in the Colombia's grasslands in the 1970s, I can appreciate the many differences in the climate, growing conditions and politics compared to those in Canada. But one of the similarities between the countries is the many benefits of pasture raised beef compared to the grain-based diet of the feed lots which should be taken into account when doing any form of analysis. In future articles I would like to take a look at some recent research in this area.
