Tree Fodder Innovations: Sustainable Livestock Feeding with Shana Hanson

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Shana Hanson over at Three Streams Farm up in Maine. She's a wealth of information and has a vast array of experiences working with tree fodder, from chipping it to silage and everything in between. We discuss her research and grants and how they are making tree fodder more palatable for livestock farmers.

Andy:

Hi, Shana. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk about this subject with us. For folks who aren't familiar with Three Streams Farm or with tree silage and tree fodder, these are different practices of utilizing leaves from trees. Could you tell us a little about yourself and your work?

Shana Hanson:

So I have a goat and one cow and more goats, a multi-micro-dairy, with CSA people and people that also just trade, come, come and milk or come and learn stuff from me and go home with milk. And I have a friend who's making a lot of aged cheese, and I'm going to a market where you can just directly trade things. I also have a blueberry field on a mountain where the animals sometimes go for field care with me, and that harvest is also income. We use tree leaves there directly for the blueberries, but a lot of it gets burnt off. I'm also, you know, I became aware once I started getting really serious about feeding animals from trees, that there's a lack of practices for our area and knowledge. So I'm just fascinated to study this stuff. So, I interact a lot with other farms and consult, often for free.

I have been doing a tree fodder seminar each summer, whichever week has July 10th in it. People can just schedule with me and come whenever they want and not have it all at once in July because now that I have the blueberry field, it's a bit too tight. So I'm doing a little research, a little education, and a lot of wandering with goats and climbing for goats and cows, sometimes wandering with the cow, too. I also have a sow here who is really happy if I take the time to bring her some tree stuff. She's kind of retired. I was providing organic piglets to the community of guinea American guinea hogs. She was my poison ivy turner.

Andy:

How did you end up going down this tree fodder rabbit hole, essentially, where you realized the great opportunities that were available?

Shana Hanson:

It took the goats, like, I don't know, eight years or so to show me. You know, I was wandering with two goats for quite a while. Not all the time, as I do, not as much of the time as when I have more goats, and they were easy to fill up, like you could cut a few branches and fill up a couple of goats, or you could cut, you know, part of a small tree. I did prune trees and fruit trees for people. I've pruned fruit trees for people for pay since 1983. So it took them like eight years of pointing up with their noses to get me to start first climbing white cedar trees, and I was like, oh, you want me to climb that for you?

And then they were pointing up at an oak tree, a little oak tree that was going to shade the pasture. I'm looking at the big oaks and going, that tree can’t be on the south side of my pasture, and they wanted it. And it was August, late August, and I reached up with. the chainsaw and lopped it off, figuring that way they wouldn't kill the sprouts, which is exactly why you pollard in exactly that manner, and it just happened to be the right age and exactly at the right time for the traditional practice. So, you know, my goats knew and do this; that makes sense. I'm going to do it high so you don't kill it.

Then the next year I found the word ‘pollard’ in a book called Lost Crafts that the library was getting rid of at their book sale, and I got really excited that other people did this, so I went to my cooperative extension agent, Rick Kurzberg, and he's really into like corn silage and very, very conventional no-till using lots of herbicide. Well, probably, I mean, he wouldn't appreciate me saying lots of, you know, but using herbicide, and I don't. I'm not even sure that I shouldn't have said that. Sure, but Rick is great; he was very helpful.

He looked up the word for me, because I didn't have internet, and found Helen Reed's tour of eight countries to study pollarding and she's in England, she's in London, she works for the city of London at Burnham Beaches. Burnham Beaches is, I'm not sure, but like 800-year-old beach pollards that aren't doing that well, and I've met Helen a few times since then. So, I got a friend to email her whole study to be published. But I knew the grant had her making more known, making more of a study than just her blog. I found it, and she sent that on disk, and I used her bibliography and her reference list to find a lot of other people and started to study. So I went back to school with, you know, out on goat walks studying things.

Andy:

Yeah, that study you're talking about—I know I found it maybe four or five years ago, and I think we talked about this earlier when we spoke before we recorded.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, it's on the internet now.

Andy:

Yeah, it's a great resource. It's an amazing collection of practices from mostly Europe. I definitely recommend that folks who are listening go dig that up.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, and that's in English.

Andy:

Yeah, one of the few resources.

Shana Hanson:

Most of the other ones weren't.

Andy:

Yeah, you are a compendium. When we spoke earlier, you mentioned books in other languages that dealt with this subject.

Shana Hanson:

When you drive, almost an hour in each direction, to sit for two hours with a friend who knows Swedish, like multiple times throughout, like many different winters, and you take notes on the book and maybe you even type some of them. You tend to remember it more than if you just read it. And then I keep looking in them, you know, in my notes, and paging through the books and getting someone else to check on something, and so I'm really familiar with a handful, you know, like four different pieces of literature and yet I still am missing things in them, because some of them are big and fat and we didn't translate the whole thing, we just kind of spot picked where it looked like it was going to give me how-to information.

Andy:

Yeah, you have to be pragmatic about it.

Shana Hanson:

Well, I've done the whole book, but my friends are only so willing to sit with me for so long. It wasn't their subject, you know, it was a little bit. One of them was a state forester who was fluent in German, and I know him from dancing and playing music. And then the other one, she's the person that brought cashmere goats to Maine, basically, and she's the president of the Cashmere Society. So she has goats and a big woodland, and she's starting to stop because she's quite old, but she's Swedish. So Yvonne was really, really helpful. She even tried to do some Norwegian for me.

Andy:

I know tree pollarding and tree leaf use were really common, especially in northern Europe.

Shana Hanson:

Well, it was common in northern places, but it's still common in warm places. It still accounts for 98% or more of cow, sheep fodder, and probably goats' fodder. In Nepal, in the mountainous regions, 90% or so of fodder for those animals comes from tall trees that mostly women climb.

Andy:

Oh, that's interesting. I'd never heard of that.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, I have a video on my website of a woman. I forgot her name, but Biju Pujal took the video and sent it. I asked for it. I asked for a video. I had a person here who goes to Nepal and has an organization there, and she got someone to video for me. It's all over. Lots of warm places are still doing it.

Andy:

Anywhere that hasn't become too industrialized might be doing it. I've heard of the fodder blocks that are becoming more common in places like Brazil, but I wasn't familiar with them. Essentially just shorter pollards, like two feet tall, creating giant stumps.

Shana Hanson:

Oh, like a fodder bank, yeah, yeah.

Andy:

So that but that's more of a modern, like industrialized practice versus like more of the indigenous which I think you're talking about.

Shana Hanson:

So they're cutting and carrying. It's called cut and carry like they're carrying it to livestock.

Andy:

No, I think they're working them through a grazing pattern, essentially, where the blocks are every couple of feet.

Shana Hanson:

OK, so Well, yeah, because Juan Alves, who's at the University of Vermont, before he was there, he was in Peru, I believe. They had funding for a 10-year study, and they were. Well, it was a project. They were supporting farmers to change to sustainable practices with cattle and they were able to support much more cattle on much less land and have it be really regenerative. And because it was 10 years, it was very effective. They picked community leaders, etc, and started with those guys; anyway, it involved tree fodder, and he said that there the trees almost have the same rotation as the grass.

Andy:

They grow so fast yeah, that's kind of what I was getting out of it.

Shana Hanson:

There's a whole different thing in the north, yeah, Ingvild Outstead in Norway, which is quite cold. It's probably similar to where I am, but we're not as cold as we used to be. Anyway, he says that people considered a five-year rotation sustainable for the trees.

Andy:

Oh.

Shana Hanson:

And Håkan Slott in Sweden said people did from three to eight-year cycles.

Andy:

Yeah, and that's also based on species too.

Shana Hanson:

Based on species, based on soil richness. So my shot checks in Austria, the big fat German book that I didn't read all the details of, I would like to say that in a really rich place, you might do every year cycle if it's really rich soil and moist, but mostly longer than that. And so you have to think so the longer the cycles and depending how fast the tree is growing, the more gummy the stuff that you're taking down is, and it's. It can be pretty dangerous taking down really big stuff, you know. So I've got some prunus pollards in what used to be a chicken yard and three-year growth. The growth is going to be over 20 feet long, so the bases are going to be three or four inches thick. Of the things I'm cutting off of the new growth, Probably wouldn't want to leave that for, you know, seven or eight years because it's just going to be like, you know, felling timber.

Andy:

Yeah, these, I've got these willows that are probably about five inches in diameter, uh, and there are two years since I coppiced them, and I'm like, oh, I guess you know I've got some kindling for firewood, and uh, some leaf, uh leaves for my sheep.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, the goats eat all the bark off, and all the twigs and the cattle even eat the twigs, and they'll even eat it in the winter when it doesn't have leaves. Your sheep may eat more than you want to give them. You might lose most of the wood to the sheep if you let them at it first. You know before you take your wood.

Andy:

Yeah, so that was one of the things I didn't realize. I'd read a bit in Sweden that it was common to chip the branches, so that what they would explain is it would give the sheep or goats something to do during the winter while they were cooped up and also to slow them down eating. But I didn't get the impression that the animals were actually eating a lot of the chips themselves.

Shana Hanson:

So I have a friend, Susan, who's making my or our cheese. I don't eat that much of it because I have milk all year round, but the whole community is getting it. It's wrapped in beeswax or dipped in beeswax. I've got barrels of wheels collecting in my root cellar, and she has milking sheep, Friesian Dorset cross sheep. So we got Lucas Tree Company, which is a line clearing company, the biggest, probably the biggest one in Maine. It's statewide.

They're working with me a bit here and there, and we keep trying to get funding. We will eventually, but anyway, we ran a load of their chips just straight, just the way they come out into the truck, and apparently, they stay anaerobic in the truck because they're blown in so fast, and they're really packed in the truck, but when you dump it out it starts to compost. So we weren't sure we could get it into barrels fast enough. But so we had to try a load before I wrote any grant proposals. So last fall, we did this, and we packed probably a ton and a half. So last fall, we did this, and we packed probably a ton and a half anyway. Susan's sheep used it the best, and they made the wood pieces kind of round.

They sucked on them. They ate all the leaves out, and then they kind of chewed on the wood pieces. And she was giving them other stuff, but she was, she was substituting her their evening hay. I think she was just giving them a gallon each instead of giving them a little bit of extra hay overnight.

Andy:

Yeah, you know that's. One of the things is like I've got my sheep, and I try to utilize tree hay, and I know how to measure out how much hay they should have, but when it comes to using, like that, tree fodder, leaf hay silage, anything like that, the measurements aren't equal. So how do you figure out exactly what you should feed?

Shana Hanson:

So it depends, probably, on what sheep you know. We don't know what sheep Linnaeus had in the mid-1700s in Sweden, but in Helen's study, I think it's where she talks about that. So apparently, Linnaeus, who made the Latin plant classification system, was it a dozen sheep? I used to be able to recite this. I think it was a dozen sheep and a hundred basswood pollards, and they all got cut in a three-year rotation, so doing like 33 trees a year, he got 80 to a hundred sheaves off each tree.

So I don't know, I would like to see pictures of those pollards if they were one huge head and they were just really old, or if they had lots of heads. In any case, they must have been really old and well-established to make 80 to 100 sheaves because the sheaf is like probably you put your middle finger and your thumbs together, and that's the neck of the sheaf. Then it's probably like a meter long, the leafiest, you know, portions, cut off about a meter long and make these sheaves. And he said how many the sheep ate, um, but I think it was like one and a half sheaves a day per sheep, something like that yeah, I guess that's probably about 15 pounds with the with itself.

Andy:

if I were to guess, ballpark 10, 15 pounds.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, I mean, if you just take the leaves off, it doesn't look like much.

Andy:

No, it doesn't.

Shana Hanson:

So I'm thinking well, they were probably small sheep, they probably weren't trying to grow or milk them in the winter, just maintenance, and then do your seasonal milking in the summer. Or if they were just meat sheath, then you know, you kill the lambs in the fall and just winter the stock pregnant you know that's an interesting measurement technique and trying to calculate exactly how this relates well, sheaves were quite standard because people traded sheaves like there were commerce rates for this she year for them.

You know AK Carlson, I don't know if I'm saying his name right, did the study of the farmer journals in Sweden I, I haven't you seen that we translated it informally, we didn't ask him um, and it's on my website under resources. We, actually, Michael Walder, typed it for me. Michael Walder does a lot of what you call tree hay. He calls it that tree. He actually cuts stuff and dries it. He has arborist skills that he uses for his goats, and he was supporting the whole family with three kids, I think, on just meat goats. So it's a good, good-sized herd, and he cut about 300 pounds of edible portion in a couple of hours each day. He's an arborist, younger than me, and really good at it. Yeah, but he typed that for me because he wanted to see it also.

So, the farmer journals. Well, just that they said that, you know, crews came up the river to help with the harvests, and they'd auction off the trees at the churchyard. One popular sheaf was worth two birch sheaves because the popular, of course, was, you know, horses were probably high cre the big poplar, and birch sheaves are generally for sheep, but my cow just scarfed up some birch sheaved the other day. She's kind of desperate for any tree matter because there are no trees where I have her right now. So each time I come to milk her, which is like every couple of days, she's in her second year of milk, so she's not giving a lot, and each time I come, I've been bringing her some taste of what I've been cutting for the goats, and she ate it pretty well. Birch, which is not a cattle favorite. Today, I gave her ash, and she could hardly stand still for milking. She was so excited.

Andy:

Yeah, I find my sheep are really big fans of willow, which obviously has a lot of other benefits, which obviously has a lot of other benefits. And that brings me to your most. I'm not sure if it's your most recent, but one of your recent works was posted on your website about breaking down the chemical compounds of some of the various things you've been working on to see exactly how useful it was.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, that was the UVM mini-grant. It was just taking the samples we already had from the SARE grant, which funded my 55-year-old woodland.

So the samples mostly of them came from other trees, and some of them had been trees that were pollarded here at my farm, but mostly they came from this one acre of my woodland that was a closed canopy, except for some firewood that had been taken out, and we felled a lot of fir trees because they're not a top choice and they don't. They weren't going to pollard well, because they didn't have any low branches that were still alive, and so it's a little open now.

So the trees we were getting, the stuff that got tested, were these tall, spindly things with small tops because they were kind of shading each other out. So when we were pollinating these trees, the poplars didn't make it because there was hardly anything you could cut off, you know, they couldn't spare any top. They're inefficient forms when they're tall, tall, with nothing on it until the very top. But the oaks sprouted all the way to the ground like they didn't mind their whole top being cut off and they just compensated by making sprouts all along the trunk.

So you can see why it's traditional to “shred” oaks in many, many places in Europe, which is, you cut all the side branches off and the top and maintain them that way every three years, so you're just cutting fodder right back to the trunk and that way you still have a saw log at the end of it all. It's like a compromise. I think it was maybe a later thing than just regular lopping and leaving a climbing structure because, you know, people wanted saw logs, there was a lot of class conflict. You know, I saw logs versus lopping, and this was maybe a compromise.

I'm making that part up, but I do know that. You know, Ben Law has a beautiful picture of Albania, Albanian oaks on a hillside, on a quite sloped hillside, with ladders up to them, and they'd all been just cut, and they look like telephone poles. It's just amazing that they gain diameter and end up saw logs, with every third ring having these tiny little three-year knots. So it must be like furniture wood, a specialty wood that grows slowly. It grows a little more slowly than if you weren't cutting all the leaves off. So it's probably really, really strong with tight rings off. Anyway, you can see why that practice would develop because of oaks. Every time I cut the top off of an oak, it has sprouted sprouts all the way down, and the next time you harvest, you can climb the sprouts.

You know, we had to use throw balls to get the ropes up there, and then the next time we can, we don't even need a ladder, but the ash just made huge top knots. They just were Dr. Seuss trees. And so I recently became acquainted with Kevin Smith. Kevin T Smith, who's at the USDA Research Center Research Station in Durham, New Hampshire, and he's a tree physiologist. So he came to my tree fodder seminar and toured our woods with me and the people that were here and he just knows a lot about tree healing and how trees cope with being damaged.

And here we are, damaging all these trees. So I thought I got to make a friend of this guy and find out, you know, what's the best way to damage these trees in ways that they are going to appreciate and be okay with. So, I'm going to continue to interact with him. But I looked at his studies; he studied the ice storm in 1998. He and another guy were mostly responsible for everybody not cutting all the trees down immediately because they said they thought they were going to live. And they studied, and they said, yeah, the trees actually didn't lose that much lumber value, and they didn't lose that much growth, and the ash trees, in particular, replaced their tops so well that there wasn't even a change in the growth ring size.

Andy:

Oh, wow.

Shana Hanson:

I wasn't here from having their tops completely broken off, like toothpicks, like you'd see a hillside in Waldo County here. I was in Scout Hegan, and it was mostly snow. we didn't really have such a nice storm, but we were just over the line. Like everything east of us, the hillsides looked like toothpicks, and my mother teases me now she's 89, and she likes to point out, you know the faults sometimes, so she's like you said all those trees were gonna die. I'm like, well, I'm glad that I was wrong, but Kevin Smith and another guy showed people that they weren't gonna die, so they didn't overreact and cut the woods down. Yeah, my ash trees did the same thing when we pollarded their tops.

They just made these huge top knots and replaced the tops. They're still doing it. I mean, it's only been two years, but they're replacing their tops very quickly. Some of them are kind of in the second and a little in a delayed way. They started making some trunk sprouts also, and the oaks are very shade tolerant, so they are more likely to make trunk sprouts even when it isn't full sun. The ashes in full sun are likelier to do it, but they don't do it right away like the oaks. They mostly focus on their tops. So we'll still have to use ropes, maybe.

Andy:

Yeah, that's one thing I've noticed. As I've cleaned out, I have an early-stage successional. It's mostly pines, which are marginally useful in the successional stage.

When we've been clearing things up, there's been a lot of smaller oaks that I was just trying to thin through because they're all in clusters and after I'd cut them down, you know they send up those shoots, even though it's still pretty shady, and I end up harvesting them and feeding them to the sheep, probably once every month or so, and they just keep coming back like crazy, and you know it's like do I want to try to kill them or do I actually want to keep them going and just keep feeding?

Shana Hanson:

Walter Yena, who's a soil scientist from retired soil scientist from Australia who's totally onto climate stuff now, and John Norman, who's a retired person who studied remote sensing of plant evapotranspiration. They figured out a rate of how much more greenery we would need to stabilize the climate. They said 11.6% increase on all livable land surfaces. If we did all land surfaces it'd be like 5%. But we can't be in some deserts, and we can't be on some mountaintops that are just inaccessible. So 11.6%. If we did all livable land surfaces or if we just did agricultural lands, it would be like 20, I forget 23% or 25%. I think there is a 23% increase in plant transpiration or evapotranspiration, evaporation plus transpiration.

You know the stripping of greenery on the planet has been more than 90% of the climate disruption, and we continue to destroy, we continue to dry out surfaces and dig gravel pits and pave and put roofs and make yards instead of woodlands, and the hydrology is much less. You know everybody wants a dry place to walk. Everybody wants the insides of their buildings to be dry. So everything's getting dry, dry, dry and also we're losing soil tills because of the way we do. Agriculture doesn't have nutrient cycles anymore. Now it just goes one way to the market, and then they flush it down their toilet, and the livestock even are far away sometimes from their feed sources, so they're not even putting manure back into the same field.

So then we're losing soil fertility because of the rain cycles, because here we had five droughts in six years, and the fungi in the soil die or get at least impaired long-term. And then when the rain does come, it doesn't hold the moisture, and then the soil, when you stick a fork in it, runs through like sand, and when the rain happens, you don't see erosion, but the nutrients are leaching out because there's not that life that's holding the nutrients. So you have this erosion that you can't even see, that's just taking away the nutrients out of your soil when it gets impoverished like that from all these droughts. So, like, we're losing fertility right and left in all these ways that we're living, plus the climate, you know, snowball that's rolling now is losing even more.

Where did we get there from there? So those oaks that are coming up in your woodland, they're trying to cover that soil with greenery. The highest correlate of biodiversity that's actually used to measure biodiversity because it's such a good correlate is foliage height diversity, as in leaves, on lots of different, in lots of different layers, on a big wide up and down spectrum. So that's why I did do a 55-year-old woodland because there also were little trees in there and I can have all this foliage at all different heights. And actually, honestly, the trees that we pollarded, we took off, you know, 15, 20 feet of height, and by the time five years have passed and they are ready to harvest again, they might be back to the same height.

We didn't actually shorten them that much; we just made the next cut easier because we brought everything closer to the trunks, and we'll know where to cut next time, and they'll be more climbable. However, foliage diversity is correlated with biodiversity, which also correlates with carbon sequestration.

But carbon sequestration is not the biggest thing that matters, except for the soil. For the soil, carbon sequestration means moisture regulation. So it's good for droughts, it's good for flooding. The more carbon in the soil, the better resilience of the soil for flooding and for droughts. And that's from a forestry article. They said root turnover is the highest.

You know, the best thing for soil resilience, for droughts and waterlogging, was Ninemetz et al. I forget the year, Ninemetz, just like I said. So when you pollard, you get that root dieback and regrowth. So they weren't talking about pollarding; they were talking about forestry. But they said that root turnover is the highest, the best thing for your soil to be water resilient, whether drought or water. Logging and pollarding make that root dieback and regrowth cycle, with the pruning that Ingvild Ousted in Norway talks about as the pioneer fertilization effect. She says it releases nitrogen when those little, tiny, tiny roots die and it feeds the ground layer, including the hay underneath or the crop that you're growing under your pollards. And then the moisture retention is because you get that regrowth and die, regrowth and die every time you prune and it just puts all this humus matter or not humus but compost, composting little roots into that soil and makes a really spongy structure of carbon down there.

Andy:

Yeah, it's almost like a perennial version of planting crops that would break the soil up, except you're not removing any of the trees, like you might with, say, radishes or something like that.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, you're just pruning in cycles and causing things to happen underground and then meanwhile, all those years that you don't do it, the tree's dropping leaves. So Ingvild, who's in Norway, she's a biologist who studies this stuff she says that between the root dieback and regrowth and the leaf drop, they didn't used to have to manure the fields traditionally. They used to be able to take one late hay crop off, and the tree leaves every three years. Well, one hay crop every year. The tree leaves every third year in a wooded hay meadow that was pollarded over pasture and hay, and they had one quick graze of the sheep, I think, in the spring, and then they had one cut of hay, and then they had leaf harvest every third year. She said the tree leaves dropping plus the fertilization from the roots was enough that they didn't have to manure that field any more than that one quick sheep graze to be sustainable.

Andy:

To transition back. We were talking about the utilization of trees in these different ways. I want to pivot back to something you commented on. So, could you tell me a little bit about what you've recently learned about utilizing white pine?

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, well, there's still more to do. So I was like, I'm writing another farmer grant proposal because I just got rejected on a novel approaches SARA bigger one, and so we'll go for a farmer one. So I've always said, well, pine is just, you know, salad, it's not really a staple. They nibble it a little bit in the winter. I try to give it to them when I'm giving them fir to strip bark in the spring. Fir isn't a real first pick either, but in the spring, there's a time when they really like to strip the bark, and it runs a kind of sugar water under the bark. The pine is like one down from the fur, but some of them that I've pollarded, that is juicy growth. They'll strip some of it.

But all these years, they've been trying to kill the ones in the pasture in the summer, and it finally got through to me: Maybe they want to eat them in the summer. So I have these ones that I pollarded because otherwise, they get tall, and they're in the pasture as barns.

I left them for the shelter. So they're groups of pines that are pretty thick trunks, but I lopped them off, probably at, I don't know, 10, 12 feet, and then they make new tops right away, just like most trees, and the new tops are now like seven-inch diameter because they grow fast in the pasture. And now I'm lopping them off again. And I specifically started lopping more of them this summer. I don't know if it was just a later season for them because it rains, because it didn't rain all spring, and it didn't have moisture from the winter, so we were in a drought until the end of July, and then suddenly we had rain ever since, so it's almost like a second spring. But they were eating pine bark, stripping it off of those whole seven-inch trunks plus the branches, like stripping everything quite easily, even though I feed them well, and they were on good paddocks and taking, you know, six hours of wandering a day, but they still wanted it, and all of August. So that's like usually your grass slump.

Andy:

Yeah, that's awesome.

Shana Hanson:

But we weren't having much of a slump with the rain and so I want to test it in the summer nutritionally, or at least during its growing season. I just talked to my guy who wants to make the leaf separator for us and does willow biomass research. He does the machines for them at the State University of New York. He's been collaborating with me on these ones that I haven't been getting the the grant proposals, so he's in this one too.

But, he just said yesterday we were talking on the phone, and he said he's, you know, familiar with the logging world as well as being an ex-dairy farmer. And he says, yeah, mostly the pine usually strips in the first half of the summer, but not so much in the second half, like that's when it gets “damaged” the most when you're logging. So we want it to slip because, you know, we want them to get the bark off easily or maybe have other ways of getting it off and siling it, but it could be pretty messy. The goats, by the way, my white goats, end up looking quite black, or at least you know Dalmatian spots for quite a while, because the pitch turns black.

Andy:

It smells good, though. Yeah, I just took down a couple of pines, probably three weeks ago, and I was, I fed all the tops to my sheep, and they like, as you said, they nibbled on it for maybe a couple of minutes, and then they're like all right, I'm done.

Shana Hanson:

But did you give them the juicy parts of the wood? They may not have known how to strip bark.

Andy:

Yeah, I mean, they're Icelandics.

Shana Hanson:

Susan's sheep know how to strip bark, but Elliot's sheep, which are Icelandics like yours, don't.

Andy:

Yeah, I've never seen them do it, so I'm not surprised, I guess.

Shana Hanson:

So you might want to get a goat over there to show them. No, I'm serious because Susan's learned from goats.

Andy:

You know, they don't follow many laws of physics when it comes to fences, either, so yeah.

Shana Hanson:

So pine bark. I was cutting more this year because I had one goat with a mange issue. She's a virgin milker, and I think the hormonal stress, I don't know, but she suddenly had this awful mange thing going on, and I was looking up stuff, and one of the things to give her was lots of vitamin C, and I hardly like to use anything that's not here. So I'm like, I'll just cut them a bunch of pine because I know all the evergreens have lots of vitamin C, and they just devoured it for like quite a few weeks. I kept some around for them to strip.

Andy:

That brings me back to the research paper you did in 2020, where you tested all the different. I think it was primarily the silage that you made.

Shana Hanson:

By the way, only the reports are dated 2020. The action actually happened in 2018. It just takes me that long to remember. Well, it took an extra year to finish the demo plot because there were trees that Josh and I didn't get to. Then, I didn't have any more money to pay any interns, so it was just me, and then I had to write the reports.

Andy:

Yeah, it's slow work.

Shana Hanson:

The SARE one is 44 pages long with a table of contents, so that's probably the longest thing I've ever written.

Andy:

Yeah, it was really interesting to see all the different tree types and how diverse the nutrient content can be across species, even though they share the same ecology.

Shana Hanson:

Right, and not just across species, because if you cut oak off of a pollarded tree here at my place and you cut some in the woods, it might be completely different. Some in the woods, it might be completely different. You know, if it's juicy, luscious, what I call happy growth, the goats want it, and that, I think, is almost more important than which species it is like if the tree is happy, you know, if they're getting everything they need. We can experimentally define what happy means for trees.

You know, we can probably measure brix count and, you know, growth rings and darkness of the greener. You know as much as chlorophyll. I know that a maple tree can be a yellowish green, or it can be a dark, dark green. Usually, the dark, dark green is happier.

Andy:

Yeah, I would agree.

Shana Hanson:

You can spot the tall trees along the bottom of my pasture, which ones I've pruned and which ones I have not by the darkness of the green, and in the fall, you can spot them because they're still green and all the others are turning colors oh, that's cool like for an extra week. I'm still green, younger, happier. Growth is really vibrantly strong and healthy.

Andy:

Do you see any evidence at this point that would suggest that I know it's been traditionally used, but that we can still utilize it as something that can be almost like an anti-parasitic?

Shana Hanson:

Well, yeah, last fall, we got invited to submit novel approaches, but there was way too much in it. It's really good they didn't give it to us. But it had parasite testing with Elliot Van Pesky's sheep at Meadowsweet Farm. But he's repairing a barn and he doesn't have time to do that, so we're not putting that in yet on any of them, but somebody should do that. But you have to get enough quantity to feed them at all winter.

Andy:

Yeah.

Shana Hanson:

And so that was one that was in conjunction with Lucas Tree, because they, you know, they do things in quantity. Because they do things in quantity, we were hoping to get then enough of it, enough chipped silage to be able to test sheep parasites with two groups, but we didn't get it, and we didn't do it, thank goodness. It was going to be a lot of way too many parts of it.

Andy:

It would be too complicated. So for your goats, do you do like fecal count to test for parasites?

Shana Hanson:

I've never done a fecal count, and I know I have worms, and I'm the only person that I know with goats that hasn't had anybody ever die of worms. You know, I have not had that happen, and I do have another breeder that I got my little buck from when he was a day old. She's had all the toes and stuff, and she just says you avoid a lot of health problems, Shana, by the way, you manage your goats because the browse is all definitely helping on that.

Andy:

Yeah, that's my understanding is the tannins seem to be a big player in managing parasite load. But, like you said, there doesn't seem to be any proof.

Shana Hanson:

Well, tannins and there's a whole list of chemicals, and they're not just doing there also in our milk, and you can taste them, and they're anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory and all kinds of good things for us to ingest from the milk and possibly from the meat, I don't know. I know the fatty profiles are different, the fat profiles when you feed them differently, grass-fed versus not grass-fed cattle. The fat and the meat are good for your heart versus bad for your heart, and then the there fats are even different again, I know.

So one thing is that the milk keeps longer. So I'm not licensed, and I milk outside, and I wash things with cold water, and people give me their jars washed so I don't wash anybody's jars, and I have put my milk in someone else's milk. When I covered for somebody milking, I stuck them both in the cellar, and the sour cream rises up, and the milk clabbers, and it sits there, and a week later, theirs has three colors of mold on the sour cream. Mine can sit all winter and never have mold on the sour cream.

Andy:

Oh, wow.

Shana Hanson:

In the cellar, in the root cellar. I mean, it's not hot in there. And it's dark. And people always report that their milk keeps longer than other milk. Well, they did get it fresh, but nothing was particularly sterile, except that the goat's guts are really healthy because of how they're eating, and it also isn't goaty, and even the aged cheese isn't goaty.

Andy:

That's interesting.

Shana Hanson:

And I really think it has to do with, you know, they're eating how they're supposed to eat, and most goats really don't get what they need.

Andy:

Yeah, it's interesting to see how different diets can impact how they live and how their health seems to appear, especially when you're talking about something that.

Shana Hanson:

And fence jumping. If they have what they need, they stay in, and if they don't, they jump out and go find something to browse.

Andy:

Yeah, even sheep do the same thing. And it's funny to see how quickly they can figure out where things are, so like right now, where they are the paddock that they're in, there's a bunch of huckleberry bushes next to them, like right outside the fence. They haven't escaped yet, but they have figured out a way to reach to some of the leaves to pick at them, so I've been like cutting a couple of them, which I hate to do, but I'm like, you know what. I'll like, I'll give them a few.

Shana Hanson:

Well, they do, I mean, they get burned and come back.

Andy:

So yeah, when we started talking, you mentioned that I sounded like you did a little bit of burning.

Shana Hanson:

I have a blueberry field now. So it's really dumb to add a cow and a blueberry field when you are already booked with goats. But the cow was going to go somewhere else unknown, and she was my friend from feeding her tree leaf stuff or not just tree leaf stuff, but tree fodders. And then she would put her head down, and she let me pet her as long, you know, indefinitely, without bucking her head around at all, and she made a, she hooked me in, and she was basically like I want to come to your farm, you have this woodland stuff.

And so then when they were gonna get rid of their cows, she came home with me, and I saved up and paid for her and brought her home, and the first thing she did was eat duff under the leaves in the woods like she'd go for the ones with all the fungi and pick moss off of rocks and eat the whole thing. And she still just really wants that, and she tries every shelf fungi. So cattle need this stuff in their rumens. And she didn't get it as a baby because they just had pasture. I mean, they had woods, but they didn't put the cows in the woods. So she's like, I gotta come home with you.

So she got added, and the blueberry field got added in the same year. The blueberries, I got hooked into that one because the cow got hooked because it was learning for me because I'd never really kept a cow. I'd milked some cows, and I'd spent two years helping someone milk, but I'd never been around one closely to wander in the woods with her, so it was learning. Sure, that was what attracted me, but the blueberry field was simply I couldn't bear for it to be houses because I'd raked it for 16 years with the guy that made the field, and he was just going to let it go to houses.

So now I'm double booked with two farms and both could be full-time, both should be full-time and it's pretty insane, but it's a really, really special spot up there we have a little walking path up through the woods that we own, or I own I'm still paying Gary, it's an owner finance, but I have the deed, I'm close, close to being paid and there's birch up there that I'm going to start managing as the birches that we should have pulled and dug out and everything else, and we instead didn't get to because I have two farms. Well, now it's going to be part of my grant to cut them and study them as fodder, and we're just going to do one-year-old birch until maybe we will wipe it out, doing it every year. But that's kind of the aim. But then the sides are all wonderful oak and beech. And Beech is a spring fodder but oak is all the time.

Andy:

Sure. I want to ask a little bit about your tree silage. What exactly does that process look like? Is it the same as making traditional silage, or is this a little bit different?

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, you're right. Well, now we have all these choices of plastic containers that are airtight. I've tried all the different barrels around here that get used for something else that has a lever or a screw lid. Some of them don't exactly seal. You just have to notice when they don't seal and maybe add some old used saran wrap in there or put a bag, you know, plastic bags seem to be everywhere, so you can stuff a bag full of leaves at the top and stuff that down and that helps the top be sealed. But you don't even need the barrel to be full as long as there's no airflow, Like there's okay to have some air in there because it'll get used up right away and then it'll be a vacuum. As long as there's no airflow, as long as it's airtight, and you can have twigs, so you can have twigs in there. You can strip willow by just running your hand down it and get all the little twigs. You know, run it backward.

I just stripped Elm yesterday. I didn't realize how easy it is to strip elm leaves by hand. I mean, it's like nothing. And you have this big handful of leaves just running your hands upwards up the stalk they strip. Ash is more of a snapping thing. You get these little pom-poms of leaves that are all bunched together and it just makes me think you know these must have evolved to be grazed. That's why they're bunched like that for a good, efficient mouthbite.

Andy:

Yeah, that makes sense. I had read that coppicing was a response to most of the megafauna. However, it would just destroy the trees as they started sprouting up.

Shana Hanson:

I'm sure there were tall megafauna that that pollarded trees, just like a feller buncher that, you know, breaks them off, them off high.

Andy:

Yeah, and that, you know, the way the landscape probably looked. You know, a million years ago or two million years ago was probably a forest would look. Everything would have been coppiced, essentially because of the fact.

Shana Hanson:

Coppiced or pollarded.

Andy:

Or pollarded.

Shana Hanson:

Everything just getting broken down, just like pasture getting grazed, except they're breaking down tree matter. Because there's these big grazers.

Andy:

Exactly, grazers, yeah, elephants or bigger than elephants way back.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, it's, it's an interesting concept yeah, well, the trees clearly know how to respond to breakage and, you know, supposedly pollarding makes them live twice as long, and we know of these thousand-year-old oak trees that were still going like one of them was still going in 2013. No, yeah, 2013 when Ian Rotherham wrote his book Ancient Woodlands. Anyway, Ian Rotherham is in England, and he has lots of books, some of them really seriously scholarly. He's like the editor with various chapters by people, and then that one is more of almost a picture book, and he has this postcard of this tree that was there in 11-something and was too big for the army to cut down, so it got left.

Andy:

Is that the one that looks? It's like 25 feet long, and it looks like it's just almost like a dense woodland, but it's actually one tree.

Shana Hanson:

No no, no, no. This is a tree. That was an oak. That was like a one-ball. Well, it might have started out with more balls, but now it's. Then it was like 15 feet wide, or 20 feet wide, so with the tiny top because they were cutting the top. So new growth on the top.

And this little boy, or this young man standing next to the doorway in the tree, seems to live there. Oh yeah, like their elf is real. And you know, these old trees were often hollow, and people could live in them. It's wild. It's one of the ways to have a greenhouse because you have no dead roof.

I think, in Ian in that same book. He has collier's huts, which are sod huts that are like a really steep teepee with sods, and the sods can be alive. That's another nice way to house ourselves that doesn't involve killed surfaces.

Andy:

I want to ask if this is something that you think can be applied on a large scale. Is this something that, in an ideal situation, if there were money and resources, we could say we can create these silvopasture systems based on tree fodder?

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, well, I don't think even with our leaf separator and even with all kinds of mechanical harvesting, it's not as easy as doing grass, except that grass doesn't grow a lot of years now.

Andy:

Yeah.

Shana Hanson:

But the thing is the trees may die too. I mean, we may all be on our way out, but the trees have a little bit more of a hope to be able to be reliable than the grass at this point. Plus, there are all those other nutritious benefits, plus they're creating the weather. And if we could start eating off of woodlands and have them be woodlands that we're eating off of, we're going to do, you know, we're going to restabilize the climate. At least, the IPCC says it will, locally. But they say they can't guarantee globally because they can't computer model it, because it's too complicated.

But they do say with high confidence in the IPCC special report on climate change and land I'm not sure if I'm quoting that title right, but something like that You'll find it on the internet they say yes, high confidence that local effects of the latent heat transfer by plants, of the evapotranspiration locking all that heat energy of the sun up in the molecules of water vapor and then the water vapor rising and going away two kilometers up and then coming down as rain.

It releases the heat when it condenses way up there, it releases it into the atmosphere, and it goes away. So there, the plants are actively exporting heat energy from the sun. You know, by stripping land surfaces, we've impaired that ability of the planet, and if we shift our eating to be eating out of the forests, that could stabilize the climate.

Andy:

Yeah.

Shana Hanson:

Because there's a lot more vapid transpiration in all this foliotite diversity than there is in flat, especially in cropland, which is sometimes the bare part of the year, but even more than in pasture.

Andy:

Yeah, and I mean I think that's pretty obvious when you start thinking about it logically. Like even a C4 grass, a summer warm season grass stops really photosynthesizing when you get above 85, 90 degrees. So if you have this tree layer that can absorb that and allow those grasses to continue photosynthesizing at a lower temperature, yeah, because the thing is the trees.

Shana Hanson:

The trees stop, too, I think, but but they're cooling. They're cooling the atmosphere so it doesn't get as hot. They're cooling the area around them.

Andy:

Exactly so. The grasses below can continue to do those things.

Shana Hanson:

That's right. And us? What about us? I mean, we can continue to exist and breathe. Yeah, I guess that's important; it's really nice to work in the shade. Let me tell you as a farmer.

Andy:

Yeah, I mean, I look at my sheep, and I'm sure you think the same thing about your goats. When those heat waves come through, I go out, and they're usually in shade. I used to take the trees out of the fields. They used to just prune them to make a field.

Shana Hanson:

And all those little shadows of pollards are up on a stalk, so they're moving shadows. Unlike a coppice, which is a blob near the ground making one spot of shade and keeping the grass away, a pollard has a little moving lollipop shadow which also moves your livestock to be shitting different places when they're hiding in that shadow, and the impact is a little bit spread out. Some people like tall, taller pollards with the pom-pom because then it moves the livestock further. No, yeah, it makes sense to spread the manure better and the impact, you know, to decrease the impact on any given spot.

But if you have, you know they went to rows. Once they had row equipment and horse-drawn equipment, they made all the trees get into rows, but before that, they weren't in rows; they were just wherever they were. People kept them because they were seen as the fertility of the field, and they just pollarded all the bushes and the trees. So when Linnaeus wrote a list of the species in a hay meadow, half the species were trees and bushes, and they were. They were harvesting all of them for the animals, and they were they. And they knew that that was the fertility of the field, that the root die back and the leaves dropping was the fertility. This is why we have these hearts with a tree growing out of it, with all the species, the tree of life, a nice European folk symbol painted on furniture, and my grandmother painted it on a little bellows that I have. Anyway, tree worship was because, yeah, fertility really comes from trees.

Andy:

Yeah. So I want to ask we've covered all of this very interesting stuff and kind of meandered around the utilization of trees.

Shana Hanson:

Well, I do it all day, you know so.

Andy:

Yeah, no, no, I. I think it's great, I think it's really.

Shana Hanson:

The way my goats like to live.

Andy:

It blows me away that I can go off on any tangent, and you can talk about these subjects in such depth, which I really appreciate. But my final question for you is, do you have?

Shana Hanson:

Oh, but we never got to the part, you know. So modern day.

Andy:

Sure. Like can we do this, yeah?

Shana Hanson:

Can we do this? Well, we might have to do this. It's not going to be economical. Don't let the grant people I'm applying to hear me say that it will be because this is life. This is the way that life works. It worked for 8,000 years. It's pleasant, it's a good lifestyle. It's not economical, but the economic system is eating the planet's surface. But also, there are ways, I mean, I'm trying to do these grants that make it more economical.

As you know, Lucas Tree is already pruning things in a five-year cycle. Does five years ring a bell, didn't? Early in this conversation, I said Engvild Ousted says that in Norway they said five-year cycles were sustainable for the trees. So LucasTree is pruning power lines in a five-year cycle. That's called job security. Right, they prune them in a way that's sustainable for the trees. So those are nice juicy growths of happy trees under power lines, especially if they're cutting them properly, and that's a whole bunch of goos either getting sold as biomass or dropped, blown as chips, into the woods on the spot. And Art Batson, who owns the company, is willing to take a step here and a step there with me to figure it out, to put some of that stuff to use. So that's a situation where the farmer doesn't really have to do the labor because the labor is already happening.

The willow biomass people at State University New York are not doing anything with fodder yet, but they're doing all this willow biomass. But maybe the leaves, you know, maybe they could cut it when there are leaves on it and use the leaf separator and send a whole bunch of stuff to the farms. So there are ways. There are ways. They all involve, you know, some fuel and everything else that we're doing wrong. But anytime you do something like that, you feed the animals with something from the trees. That means one field that doesn't have to be bare. You know that means you're not eating something out of the woods, which means we can have more woods to support people and less open to supporting the same people the same people. You know we don't have to strip land to support people.

Andy:

Yeah, it speaks to a fundamental rethinking of what it means to be productive, so to speak, and that you're speaking about the fact that our economic system isn't compatible with sustainability in terms of this kind of work and that we really need to think about. Do you know what is work? How do we incorporate things like landscape management as a part of that, and how do we disconnect that from economic modeling as we think of it today, where the infrastructure in place has created a system that is imbalanced, and we have things like railways and all these other things that allow us to bring in hay and this and that to places where it otherwise wouldn't make sense and we would be doing these things.

Shana Hanson:

So, I talk about people being hydroponic. People, where you know you could be parked on any, on any spot with your same old house and all your nutrients shipped in and your energy shipped in, and no roots and no flavor. Hydroponic means just the nutrients, don't you? You're not rooted there; you're just being fed. You know, someone said, oh, but there's all these people to feed, and I'm like there's something wrong with saying that we used to get together and feed ourselves. There's not. There's not any obligation on me, a farmer, that oh, there's all these people to be fed. I somehow, because I'm feeding myself, I have to now feed all these other hundreds of people. No, we used to do it together. Feed ourselves by feeding, feeding yourself as an action. It's not passive. You don't just sit and wait and get fed. I mean, this hasn't been working. We're killing everything. Doing that.

It's like a beehive with too many drones. The drones are male bees that are male, but they don't work and make honey; they just hang around to breed the queen. And when you see a hive with a whole bunch of drones, it means the queen's dead or the queen's failing, and there's not enough workers, and the hive is on its way out. Well, that's what we've got right now. The hive is on its way out if we don't get in gear and start doing physical things that support ourselves.

And you know, climbing trees is just one of those many, many things that's actual, actually labor. It's doing something. It's like the climbing gym, except that you apply it. You know we have this thing. People say, oh, you work so hard. Yeah, well, where's my recreation, and where's my downtime? It's all together. It's not all working hard. I'm hanging out; I'm taking naps at any time of day.

Andy:

You know, one of the things people forget is when we talk about things like culture and identity. All these things are a reason why it's tied to our food, because our food comes from our ecology and our landscapes, where we live, and all of these things as you said, are really intertwined in how we identify ourselves. And if we're not being a part of the thing that's working on the landscape, then how are you tied to the fruits of that labor?

Shana Hanson:

Right. And then there's this whole ecological consideration of simply having a feedback loop. As soon as you're detached from a consumer and your impact; you don't know you don't know what you're doing wrong. We can do a lot wrong, not even see it, and think we're doing just fine by voting with our dollar and buying the right products. You know buying the right brand, but it's not real feedback. You know like it's to be in touch with what the actual live things that are feeding you. You have a relationship.

I noticed that some years, the trees don't look good, and some years, they look better. I'm like, oh, something's different with the air, something's different with the pollution, something's different with the way the sun's coming through the atmosphere. I think it's been better since COVID. I think maybe just the lack of airplanes, I don't know. But you have a direct feedback loop. You know, like I know more than most people, or I think you know. I get the impression that we're probably on our way out, which is easy to ignore if you're not up in the tree. It's easy to ignore if you're not up in the tree.

And so I'm more highly motivated about, you know, teaching and helping people to think about a lifestyle change or committing to some spot and really getting to know it, you know, even if we're on our way out. How about? How about love? How about getting, you know, some intimate involvement here before we go out and at least make an attempt to pull things back together in ecological communities of, you know, multi-species communities what I'm talking about.

Andy:

The Earth continues, with or without us, and we should at least do our part to manage its future.

Shana Hanson:

Or at least just get in touch with our own impact. Yeah, I get intense about this stuff.

Andy:

No, I mean, this whole podcast is about ecology, agriculture, and climate change. So you know, the end result of us not doing anything is why we're where we are right now, and these are parts of the conversation about thinking about what that future should look like if we want to survive, and not just what it should look like, but what it has to look like, and these are part of it.

Shana Hanson:

Well, there are many, many, many ways of being closely involved and interacting with what feeds you.

I wanted to say I have those two studies that I've quoted in a few things I've written that are Neolithic times. People sometimes send me these things, or I find them somewhere, and I'm not really that interested in Neolithic times because I'm now, you know, but I read them because I'm kind of curious. Well, you know about this pollarding thing, and so two places, one's Bulgaria and the other I forget where, but somewhere also in Europe, I think, or Eastern Europe, maybe, the archaeological evidence of pollarding to feed livestock, or you know evidence of pollarding to feed livestock, or you know, wandering with grazing animals and living on a lot of dairy mostly, and some meat is no soil erosion.

The archaeologists know the civilization was doing that type of agriculture of just living off of forests because there's no soil erosion. So yeah, you know we start this. You know, the further you open the fields, first, they just pruned the trees and made the fields, and then they started making them go in rows, and then they started taking the rows out, and it's not necessarily progress, no.

Andy:

So, for folks who have been listening and want to know more about what you do, maybe take a class with you, or read some of your work, yeah, I had that one thing, so I'll send my email right now.

Shana Hanson:

But hey, folks, if any of you farm at all and you're interested in silages from trees and leaf separation to make those really leaf-dense silages that I'd like to make, I need people to email me, yes, who are farmers. I keep applying for these grants, and they want to see that other farmers are interested. So, I'm keeping track of how many emails I get that say, "Yes, we're interested.”

Andy:

What is the requirement to qualify as a farm? Do you need to file a Schedule F on your taxes, or can you just say you homestead?

Shana Hanson:

I'm going to say anyone who keeps livestock and produces food. Okay, because I mean, it's mostly livestock people. I'm not going to say you have to be one that files. I didn't file for years. Okay, I do file now as an official farmer. Yeah, so S-H-A-N-A-H-A-N-S-O-N, that's Shauna Hanson. I'll say it again: S-H-A-N-A H-A-N-S-O-N at gmail com is my email and if you forget that, then look up the website and look up contact us and it has my address, my email, my phone is the best to reach me.

It's voicemail, no texting, but the website has a resource page, has a grant page with all the many, many pictures of other farms when I fed this stuff to the animals. Then there's a farm offerings page that talks about my milk trades, etc, and lots of other things. And then there's a blueberry page that we've hardly put anything on yet because my ex-intern, who can access the web page, just created that one, and I didn't send her anything.

Andy:

Do you have any classes coming up?

Shana Hanson:

It's not official, but I always make time for people. If you want to come to do an internship, or if you want just to come and have a tour and learn or have a one-day workshop, I'll do individual anytime to schedule ahead with me, and I will make time for that. Like I said, I'm not sure if I'm doing the tree potter seminar the same next year. I'll always create one for somebody, take you around, and teach you to climb with ropes, whether you like it or not.

Andy:

I highly recommend that folks reach out if they're interested because the amount of information you can talk about is just surreal.

Shana Hanson:

Well, because we talk to a lot of farms so I hear what their livestock eat. Like stuff you wouldn't think of, people tell me. So it's good I get to collect this information.

Sheep don't eat alder except when it's dried. It turns out that it's traditional in Europe for them to eat it dried. But the ones in Sedgwick would wait until it dried and then eat it, and I was like, "Oh yeah, well, Ingvild says that that's traditional over there, that they don't eat fresh alder sheep." I don't know. Maybe some sheep eat it, but so far, not.

Andy:

So that, that's, I think, again speaks to that knowledge.

Shana Hanson:

Leave me a voicemail. Make sure you say your number. It doesn't have caller ID, and email me. Yes, if you're interested in tree leaf silage and leaf separation and kind of mechanical ways of making silage from tree cuttings more efficiently, on a hand at Gmail dot com.

Andy:

Yeah, I will definitely be reaching out in the future to talk to you a little bit more about that because we don't have time right now, but I want to learn more about it.

Shana Hanson:

Yeah, if we get this farmer grant we're going to apply for, we'll learn more.

To listen to this interview, tune into episodes 67 & 68 of the Poor Proles Almanac.