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Silvopasture Is an Ancient, Climate-Smart Farming Practice: Can the Farm Bill Help Spur its Renaissance?

By integrating trees and pasture, farmers can increase their bottom line and protect livestock from hotter summers.

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This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News and Ambrook Research.

On a clear morning in April, after milking his seven cows, Tim Sauder looked over the pasture where he had just turned the animals out to graze. Like many dairy farms, Sauder’s fields swayed with a variety of greenery: chicory, alfalfa and clover. But they were also full of something typically missing on an agricultural landscape — trees. Thousands of them.

Between 2019 and 2021, Sauder planted 3,500 trees at Fiddle Creek Dairy, a 55-acre family farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife raise cows to produce yogurt, cheese and beef. Today, young willow, hickory, poplar, pecan and persimmon trees stud the pastures, and on a crisp spring morning, rows of honey and black locusts, bur and cow oaks, were beginning to leaf out, casting shadows on the long grass below.

Sauder said planting trees has ...

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