Episode 73 | Branching Out: Agroforestry's Role in Reducing Nutrient Loss

This is episode 73 of the Illinois nutrient loss reduction podcast Branching Out Agroforestry's Role in Reducing Nutri ent Loss. Today we'll talk with a couple of folks from the Savannah Institute. It was inspired by the Oak Savannas native to our region. The Savannah Institute supports the growth of more diverse perennial farming in the Upper Mississippian Great Lakes watersheds, and it helps to create opportunities, it says, for farmers integrating trees with crops and pastures to diversify farm incomes and landscapes. We're joined today by Nate Lawrence.

He's an ecosystem scientist and MJ Oviat. She's an Illinois agroforestry educator. Thank you both for being with us. MJ, can you tell me a little bit about yourself, please?

I'm MJ Oviedt. I'm the Illinois agroforestry educator at the Savannah Institute. And my role is essentially coming up with and then executing educational events and workshops at our demonstration farms in Illinois. And then I also do general outreach for Savannah Institute. I go to a lot of conferences.

I think a lot of people have probably met me if they've ever interacted with Savannah Institute in Illinois. And then I do some work with our partners with the Illinois Sustainable Ag Partnership, ISAP, and then I do some work with the nutrient loss reduction strategy.

Nate Lawrence, you're with us as well. You are, with the Savannah Institute, but in a different role. Can you tell me about that and where you're located?

I am Nate Lawrence, ecosystem scientist at the Savannah Institute. I have to call out that I was born and raised in Illinois before I say that I currently live in in Madison, Wisconsin. So I'm originally from Monticello, went to University of Illinois, got an in res degree, which is something MJ and I have in common. And then my role here is focused on kind of the environmental half of agroforestry and a lot of that focuses on finding new revenue streams for farmers to implement agroforestry. And then based on some improvement that we made to the environment, bringing in new revenue to make these practices profitable and make environmental improvements profitable rather than costly.

You know, on the website for the Savannah Institute, it says that it works to cultivate resilience in Midwestern agriculture, and is inspired by the oak savannas native to the region. Can you tell me a bit more about that, Nate, and what it really means in the Upper Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds?

Yeah. I think a couple terms are thrown around there. Resilience is something we like to talk about because we know that our weather patterns are changing and we need to adapt farming systems so they're ready for what's coming next. And I think the the inspiration from the Oak Savannah, we take that sort of defined very broadly. And so Savannah defined as trees and, something growing under the trees in a native ecosystem that would be a grassland.

But it's kind of this two storied eco, two two tiered ecosystem with an overstory, a canopy as well as an understory. And so a lot of agroforestry practices loosely mimic that that same approach. And so we'll have trees that are doing something useful for farms, whether that's producing a tree crop or blocking wind or providing some conservation value. And then around or underneath the trees, we have vegetation that's being managed for something else. So crops or livestock or hay or something like that.

MJ, you you mentioned that we would talk about some of the things you have coming up, and I'll get to that. But where are the demonstration farms and plots around the Midwest, particularly in Illinois, that you might be able to point us to that the Savannah Institute helps to operate.

In Illinois, we have three demonstration farms. The first one I'll talk about is actually one that we lease from the University of Illinois. That is at the 4 H Memorial Camp right next to Allerton Park in Monticello. We have a 35 acre alley cropping demonstration farm there, and people can come out and see that at any of our public events. Those are all posted on our website.

That site is timber alley cropping with a corn and bean rotation in the alleys. So something that we think would be, very applicable for other farmers in the Central Illinois area who do corn and bean rotation. Nearby in Urbana, we have the largest agroforestry demonstration site in The US right now. It's right outside of town. You may have passed it if you live in the area.

It's a 120 acres and that showcases similar alley cropping to our site in Monticello with timber and then corn and beans in the alleyways in between the timber rows. And then on the other half of the farm, we have some more unique alley cropping going on with hazelnuts and prairie strips and bunch of interesting fruit that we are really excited about at Savannah Institute, things like elderberry, black currant, and even Japanese walnut. And then surrounding that entire farm, we have 11 different kinds of windbreaks, which I think we're gonna talk

about a lot

today. And those two are in Central Illinois, but then we also have one more demonstration farm up in Ogle County near the border with Wisconsin in Oregon, Illinois, that farm's called Fields Restored. That's our oldest demonstration farm. We have a silvopasture by addition experiment going on there with some cattle. And then we also have a riparian buffer that I just was at yesterday walking around.

It sounds so amazing. You can hear all of the bugs coming back and all the birds. And then there's also some alley cropping being done on that site as well. Starting next year, we're going to be launching a Illinois partner farm network. That's where we're going to formally incorporate people that are doing agroforestry on their own farms into a network like we're doing in Wisconsin this year.

Nate, the farms in Illinois sound to me as if they are woodland adjacent. So they're more into the the prairie parts of Illinois, particularly because they are in those areas of Illinois that that are not forested. You'd have to be much further to the south. Can you tell me how you think that producers, landowners on the prairie soils, in the Grand Prairie, can implement some of the things that the Savannah Institute is looking at and the kind of research that you're doing with these?

Right. A lot of Illinois is not historically, woodland. Savannahs are a little bit more common than forests at least in some parts of the state. But I think what we're implementing is trees for a whole bunch of different outcomes. And not all of that is going to be mimicking exactly what was there two hundred years ago per se.

So again, I'm going to bring back a topic that I think we'll talk about a little bit later, but there is a historical precedent for windbreaks across much of the Corn Belt including Central Illinois, areas that we don't necessarily think of as being forested. And that was an agroforestry practice that was a hundred years ago planted up pretty widely and today is probably declining in acreage. But it's not sort of unheard of. And then there's also whole that's kind of an edge of field practice. Of course windbreak.

There are a lot of different ways that trees could help be a solution even where there weren't necessarily trees two hundred years ago. So trees providing a different crop that can diversify farm income for instance. Because we're harvesting something from the tree, like a fruit or a nut or even a timber product.

Let's pick up with the windbreaks for just just a moment. Windbreaks were planted on farms across the whole of the Corn Belt in response to the dust storms of the nineteen thirties as a conservation effort. Many of those have been taken out in the last four decades. Can you tell me about windbreaks and the purpose that they might serve and how you think if there is a different kind of windbreak or different species that might serve producers and landowners better in The States?

Yeah. That's an excellent question. So we're on the verge of launching a five year project, with research collaborators at University of Illinois at Iowa State that's going to be examining windbreaks. And I think examining them in some some new new angles that we haven't necessarily thought of before. So originally planted in response to the dust bowl, of course, as we learned recently, dust storms might not be a thing of the past.

So that original purpose might not be so so out of place in this century. But I think windbreaks also could do a lot of things that they haven't really been planted for or thought of before. So for example, blocking, some intense storms from causing crop damage. We seem to be headed in a direction of more intense storms in the future. So wind related crop damage is a pretty big issue.

We think that wind breaks can actually play a role in reducing nutrient runoff, which we can talk more about, providing wildlife habitat. But I think the key here will be to figure out how, where and when we can optimize windbreaks so that they work for a lot of different stakeholders including perhaps most importantly the farmers who have the wind breaks on their property. And so planting the right species, planting these trees in the right locations so that they're not in the way so that we're minimizing negative impacts on cropland, adjacent cropland for instance, while maximizing the positive impacts on things like water quality improvement, on protecting crops from extreme wind, on providing wildlife habitat. We can go down the list. But I think in the 30s we probably planted windbreaks in the best way that we knew how.

And I think we can now examine the something like 10,000 acres of windbreaks across this Illinois and Iowa target region, really dive into the yield maps and a bunch of different rigorous science that we're bringing to the table to try to figure out what is the optimal windbreak? How does that actually work out, and where does it fit on our modern landscapes?

Imjai, there are a series of different kinds of agroforestry practices that can be put into place. Can you tell us about some of them that the Savannah Institute has implemented and other than the windbreaks we've talked about, and how it is that you are trying to showcase them?

Windbreaks are the trees that border farms. They're an edge of field practice. But another edge of field practice that we promote a lot of is riparian buffers, particularly riparian forest buffers. So a riparian area is anywhere that has water flowing through it, either always or intermittently being a stream, lake, pond, whatever, planting woody species around that is something that we really care about and wanna see. And that is a USDA defined practice.

Alley cropping, I also mentioned earlier that is where you're planting tree rows inside your field. So it's not just on the edges of your farm, but also within, your farm landscape. And a lot of that can look like a nut crop that you're harvesting the nuts from, be it walnut or chestnut, and then you're growing wheat or corn or beans or hay in between those trees. And alley cropping, I think, is really interesting and we're doing a lot of research on that at the Band Institute to see how the trees and then the understory crops can really compliment each other. And then I also mentioned silvopasture, that's essentially where you're grazing an animal, but instead of just having it be an open field, it looks more like a really lovely park.

So making more of the savannah landscape, planting trees into that pasture, for save for the animal, protection for the animal, and then also potentially tree fodder that you get from the trees. So you're feeding things from the tree to your animals. And then forest farming is the last practice. And this one, don't talk about as much in Illinois where you already have a forest canopy, maybe, and it's not a high quality forest, or maybe you have a lot of invasive species in your understory. You can clear out those invasives and use the understory to farm things that grow well in shade.

So a lot of that looks like medicinals like ginseng or golden seal or growing log grown mushrooms, which have a really high price point, things like shiitake. And that is where you already have a forest stand. And these are all of the conservation practice standards from the NRCS that the National Agroforestry Center views as our five main agroforestry systems. Agroforestry is more of a concept. It's incorporating trees and shrubs into your farm for a variety of purposes.

So oftentimes we see farmers using these practices in different ways or, doing them maybe not by the book, but essentially, if you're incorporating a tree and you're using that tree for the good of your farm, that's agroforestry.

And that we've talked a little bit about the, impact of some of these practices on the farm wind erosion, relatively speaking. But what impact might they have on water quality?

Yeah. That's a great question. So all agroforestry systems entail some percentage of the landscape being managed with perennial. I'm going to pull out a keynote from my graduate research. And the graduate research was looking at wet spots on farms.

And we found that the spots that were worst for annual crop production also tended to be worse for environmental outcomes including nutrient loss. And so I think this probably is generalizable to a lot of marginal steeply sloping too wet, too dry acres. Is that those acres where the crops don't do well leave a lot of nutrients and soil exposed for loss and including to surface waters and groundwater. And so I think there's an opportunity for perennial practices, crops, some conservation practices, different management techniques to be implemented on some of these acres, hold on to the nutrients all the way through the year, keep soil covered throughout the year, filter out runoff from adjacent fields. And I think that across a broad suite of agroforestry practices, if we manage them well, we should be able to deliver pretty impressive reductions in nutrient loss, both surface runoff and groundwater leaching.

Can you tell us about some of the ongoing research you're doing, Nate?

Yeah. I have a few different projects right now that all focus on, trees and and soil health, water quality and then biodiversity. And in this case, I mean birds. So wildlife, but really focused on birds. The water quality work that I have, projects that I have currently going are related to nutrient leaching.

So we install instruments called lysimeters in the ground in a whole bunch of different agroforestry systems, different management practices, kind of a whole breadth that you heard from MJ about earlier. And then we see how nutrient leaching, so the downward transport of nutrients when, the surface soil is is saturated or reaches field capacity after a big rain and then you have the water moves down into groundwater or into shallow, in much of Illinois would probably move into a tile. We can actually put these lysimeters in and then quantify how many nutrients are are leaching down. And this is the primary way that nitrogen ends up in our groundwater and surface water. So we have, several of the demonstration sites that MJ has already talked about.

We recovered those lysimeters. Almost all of them are analyzed. They look really good. It appears that across a broad suite of agroforestry practices, we're reducing nutrient leaching compared to adjacent conventionally managed cropland. And so we will be finishing up that analysis soon, but the preliminary results do support that perennial management is pretty effective at addressing some of these concerns.

You know, for many farmers, adoption of these kinds of conservation practices comes down down to whether they're really economically viable. What are the economic considerations surrounding agroforestry?

So agroforestry entails the potential to add more revenue streams to the farm landscape. So a lot of farms are relying on a couple products that they're selling. And if we bring in the right trees, we could increase the number of ways that farmers are accessing markets. So that could be through specialty crops, fruits and nuts. It could be timber production.

It could even be bioenergy or biomass production. And then I think there's another untapped opportunity in some of the ecosystem service incentives that exist. So if trees are improving water quality, can we turn that water quality improvement into additional, revenue, additional economic opportunities for farmers to help break down some of these barriers? So the practices that deliver for the public good in the case of water quality improvement can also deliver for farmers and make kind of make the difference, the economic difference for a farmer who's looking, can I plant this practice? What's it going to do for my bottom line?

Can we bring in additional revenue streams, whether that's products from the trees or potentially ecosystem service incentives like water quality, water quality improvement benefits? And can we use that to help kind of make the full case for, agroforestry?

MJ, can you tell us a little bit about the biggest challenges you think there are surrounding the adoption of these agroforestry practices?

I think the challenges are and I hear this pretty much every time I have to do an outreach event is you tell a farmer, oh, this agroforest practice, it's so great. There's so many benefits for the public good, for wildlife, for insect health, for climate resilience, but people don't want to quote unquote, take land out of production. Traditionally federal and state programs like the conservation reserve program and other foster programs, those are what's used to get people to be incentivized to plant out conservation agriculture type of things like agroforestry. But with NAEP's research and with some research that we've already seen, when you plant trees in certain spots, you can actually increase your yield and it's not so much that you're taking this land out of production because trees are really productive and that's really the biggest hurdle is the economic piece.

We began, Nate, our conversation by talking about windbreaks, the Dust Bowl just a bit. And I know you have, a project called the Corn Belt Windbreak Project. Can you tell me about it and how people might be able to get involved?

Right. We are launching a a five year, research project in Illinois and Iowa. And step one of that research project is going to be to find every suitable windbreak or shelter belt across our target region and invite producers to be part of the network. And that network is going to guide the research questions that we ask. So we're going to be asking farmers what do and what don't you like about windbreaks.

Don't give us the sugar coated answer. We really want to know the truth. And then we can help fill in some of the knowledge gaps that might exist. We're also then going to be relying on that farmer network for some of the research sites that we do our work on. We'll have stipend payments for any producer that's involved in the project in any capacity.

And we're going to be, one thing we'll be looking for a lot of will actually be yield maps around windbreaks. So farmers are pretty familiar often with the yield reduction in the rows right next to trees. You don't have to have a PhD to see that corn and soybeans going right next to trees don't typically do very well. But the full yield impact of that windbreak would include the area that's protected from extreme wind. And that extends something like eight to 10 times the height of the trees into the adjacent fields.

It's much harder to eyeball what is the yield impact eight to 10 times into the adjacent, 10 times the height, 800 feet into the adjacent field and it's not really something we can eyeball. So, that's one type of data we'll be looking for. And again, all of this will be compensated to the farmers. Any time or data that we're asking them for will be compensated for. And they'll be the primary audience for all of the findings of the research project.

So I I really think of the farmer network that we're putting together as the audience and and stakeholder number one for all of the research that we're doing. You have windbreaks on your property. If you know of anyone who might be interested in the project. At this point, what I'm gonna suggest you do is shoot me an email, nate@savannahinstitute.org. You can find that on the website as well.

And pretty soon, we'll have a more formal process as this project gets up and rolling so that we can, get get more people involved in a more streamlined way.

MJ, are there upcoming events that folks can attend on some of the farms we talked about in the state of Illinois?

Yes. You're listening to us in the 2025 season. We have standing monthly tours at either our farm in Urbana, Illinois or the farm in Monticello. You can find out information for that, again, at our website, savannahinstitute.org. Another big event we're doing this season is with U of I Extension that will be at the four H Memorial Camp on September 30.

It's gonna be an all day workshop, trees for bucks, birds, and bees. We'll tour the farm, we'll talk about the benefits of adding trees to your farm, especially for folks who are hunters or interested in hunting any kind of game or a birder or anything like that. And then if you're interested in getting more involved with the agroforestry community, every year we put on a perennial farm gathering and the next one will be next March, March in Dubuque, Iowa. So I would highly recommend going to that, but check out our website. There's a lot of information on there.

And if you have a large group that's in having a private tour of a farm, you can reach out to me. I'm mj@SavannahInstitute.org, and I'd be happy to try and coordinate a private tour if you have a group.

MJ Oviat and Nate Lawrence are with the Savannah Institute. You may find more at savannahinstitute.org. That's savannahinstitute.org online. They joined us here on this episode 73 of the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction podcast. The program is organized by Rachel Currie and Nicole Haverbeck both with University of Illinois Extension.

I'm Todd Gleason.