Reforesting the Home Place
For 5 generations we have farmed the Home Place for a living, and through that time it’s hard to argue that our practices did not have a mostly negative impact on the land and ecology. However, to make a living farming, we had to continue planting, fertilizing, and applying pesticides to the row crops produced on this ground, year after year.
The advent of no-till farming (paradoxically thanks to advanced herbicides and GMO technology) helped slow the topsoil loss, but the soil life and ecological loss continued. I do not mention this because I think that row crop farmers are personally to blame for this - my father is a row crop farmer, and so are many of my friends and relatives. That said, it’s hard to ignore the fact that commodity row crop farming forces farmers to prioritize a season’s yield over long-term soil health, biodiversity, the water shed, and the air. It’s also important to mention that many row crop farmers recognize and worry about this issue, but do not have the luxury to do much about it. They must make a crop and pay their loans each year or else quit or lose the farm.
Last fall our family made a difficult decision to liberate most of our cropland from the above conundrum, permanently. In the spring of 2023, we learned about a Ducks Unlimited pilot program called “Flyway Forest”. The aim of the program is to restore native hardwood timber, and therefore wildlife habitat, on farmland throughout the MS river valley. The program is complex, (here's an article ) but essentially DU buys an easement from the landowner and covers all costs to plant the trees. The landowner remains the owner, but cannot do anything on the land that jeopardizes the trees (aka farm), and cedes all ecosystem services rights (wetland restoration credits, carbon credits, etc) to DU. Down the road a decade or so, DU will begin selling the timber carbon represented by the biomass of the hardwoods on the carbon market, hopefully providing a substantial ROI. In the ever wavering and evolving carbon market, timber carbon is the easiest to measure and verify, and has the most solid (forgive the pun) reputation amongst buyers. Accordingly, DU has successfully raised investment capital for the project from federal and private sources. Money aside, the ducks and other wildlife are also beneficiaries.
What about HPP’s vision?
I often talk about my journey back to farm- how I didn’t want to farm because I thought row crop farming was the only way to do so. However, I was bothered by accepting this as a dead end and giving up on agriculture- it seemed like a cop out. Thanks to innovative ag thinkers and pioneers, and some formative personal experiences, at age 23 I forged my vision for HPP and decided I could raise meat on pasture and sell it regionally- all I needed to do was build a USDA meat plant in the middle of the farm to connect regenerative, humane farming practices to (what I believed to be) booming consumer demand. I could build a brand and create viable jobs in my rural community while farming in a way that enhanced the health and natural beauty of my generational farm. I could also give people a sense of community and connection to place in the process.
At 24, I moved home with the ambitious and admittedly naïve plan to transition the entire farm into a multispecies regenerative grazing operation and build a USDA meat plant right in the middle of it. A decade later: taking the entire farm out of row crop production has proved financially impossible, and operating the meat plant remains a much more intensive and challenging endeavor than I could have imagined. We also added a restaurant and butcher shop to the mix, and farm stays/ tours- which, again, was a more intensive endeavor than I realized on the front end.
Over the past decade, I have assumed management of the pastureland and we’ve had success transitioning about 60 acres out of 625 acres of row crop ground on the Home Place to year round grazing, but we have not been able to do more than that to date. My dream was to spread the regenerative model across the entire place, row crop land and all, but I got so bogged down in trying to make the processing facility, agritourism, farm store and restaurant, sales, marketing, and distribution work that I had to take a 2 year hiatus from expanding this vision to stay afloat. The constraints are capital and time, both of which remain mostly tied up in the meat plant and sales. My goal is to get these areas operating at a profitable scale and manage myself out of daily direct involvement so I can refocus on scaling the enterprise I moved home to manage: farming the Home Place.
With all of that in mind, I ultimately agreed with my family that the DU program is in line with HPP’s goals for the place: to enhance its health and biodiversity, albeit in a way which makes it unusable for grazing. My goal now is to take the rest of the farm over in the next 5 years for regenerative grazing, meaning that the entire place will host native hardwood forests or be engaged in regenerative, humane, chemical and drug free meat production. We also hope to offer self-guided hikes and ample recreational opportunities to enjoy the new forest!
I will add that I’ve been much more wistful about the change than I thought I would be. I was…overcome, for lack of a better term, by watching the last corn harvest off the bottom land last fall. The lifelong familiar sight and smell of the harvest made the gravity of our decision and the end of a generational way of life hit home; my kids will never see or experience what I was witnessing here for the last time. Melodramatic narratives and cultural tropes of the American farmer typically make me roll my eyes, but I had to permit myself a moment contemplating all this. There is a weight of history on the land, bad and good, and the lives of not only my family but many others who have worked the fields are connected to it. I wondered how many pints of my own sweat and gallons of my dad’s are in that ground.
Concluding thoughts on this decision
As a family we love trees, and are often considered crazy by our friends, neighbors, and other farmers in our community because of our loathing to cut one down. We will design roads and structures around them to avoid killing them. We have dreamed about restoring our bottom land acreage into the swampy hardwood forest our ancestors encountered and worked so hard to clear and drain, and my father spent a lifetime land leveling for irrigation. It is strange for a family of farmers to feel this way about their own actions, but we harbor a lot of contractions I guess. All I can say is that the finances never worked for anything other than row cropping, and even that was risky and often involved losing money 1 or 2 years out of 3, which is why our parents worked so hard to give us the opportunity to do something else.
One can imagine that when suddenly there was a financial vehicle for reforesting a large swath of the Home Place to native hardwoods in a single year, we could not believe it. Ultimately, we decided that it was fair for mom and dad to capitalize on this opportunity after sacrificing so much for us, and that this is what we (my siblings and I) want to leave our kids: a beautiful, unbroken, undivided plot of hardwoods bordering regeneratively managed grasslands, teeming with life.
Re-wilding
So this spring, for the first time in 150 years, we did not plant the “big bottom” with cotton or corn. In fact, we didn’t do anything. We didn’t clip or spray or plant or fertilize. DU planted the trees in February, around 300,000 of them, and the tiny saplings are barely visible surrounded by the undeterred spring growth of weeds.
The land looks abandoned. It’s shocking, almost insulting and shameful- the kind thing that happens to a farming family when the wheels really come off. But we know (and have been assured) those little saplings have got a good jump on the weeds and within 5 years will be shading out all the undergrowth so the forest can continue to mature.
By the time my daughter is 40 (and I am 74), I can tell her about how her grandad used to make her dad irrigate cotton and corn all summer long on the same land that’s covered in trees. I hope we will walk and talk together under this forest and encounter all kinds of wildlife- maybe a black bear will run us up a tree!
A week ago I took some videos in the same bottom land. One side of the road has the only remaining acreage of row crops on the Home Place, totaling around 135 acres, which we lease to our cousin, and the other is hosting the freshly planted hardwoods under a growing canopy of weeds, unsuppressed for the first time in 150 years.
One side looks familiar, orderly, clean, respectable, with cotton leafing out in neat rows. The other side looks unkempt and shocking in the ways I mentioned above. I walked out into this weed patch and was struck by the noise. Crickets chirping, pollinators buzzing- there was whir of non-plant life filling the air.
Back on the other side of the road, the silence was deafening. I was able to capture the difference on my iPhone camera to share it. In just one spring, a diversity of plant and animal life has exploded in the former row crop fields. Despite my wistful feelings about removing this land from agricultural production, I am excited to spend the rest of my life watching it return to a wild place again.
- Marshall