Mastering Sustainable Land Stewardship: Insights from Steve Gabriel on Silvopasture and Indigenous Practices

Sustainable Farming through Silvopasture and Tradition

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Steve Gabriel, an ecologist, forest farmer, and educator living in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, where he manages Wellspring Forest Farm. His farming framework is based on the ecology of where he lives. He also utilizes his extensive knowledge in silvopasture at the Cornell Small Farm Program as an agroforestry extension specialist.

Steve Gabriel:

I hail from the Finger Lakes region in New York, which is a beautiful place right in the middle of the state that we now call New York State, it is a unique ecosystem with lots of rolling hills and a pretty large cluster of lakes. That affects the climate and the weather around here. So we have people growing grapes on the shores of the lakes and we have hilltops, like our farm, which can be pretty cold and windy, but we, my wife and I, and my son, Aiden, steward about 20 acres here with our farm. I also work part-time for the Cornell Small Farms Program helping other farmers get started and specifically work a lot with mushroom growers and in agroforestry in that capacity so I’m busy on the land, and I'm blessed that when I'm not at our place I get to help others figure out how to do that for themselves.

Andy:

Yeah, that's awesome. For a lot of folks that are listening, you kind of have this natural progression where you might be gardening and then you get into organic and then you realize there's more to it than just switching where your inputs are coming from and then you kind of go into like either regenerative or getting the cover crops. Ultimately all this kind of uh snowballs into this idea of food forests and ultimately, if you can, if you have the space to integrate animals into something like a food forest, and that's really silvopasture. That's trying to bring all of these things together and in this kind of model, you can stack a lot of different things. I know you just spoke about mushrooms and I know you have livestock and a few other things. So could you talk a little bit about your evolution into silvopasture and how you decided to write your two books, “Farming the Woods” and “Silvopasture”?

Steve Gabriel:

My evolution was, you know, first and foremost, being a child and like, a lover of the forest and feeling, you know, comfortable there, feeling safe there, having just a lot of great experiences up into, you know, my teens in the woods, and so so, for me, like getting into college years, it was a question of like, well, how do I spend as much time as I can in the places I like I didn't really like, you know, desks and computers and um, and the idea of working a 40 hour week job. You know it's like this is where I want to spend time. So what does that look like? And so for me, that led me to, at first, like, um, getting a lot into outdoor sports, like you know, rock climbing and hiking and backpacking and canoeing and all those kinds of things, and then thinking, oh, maybe I could be like a guide or take people out into nature.

I was also doing a lot of work with youth and felt a really important role —and I still do— is to connect youth to the natural world and build a relationship there, so that all felt like it was going well until I really started developing awareness of just the real crux for lack of a better word that we're in with. We can't just enjoy the natural beauty of spaces around us because we're actively destroying it as we live our lives and are disconnected from the sources of where we get our food and our energy and all those things. So for me, it was like, well, I need to really sort of figure out ways I can give back and protect, and you know, and so the progression was to figure that out and it looked.

It started out looking more like conservation, but the problem I had with that is that conservation and setting things aside assumes that humans cannot coexist or inhabit natural spaces. And that was problematic because we had to live somewhere.

For me, it was like farming and forestry and this sort of idea of co-inhabiting space and finding the intersection where we can meet our needs while taking care of, and I think in many cases, restoring ecosystems, and so that included some studies in permaculture, that included some studies with some amazing mentors along the way, and just a deep appreciation for ecology and really learning that specific forest ecology, and for me it just felt like a series of one thing after the other. One thing kind of leads to the other. So, you know, I traveled, I did a bunch of learning, I moved back to where I was from because it felt really important to be in the space that I grew up in, and I worked at the Nature Center. That was one of the first places.

I connected with nature and was teaching kids. There was tapping maple trees and making maple syrup and teaching, teaching nature connection through, you know, producing that magical product. And I just remember in that, in that space, one of the years we thinned the sugar bush. When you're tapping trees, it's really important to make sure the health of those trees is maintained. So one of the things you can do is thin and give some space to those trees you're tapping. So we're calling out this smaller diameter wood, and that led to the first mushroom inoculation I ever did. And for me that was one of those moments where I was like, oh, these things connect. One thing leads to another. Now we have mushrooms growing in the understory of this forest that we're tapping the trees of and ultimately we're actually taking care of a really healthy forest.

Some of the healthiest sugar maple stands in the US are ones that have been maintained as sugar bushes because humans are giving positive management to it and that benefits the birds and all the species that rely on that type of forest to thrive as well.

So you know, that's, that's one example of many, and so for me it's been that journey and really writing two books was trying to summarize and interpret some of the things I've learned along the way and really just trying to put it all together. “Farming the Woods” was a book by a professor, Ken Mudge, that I learned from, and we felt like there wasn't a concise book of information about ways you could cultivate things in the woods, so worked on that. And then “Silvopasture” was really as we developed our farm and we had a really severe drought in 2016, having an experience where trees and tree fodder, in particular, saved us that year, and realizing that that was just a microcosm of the things we might be up against in the coming generations and that really intentionally integrating trees and agroforestry as a practice in our farm is going to be essential to it being resilient to that. So that's kind of led me to where I am, you know, today.

Andy:

I think you're the only person I've ever seen speak in a YouTube video where you started talking about Tom Wessels and bringing in these ideas of like reading your local ecology and having that inform this process, which I talk a lot about his work because I think his books are really insightful. You know, I think there's a lot of people that are into, again, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, all these different things. But tying that into what already exists, I think sometimes gets lost and you're talking a lot about that Like. With that in mind, how do you personally try to bring in this concept of local ecology and local history into trying to understand what the appropriate system looks like in a space where you're working?

Steve Gabriel:

I think it's multifaceted. I mean, I think at the most basic level it's spending time and observing and what I think of is always like relationship building with place, and like when I'm teaching folks, I encourage them to think about. You know how they build relationships that are healthy in their lives and that should be the same way that you approach land and ecology or even livestock. We're really well-trained sort of capitalists and you know we have this harsh background of colonialism which I think really infects sometimes the way that we put really subjective value on things.

I think a relationship hopefully changes that notion of thing to a particular moment in time, a particular entity, like a living spirit, a living being that is there. So the sheep are not just an entity that's producing meat for me, they're also individuals and they're also a collective, they're a community and they have habitat on our farm and I'm just stewarding that habitat and we have a relationship that some might say isn't fair. I get to make a lot of decisions and harvest sheep but at the same time, they wouldn't be there if we weren't stewarding them over time the flock has gotten really healthy and is producing really good offspring and is a healthier community because of the choices we make. So we grapple with the hardness of, you know, harvesting animals and things like that.

But you know all this to say, I think that's where it starts and you know, from there, learning the history of the places you're in, which includes the Indigenous history which you know. Every land has an indigenous story. In most cases, it's been erased, if not highly muffled. So learning that piece and learning about just the unique geological, geographical, weather, climate, and microclimate features that probably exist not only locally but even sublocally, like within our landscape, there's a ton of different micro microclimates that if we start to identify and think of as little subsets of the land that we're stewarding, then it's a question of how do we?

How do we work in sort of the direction that that that space is heading already and building off of that? So what's the intersection of the things I think I want to do and the things the land is suggesting so for us, we'd worked for years with cattle and when we got to this landscape it was really clear, because of the moisture and some of the different topography and the access, that that was too large of an animal to take care of the land here, and so sheep, you know, emerged out of that kind of analysis over time.

Andy:

I've got a few acres and I was looking at some mulberries that I'd seeded out and planted a few years ago. And there's two that are about eight feet apart and I have pretty low pH, and one that's below a pine tree that you would think would be struggling more than the one that's got a little bit more direct sunlight and is further away from the pines. The one that's further away is suffering, while the one that's underneath the pine, yeah, is doing pretty well.

You would think about it— that doesn't make any sense. And then if I was looking at the ground and you can see the fungi, uh, you know this, with all the rain and cool weather we've had, um, shooting up all this coral reef fungi right around the healthy one and the other one had nothing going on. Right, it's as complicated as you want it to be and as simple as you want it to be, and as long as you have like a basic framework of understanding that ecology, you can kind of figure it out without getting too deep into it. But the depth of knowledge also, I think, helps reinforce some of that common sense when you look at it and you're like, okay, this makes sense now that I think about it.

Steve Gabriel:

And that process of thinking small and also seeing the big picture I think sometimes gets lost in a lot of the more um, static understandings of permaculture design classes where you might just go in and say, all right, this is your site, you've done the topography, this is your ecozone, uh, you know, xyz, and then you're just going to go plug stuff in yeah it's a little bit more complicated than that and more informed by what's already there yeah, someone shared with me, like at one point, it's not so much that you're imposing a design or a plan, as you're discovering it and you're maybe building it like a, like a lawyer would or a detective, like you're building a case for why you want to do something based on what you, what the evidence, you know, versus.

I think it's very easy to approach a lot of these things and continue to sort of impose what we think is a good idea. And I work a lot with clients and one of the things I find very common is people say, well, this is what I want to do, you know, this is what we want here, and when we dig into that, there's actually goals and values behind that that might lead to something else, but they're already locked into. Like, oh, I want a pond here, but is the land, you know, that a suitable spot for a pond? Are you going to spend a bunch of money if it's not going to hold water? There are all these kinds of factors that might not actually be the best solution, but we often jump to that imposition versus really being receptive. And so you know that can be challenging sometimes to walk people back from, but ultimately, I think the more receptive we are to what we see in the landscape, the better you know our planning is going to be and the better the outcome is going to be.

Andy:

And there are a lot of species I think people are initially ready to write off that offer a lot, not just for us in terms of if we're thinking about food systems for humans, but also just the local ecology.

Things like if you don't use tree hay, you might not really have any interest in willow, whereas willow is a great tree hay feed, but it's also I think it's the second it hosts the second most native insects of any tree in North America. So having that on your site, especially if it was there on its own without human intervention speaks to how it's so important for that local diversity and, even though it might not be a productive quote-unquote plant, for what you're trying to do. Having that understanding and that framework is so important to help, you know, reinforce that. Even if you were to walk away from that food forest quote-unquote, 50 years, 100 years from now, how long will it stay there? How long will it be supporting native ecology?

I'm curious, in your experiences you know, how heavily do you try to incorporate things like willow, which I know you probably would use more than the average person oaks, and things like that that aren't traditional food forest species but are so important in our local ecology.

Steve Gabriel:

I think we have to question a lot of what we value and what our culture assigns value to Because, as you say, the willow, red maple is another good example which, like my background, is in forestry and that's considered like a weed tree. We've created the conditions for red maple to thrive in the northeast US because of the sort of high-grading logging that's happened and that red maple is incredibly adaptive to to that sort of practice and also just the climate changes. So sugar maples definitely have a harder time as things are happening, but red maple has the most flowers of any flowering tree early in the spring, along with willow are, like these, two, essential early food pollination sources for people, right?

So I was raised to be told that this, you know, this, this species or that species doesn't have any value, but it's there. It just may not be in the certain framework that someone has imposed. So I always, you know, think about and try to encourage well, what is the value in this that I may not know about and I can learn about? And also, um, maybe it has inherent value or inherent right to exist because it's there.

What we try to do is, I think there's a balance between like uh, too many species, like just uh. I always say it's like um winter catalog syndrome, where you get like a tree catalog in the mail and you're like, oh, this sounds great, I'm going to, you know, buy two of these 20 different types of trees and two of this you know, and then they all arrive in the spring and you're sort of like I don't know where to put them and I'm panicked and I can't, you know, again, build a relationship because I don't know any of these things. So I've gone on a strategy of not going too much too fast, a couple of new species every year, and getting excited about a couple of new things and sort of adding those into the mix.

That includes a whole list of native and quote-unquote, non-native species. One example is the black locust. So, yeah, you know it's, it's ubiquitous, and both Indigenous cultures in the northeast us have been propagating black locust for a long time as well, as settler farmers have been using black locust for a long time because it's an incredibly valuable wood.

It's a rot-resistant wood, it is a pollinator plant, it is a nitrogen fixer, and it is an incredibly high protein fodder for animals. It supports a lot of good ecosystem diversity. But people put it on the invasive species list at some point and then I get eyebrows raised all the time when I start to talk about black locusts. But when we start to check off all the positive benefits, it has a place in the ecosystem, probably in a managed ecosystem, because it does tend to spread by roots and create thickets, which, if you want to control nature, is frustrating. But for me, it's just creating more abundance and more management.

So now our initial locust plantings are becoming little thickets, but our sheep and their browse tendencies are helping to manage those so they're not sort of out of control or not moving into spaces that we don't want to. So it's important to nest that in a context. Right, certain trees, if I didn't have grazing animals I might not want to put black locusts on if I wasn't ready for that kind of management. But we're really into the birches and the oaks and the willows and sort of thinking about what's the mix of species that we can introduce because we have a clear idea of what they perform, and then also just adding ones in that we think are just cool and want to see, and we get a bunch of those surprises like you're saying with the mulberry and other things. That's an important thing is just to kind of stick a couple of things in and see what happens too.

Andy:

From an outsider's perspective, I think there are a lot of assumptions that we know a lot more about ecology than we do. You know tree hay is a great example. It's something that humans have done for thousands of years and if you go into any extension school and you look up a lot of species, they'll claim that they're poisonous Maples, black locusts, and they're clearly not. I feed them both all the time but I get why they do that it's a cautionary thing, I'm sure, because they don't know, and it's easier to say it's probably poisonous than otherwise.

Steve Gabriel:

We've raised animals in confinement and the animals themselves haven't built relationships to these plants, so they often overeat them. Or the horse that's been penned up for months and only eats the thing the ration right, leans over the fence, eats too much black locust, and gets sick. But have you ever heard of Fred Provenza? Have you gotten into his books at all? Or work his books at all, or work? He's done an amazing job at sort of building a body of research around what they call the bodily wisdom of animals, and a lot of it relates to toxicity in the landscape and sort of this idea that a lot of what quote-unquote toxic compounds are pretty medicinal and it's a matter of moderation, just like many things in our lives, and animals have that intuitive, innate ability to balance those things.

When I first started farming, here we were, we were down our hands and knees clipping black cherry seedlings out of our pasture because we read they were toxic and like, spent all this time doing it because we were afraid our sheep were going to eat them, and one day we just observed that actually they were nibbling on them and doing just fine.

And it was completely out of context and we just read it on a list. But if we actually look at the animals they're able to self-regulate. If they're used to being in a grazing landscape and they're used to that feedback I just recommend to folks to check out Fred Provenza's work. Um, that really gets really deep into that and if you're especially working with the animals, I think gives you the potential to work with animals in a landscape and it really kind of erases toxicity if they're, if they have the ability to express and learn and pass it off to their offspring and there's really not that much concern of them running across. Our sheep eat everything on the list of toxic plants at this point, I think so yeah.

Andy:

I think there's this loss of animal ancestral knowledge of this is what they've eaten out in the field for millennia and now they've been confined into managed paddocks and whatever. And now they're they're relearning along with us.

Steve Gabriel:

Yeah, for sure. That's the antithesis to that which is happening in human diets too. We're like this is the nutritional profile you need, and we can put it in like a milkshake. That's all you need, right? Like we need live foods. We need diversity. We actually need the opportunity to sample that. There's. There's research to show that humans as well, given the opportunity, can develop that nutritional wisdom and be responsive to their needs based on food. But that's never how nutrition's been approached. It's been. This is the amount of things you need to be healthy, and it's the same with animals.

Andy:

Um, but, given the chance, I think it's a really important part of connecting to, to landscape and, yeah, building a better you know, better healthier relationship I'm not surprised at all if you think about it, like if, if we were out in the, in the wild, so to speak, quote, unquote, wild, you wouldn't be eating the same thing every day to get your you know x amount of grains, of grains and this and that and all you know, whatever you would be like, okay, it's a blueberry season. I'm going to be eating a lot of blueberries for like two weeks and then you know storing berries in different forms for occasional enjoyment throughout the rest of the year.

You know I might kill a deer and then again, whatever the next fruit is that I've got there, you know, huckleberries for a week or two and that's not, you know, based on the food pyramid and stuff that wouldn't be healthy. But that's like what we're designed to do, right?

But to kind of circle back to farming. So your farm, Wellspring Forest Farm, you have a lot of Cayuga ducks, which I also have. They're fantastic ducks and their eggs are unreal. I just I've never seen a duck egg with whites as thick as a Cayuga. I was curious if the reason for your choice to go with Cayugas was based on that historical connection to the Indigenous tribes of the region, or was that just a coincidence?

Steve Gabriel:

It's interesting. Yeah, so we're on the land, traditional lands of the Coyocono, which is the word for Cayuga. In Cayuga, which I was blessed to learn, took a language class a couple of years ago; the Cayuga duck, from what I understand, is I mean most domesticated ducks are like descendants of mallards and essentially just bred in different directions from there. And, yeah, I guess the development of Cayuga was around around this lake that we're blessed to be around. And I'd say, yeah, that was an incentive. I mean, we were looking for different species, different quote-unquote heritage breeds, and Cayuga was one of them that we initially tried. We did a research project where we compared different breeds and we're looking at the time raising them potentially for meat, but then settled on the eggs.

But I appreciate that connection and that's it's sometimes hard to find the lineage of a lot of these, um, a lot of these livestock connections. So it's cool that it embodies the name. But at this point, we kind of have we have a bit of a ragtag team of ducks. Uh, we have some pekins, we have some Indian runners that were sent to us by mistake, we have some khaki Campbells, you know. So, um, it's a bit of a quite a mixed flock that are that are shepherded around by a couple of guard geese. So there you go. Cayugas are in retirement mostly at this point, but we love, love the eggs of all of them. There's quite a diversity there, yeah yeah they're, they're great ducks.

Andy:

I've got some pekins as well and um some rouens, and I think by far I would take if I had to start over. I would just go straight with the Cayugas. I think they're better ducks, at least in my experience. And there's nothing better than watching ducks walking around in the forest digging through everything.

Right now they're working overtime, so we've talked about this a little bit. How do you think about recognizing local Indigenous history when we start thinking about these practices? You know, we're trying to give recognition to the Indigenous people who've been taken off this land violently, and there's a lot of action going on too, like you know, recognizing the landscape of whose indigenous lands it is, but as people that are actually stewarding the land, how do we incorporate this ethos into what we're doing, and doing more than just like giving lip service to, you know, these indigenous people?

Steve Gabriel:

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's a bit of a journey. There's not a clear, concise answer to that. So what it's looked like for us is first trying to maintain presence and awareness and bringing that into our daily existence. Learn not only the name of the people whose land we inhabit but also learn it in their language and be able to speak that. And there are resources to help people. There's a website that's like native-landca. I think that's like a Google Maps website where you can. It's really cool because it started out just in North America. Now it's like in South America and other parts of the world where land is being named for the people who have traditionally been its inhabitants, and so that's a great way to start and in learning how to pronounce and say it, I learned from the Cayuga language person who taught me that saying the actual name in the language on the land that you're on is a powerful gesture and it's important to them that other people do that. Now, that's specific to this individual.

I think it's really important that we don't generalize about Indigenous cultures as a whole. We've done a wholesale job of that, especially in the US, of sort of lumping them all together and, as well as that, no individual necessarily speaks for their entire community, and that's important as well. So this one person said this is what's important for us in this time is being able to say the name and reverberate that have that in the air and the water is important, and then also just that, wherever we're going, that we're acknowledging that these are not a story of the past, they're not a history lesson.

They have a present, they're very active now and they have a future, and so often we're talking about indigeneity and Indigenous cultures is like this past tense event or past tense group of people, but so many of them are present and here and it's a real testament to their resilience in many different ways, and so I think those are pieces that are important.

I think, across the board as well, is to learn those things and to acknowledge and make sure, as we're speaking about it, it's in a present sense, and then, ideally, we're building relationships, we're learning and connecting, understanding what each community I think needs and wants from settler-colonists that my ancestors descended from, where we arrived down in the Mississippi and made our way up, and we're in the Midwest. Now we're out here, what does that look like and what are the desires of those communities now from the rest of us is an important conversation to hopefully have at some point, but that can take some time to build a relationship and to understand and I feel like we've gotten some kernels of that, but have a lot more you know to learn.

The other piece is just to recognize, I think, wherever our privileges afford us the opportunity to do work. So I work part-time for Cornell University. Cornell University is a land-grant university and just digging into what a land-grant means is an eye-opener for me, Cornell's endowment is not only benefiting from lands here in what we call New York now, but also many Ojibwe territories and others in the Midwest and Minnesota and places like that. So just really tying all these deep connections together, understanding that this is a fabric that threads through a lot of institutions, a lot of things that we're connected to, and that after we learn we can think about ways to leverage that privilege, and power to do some of the healing work. But I think personally, keeping in mind that the healing work is probably multi-generational, in the same way that the pain inflicted has been multi-generational. So it needs to be built in and embedded into the sort of slow work that we're doing alongside the ecological work on our landscapes.

Andy:

In terms of the actual farming itself. How does that inform your decisions? I know we talked a little bit about the Cayuga duck, but did you do any research or anything like that on indigenous farming practices or land management practices? Or was that just based on a kind of historical record that you had understood or what? How does that kind of all integrate together?

Steve Gabriel:

Yeah, that's a great, great piece and for me, I've been lucky. One of my mentors and close friends is a forester here in the Finger Lakes named Mike DeMunn, who was raised in the Seneca community, so that's one of the Six Nations, often known as the Iroquois but more preferred to be called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. That really encompasses a lot of New York State and so, just in that, learning forestry and learning forest stewardship and planting trees and creating landscapes that are supporting forests and supporting clean water are a really powerful way to express Indigenous land stewardship. Without calling it that myself, like that's not something I'm claiming, I'm just saying those are values that have been translated to me from folks from those communities that those are important things versus, you know, maybe, growing out. We've grown out some corn that Mike had. That has a long history. We've grown some of that on the land and learned some of the specific cropping systems.

Our work with maple syrup is tied into a very long understanding of the cycles and the harvest and that's a practice that very much has a long history here. But I think a lot of people gravitate towards it. Well, I'm just going to, I'm going to grow these Hopi beans or I'm going to grow this kind of specific seeds, but I think just the overall stewardship of clean air, clean water, and diverse biodiverse habitats and that restoration work is an expression of taking care of the land in a way that that has been done for so long and only recently sort of been undone. So that's kind of the way I approach it. But I think also, maple syrup is an industry now too, right? So there's like this balancing point of like and that's perfectly fine. People can; I'm glad people make a living from it.

But also for us thinking about how we harvest things, and how we treat things, it's very easy to slip into this sort of commodification of everything and against subjectifying things into. You know well, this is just dollars, essentially, that I'm growing. So really, what does it mean to tap trees? What does it mean to welcome the maples back? What does it mean to give thanks and gratitude for those things?

I think those are all really valuable parts to this that are important, just like when we slaughter our sheep, what does that mean to take a life and to be grateful for its sustenance right? So those are the ways I think values show up in our, on our farm, and it's for us a lot of just sort of undoing what we feel like we've been trained which is sort of to be good, good capitalists and sort of like like not have that connection relationship because it's painful or it's, you know, it's not productive in some way. So so, because it's painful or it's, you know, it's not productive in some way. So that's how I think it shows up in a lot of our farms.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think, like with like tapping the maples yourself, one of the things personally for me that's important about that process is recognizing place and time, and I think that gets very lost in the commodification of whether it's maple syrup or anything else. It's something that I think humans, especially in 2021, post the beginning of COVID you know even before that it's such an important thing that we don't have the words, for the most part, to really understand and to articulate, and it manifests in all these other different ways, whether it's, you know, pumpkin spice season or whatever like it comes out in all these different ways because we don't really understand it, but it's like very primal part of who we are as humans.

Steve Gabriel:

Absolutely. I mean, maple sugaring is the thing I've been doing the longest and it's something that's tied me to the seasons and it is such a thermometer and a barometer of what's happening in a specific year and a specific time and I value that relationship so much to see the change. And even if you know, I really encourage folks, even if they have a tappable tree in their backyard and they just tap one tree and just drink the sap. That's actually my favorite thing, drinking sap every spring and just taking partaking in that ritual and that understanding of that real reflection of what's going on, I think is really, really awesome and it can trickle into other things as well.

We know we were, we're often lost in the sort of season or the holidays or the rituals that might tie us more. And I think we have to find a balance between, you know, appropriating other examples of that but just creating our own ways to tie to that and for us, like we harvest garlic now, every year, you know, and there's a cyclical cycle, nature to that we, we harvest all our firewood and we're curing the firewood this year for two years from now and just being tied into those cycles. I think it is really valuable, without having to um necessarily put specific customs to it, but just thinking about that as a way to tie us to the land and tie us to the seasons and hopefully tie us to the generations, because I think that's ultimately where we need to head is that these practices are not just a single generational thing. When, then, we sell the land, someone else does it Like that's a very new construct. I think our cultures were all inherently sort of multi-generational, and that's an important aspect of something to rebuild.

Andy:

You say culture, and that's an interesting word choice, because when we talk about all these things that we're doing tapping maples, growing, raising sheep, whatever it might be all of those inform our foodways and our cultures come from our place because they come from our foodways, right, and so all of these things, this, this sense of identity, all comes back, and it's only been in the last couple of generations where we haven't had those intimate connections with place and food, uh, where we've become disconnected from it.

Whether through, I mean, immigration's always existed, but more so under the ease of you know, with the internet, where if you move someplace you can stay in touch with your family through screens or whatever it might be between that and our food system, where we nobody knows their farmer and if you do, it's because you're rich, like it's just the way it is. And that comes with its challenges. But I think, like all this kind of I don't want to circles back to, but it all orbits around this one big component moving forward, which is climate change. How does climate change play into this idea of how we honor Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous practices while also preparing for a future where those landscape practices may no longer be applicable because of changing climactic patterns, temperature, and so on?

Steve Gabriel:

Yeah, I mean maple sugar is a good example, right, because the projection is that the sugar maples will continue to sort of shift northward, so to speak, and not we're already seeing very unreliable seasonal changes. But sugar maple seeds need a certain number of cold days, of stratification, days below freezing to germinate, and so we're already seeing a decline in sort of regeneration of sugar maple, which is compounded by deer, which is compounded by insects and all the kinds of things that are happening. So change is happening, that's inevitable.

People have always moved from place to place, that's inevitable. But what are the ways that we support that? And I think simultaneously, sort of like, I will grieve the loss of the sugar maple, but I also welcome in the red maple again, which is a maple that is a cousin, that is highly adaptable to climate change, is already growing down in, you know, Georgia and will probably continue to grow in this region and does produce sap and can be cultivated, and so maybe one of the shifts is that our collective culture starts to, you know, put more value and support towards those species that in the past we've called weed trees or something like that and that that's one way we can adapt to climate change right, but I think that it's okay also to sort of grieve or be challenged by the loss of things.

I think that's an important part of recognizing that this landscape isn't going to look like it was and we're not trying to recreate the same thing that happened in the past. Sometimes we're weaving in sort of different layers, and one is that the understanding of the past and the present and the future, all kind of you know all kind of together, so I think that's an important part as well. The future, all to kind of you know all kind of together, so I think that's an important part as well.

My friend is a filmmaker and he created an amazing film series called Inhabitants that recently came out I just want to mention that because when we talk about climate change we talk about indigenous sort of stewardship of land. That film has some amazing examples from across the US of indigenous tribes who are engaged in really deep practice with land stewardship and are adapting to climate change and are really powerful templates and examples for the rest of us to learn from. So I think that is another piece is that settlers of the colonial Eurocentric cultures don't have a lot of history of adapting to a place over thousands of years. Cultures don't have a lot of history of adapting to a place over thousands of years. The indigenous people do, and I think an important part is how do we respectfully learn from those cultures that have that track record and that understanding and that film provides some great examples of that and I think that's a conversation that we need to dig into if we want to be serious about the future, because we don't have a roadmap.

We're not headed in a clear direction right now and we need, I think, everybody at the table thinking together in a respectful way about how we can make this work. I do know that trees and forests and what we call agroforestry are part of that solution, but agroforestry is just a modern term for an indigenous land practice. In many ways, we can look at those patterns and say, yeah, maintaining tree cover, maintaining different diversities of these densities of tree cover, deep forests and open fields and savannah-like forest and planting food forests these are all ideas that many people are returning to and feeling like they're new, but they really have, you know, very deep traditions around the world, and so we can learn a lot from folks who've been stewarding those for much longer than we have.

Andy:

For folks who enjoyed your thoughts, where can they find your work? Or I know you've got two books. Do you have anything new coming? Or you know, where do you recommend folks buy those books? Anything like that.

Steve Gabriel:

So we have our farm website, which is wellspringforestfarm.com. That has you know. You can purchase the books directly from us if you want, or your local independent bookstore is a good second choice preferably, but that's the way the world works these days, right? So however you get it, I'm okay with it, but those are the preferred ways. Silvopasturebook.com has a lot of content and additions, videos, and some tools we've created, and we have an online course if folks want to dig in. That you can access anytime. But we do a live session once a year and once you enroll in that you can tune in for the rest of your life, anytime. We do a live session and check out the recordings if you can't make it, and things like that.

Andy:

And that's also on a sliding scale, right?

Steve Gabriel:

It's on a sliding scale. Otherwise, there is a lot of concerted effort and right now for us, it's raising our toddler and continuing to figure out what our farm means after stewarding a specific place for 10 years, which is not very long, and very long at the same time and looking to the next 10 years and kind of maintaining those things but continue to teach and help other landowners with consulting things like that is kind of the plan for the near future.