Another fascinating presntation from Dave Jacke. Thank you, DAcres, for the post! He mentions trees growing in pasture, but beyond that, savannas are reportedly the ecosytem that supports the most numbers/mass of mammal species. Savanna is likely the original home of the human species. While Jacke mentions the use of pollarded material (or from coppicing, or slash) for livestock fodder, he does not mention that pollarding originated as a way of keeping the resprouts out of reach of wildlife and livestock until it was ready to be harvested. Hawthorn was widely used in hedges in the UK, but hazel was, and is, a (the?) major species used in laying hedges. In part because of its flexibility, which he mentions later. Additionally, it provides fodder, and nuts enjoyed by humans and animals that are nutrient dense.
The portable fence panels made of wood, often hazel, are known as 'hurdles'. As Jacke says, these, along with herders and dogs, facilitated more controlled managementof flocks & herds of domestic animals than Allan Savory imagines in the pre-portable electric fence era. (With apologies to Savory. With Pollan, he has done much to bring the viability of eco-agruculture to the attention of a large swath of the American public, including many pulling the stings.)
Useful information on coppicing is extremely hard to find, so thank you for this precious and informative lecture. I just wish the mtf would publish his damn book already!😂👍🌱
On alfalfa... it often contains more protein than the quoted levels. 1.) Published protein levels for alfalfa include the entire plant, including the stems. What would be the protein levels of black locust be if the twigs and branches were ground up with the foliage for analysis? 2.) Not just alfalfa, but many cool season pastures will contain similarly high levels of protein during the spring flush, and perhaps the fall flush as well, particularly those pastures intentionally managed to stay at a very immature growth stage. Like the foliage of black locust trees, early stage alfalfa and the plants in such pastures in spring will not yet have developed phytochemicals in response to increasing temperatures of summer, and/or of later stages of maturity. Of course, legumes are often part of these pastures, usually clovers which withstand repeated mowing by mouths or machinery to low heights. Like clover and alfalfa, black locusts are legumes.
Jefferdaughter Also - *alflafa aka lucerne - Medicago sativa- is a great HUMAN food source, too!* In addition to being one of the best forage crops ever. Far beyond just two weeks of delicious flowers, alfalfa can provide 12 cuttings or more per year for fodder (in warm climates). Young shoots and leaves that are a palatable vegetable, either raw or cooked can be harvested even more frequently,. According to Stephen Barstow in his book 'Around the World in 80 Plants' which focuses on perennial leafy vegetables, alflafa has been used as a vegetable for thousands of years. His own plants have been productibve and trouble free for over 11 yrs with no sign of becoming less productive. Most of the challenges of growing alfalfa in industiral ag systems stems from the industrial ag system. (Mono-cultures, soil compaction, soil food web killed by industrial ag chemicals including fertilizers, lack of havitiat for natural balance of insect pests and predators...) And alfalfa is easily harveted with sythe or machinery already extant. My guess is that if black locust - or any coppice crop, becomes TOO industrial in production, it will also face the problems common to all such systems.
Howdy Dave! You don't know me, but I'm starting a 55 acre permaculture food forest and paulownia plantation. I believe that you and Paul Stamets will save the world. So I'll be promoting this video! Cheers!
Clarification" in the comment below, I am using the definition of 'agriculture' as: The prductio of food, fiber, and/or fodder. 'Fiber' would inlude, in my view, not only materials like cotton, silk, and wool for clothing, or horsehair and mohair for upholstery (one mill in the UK is still making horsehair upholstery fabric!!), carpeting, etc... but also materials for basketry, and fuel for burning. In this view, coppicing is an agricultural technique, as is animal husbandry via herding (in many variations in many regions, but including the Mongolian herders, and the Masai). It seems Jacke is thinking of 'bare earth' industrial-style agriculture.
I have a few bits and pieces of info: Bigleaf Maple, Willow, and Poplar all coppice pretty readily (in fact, this year I cut a two separate Bigleafs in the middle of SUMMER and the resprout vigor is incredible) Also, be wary of where the light will be when doing winter coppicing. If by Northwest US you mean the PNW, our spring light levels aren't all that great.
Ryder Hughes Pretty much all maples are very tolerant of massive pruning, including coppicing. An aside- bonsai arists have long worked with the ability of these species to resprout and resprout. Their techniques include leaf pruing (folding and cutting the leaves in half) and 'leaf plucking'- leaf removal. Of course, there are limits... While not directly applicable to permaculture- or wait, since maple leaves are edible by humans (though I've heard not tasty, butwhich species? At what stage of early leaf development? ) and by animals, maybe these practices can lend us a little useful insight. I also recently learned that the seeds of maples are edible, and those I have tried tasted pretty good raw, nibbled right off the end of the samara. And, you probably know that basically all maples can be tapped for sap, used either as-is or made into syrup or sugar. Not everyone is aware that some (most?) silver maples have a higher % or sugar than sugar maples. Has anyone ever tested big leaf maple sap?
This is the economist vs. physicist conversation you were referring to. I highly recommend this website for a general understanding of the basic physical considerations underlying our energy problems. physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
Steven Gubkin Thank you for sharing this link. Thought provoking, and sobering. A 'reality check' that everyone ought to be familiar with. People need to know that there are alternatives, opportunities to thrive without destroying the life-support systems of the planet. Best regards-
Luke Confidential It can be a bit frustrating waiting for something we know is going to be so good, eh?! But genius takes time. If you have read 'Edible Forest Gardens' you will appreciate that whatever Jacke is writing is worth the wait. Personally, I would rather wait for the deeply researched and thorough treatment of the topic this is sure to be, than to have it rushed in any way, but that is just my view...
Jefferdaughter I do understand what you're saying, and Edible Forest Gardens is a heck of a volume of work. It's just frustrating being in the development phase of a piece of property, seeing a product being marketed that holds information you really really really want to apply... and then watching and waiting as the years tick by and the thing doesn't hit the shelves.
Charocal & fuel - Isn't it interesting that barbeque charcoal kept coppicing alive in Britan, but Americans were sold fake 'briquetes', and then propane. Food cooked on the coals of a wood fire or real wood charcoal is superior in flavor to that cooked on a propane grill, imho. - For heating, rather than charcoal, rocket mass stove heaters are probably a better option in most applications. Or even the ceramic/masonry mass stove/heagter/fireplaces traditional in the northern most parts of Europe and the alps. A lot of heat is lost in making charcoal, and there are emissions. Rocket mass stove heaters also burn nearly all of the emission by-products generally released into the air. - Osage orange has ruined many a wood stove not rated also for coal. It burns that hot. Once a widley used hedgerow species planted for windbreaks after the Dust Bowl, the wood has a rot resistance that far excedes black locust when inground contact. It does tend to grow with the major branches arching, thus one of its common names: bow d'arc. Discouragaed when grown- often coppiced, for posts for fences, pole buildings, etc, the natural arches could have natural building applications.
Jefferdaughter Osage orange is also said to be immune to termites. (Termite damage can also be prevented by a healthy soil food web including nematode species which feed on them, some seeking out the queens and eliminating them.) For fns of the edible food forest, (though osage orange is more of an edge or hedgerow species needing plenty of sdunlight) - orsageorange also offers human edibility: www.eattheweeds.com/maclura-pomifera-the-edible-inedible-2/
Several leaps of intuition and conjecture in here claimed as science, particularly in the beginning. The story regarding the economist and the physicist also belies credulity as SO MUCH solar radiation hits the earth and is otherwise untapped, i think we have plenty of breathing room left for man's energy usage before we need worry about boiling away the oceans. Not to mention that inbound solar radiation, is of a different wave length which then radiates out the atmosphere. Thermal radiation produced by 'work' is of the later variety. Yes, it could eventually be an issue, but I doubt it is as close as the doom and gloom scenario presented here. I can tell you right now the issue with pollard and coppice in the meat industry is a complete non-starter. There is a reason why farmers keep down trees in the field: Lightning. One storm, one bolt of lightning striking a tree can wipe out an ENTIRE flock of cows who have sought refuge underneath. I've seen it. A photo with a lightning-struck Oak, with 50 dead, bloating cows underneath. Perhaps there are work arounds, perhaps not. Only in the last recent years have I heard of farmers starting to allow shrubs in their pasture land. For trees, you're going to have to see major margin shifts in beef before these people start taking risks, because 20 cows dead is a farm-closing failure.
1. We should transition away from animal-based diets anyway because methane is roughly 10 times as greenhouse-inducing as carbon dioxide 2. Lightning rods are a thing. A pollarded tree is kept much shorter than a lightning rod. Atmospheric electric discharge 'wants' to follow the path of least resistance, so it will preferentially arc toward lightning rods with a deep buried ground rather than a short tree. 3. I have only watched this once, but I believe what he's indicating is at some point of energy production, we warm the planet through greenhouse effect so much that we generate a much greater net loss of water from the planet. Clearly he isn't saying this is going to happen in the near future, the point he was attempting to illustrate is that we cannot have *infinite* scale-up in energy production because we love in a closed system with finite parameters and increases in energy production have dire repercussions on all other earth systems.
It would be so much better a presentation if it didn't make out that us Europeans are not interested in coppicing, or that we are not willing to share knowledge about it. Rather rich, from a people who have destroyed the native cultures that did practice it in North America and are one of the largest energy consumers on the planet. As for not sharing, we too regret how much knowledge got lost during two world wars, when millions died.
Super valuable content, thanks so much for presenting!
Another fascinating presntation from Dave Jacke. Thank you, DAcres, for the post!
He mentions trees growing in pasture, but beyond that, savannas are reportedly the ecosytem that supports the most numbers/mass of mammal species. Savanna is likely the original home of the human species. While Jacke mentions the use of pollarded material (or from coppicing, or slash) for livestock fodder, he does not mention that pollarding originated as a way of keeping the resprouts out of reach of wildlife and livestock until it was ready to be harvested. Hawthorn was widely used in hedges in the UK, but hazel was, and is, a (the?) major species used in laying hedges. In part because of its flexibility, which he mentions later. Additionally, it provides fodder, and nuts enjoyed by humans and animals that are nutrient dense.
The portable fence panels made of wood, often hazel, are known as 'hurdles'. As Jacke says, these, along with herders and dogs, facilitated more controlled managementof flocks & herds of domestic animals than Allan Savory imagines in the pre-portable electric fence era. (With apologies to Savory. With Pollan, he has done much to bring the viability of eco-agruculture to the attention of a large swath of the American public, including many pulling the stings.)
Useful information on coppicing is extremely hard to find, so thank you for this precious and informative lecture. I just wish the mtf would publish his damn book already!😂👍🌱
Might I recommend 'Coppicing & Coppice Crafts' by Rebecca Oaks, among many ...
On alfalfa... it often contains more protein than the quoted levels. 1.) Published protein levels for alfalfa include the entire plant, including the stems. What would be the protein levels of black locust be if the twigs and branches were ground up with the foliage for analysis? 2.) Not just alfalfa, but many cool season pastures will contain similarly high levels of protein during the spring flush, and perhaps the fall flush as well, particularly those pastures intentionally managed to stay at a very immature growth stage. Like the foliage of black locust trees, early stage alfalfa and the plants in such pastures in spring will not yet have developed phytochemicals in response to increasing temperatures of summer, and/or of later stages of maturity. Of course, legumes are often part of these pastures, usually clovers which withstand repeated mowing by mouths or machinery to low heights. Like clover and alfalfa, black locusts are legumes.
Jefferdaughter Also - *alflafa aka lucerne - Medicago sativa- is a great HUMAN food source, too!* In addition to being one of the best forage crops ever. Far beyond just two weeks of delicious flowers, alfalfa can provide 12 cuttings or more per year for fodder (in warm climates). Young shoots and leaves that are a palatable vegetable, either raw or cooked can be harvested even more frequently,. According to Stephen Barstow in his book 'Around the World in 80 Plants' which focuses on perennial leafy vegetables, alflafa has been used as a vegetable for thousands of years. His own plants have been productibve and trouble free for over 11 yrs with no sign of becoming less productive. Most of the challenges of growing alfalfa in industiral ag systems stems from the industrial ag system. (Mono-cultures, soil compaction, soil food web killed by industrial ag chemicals including fertilizers, lack of havitiat for natural balance of insect pests and predators...) And alfalfa is easily harveted with sythe or machinery already extant. My guess is that if black locust - or any coppice crop, becomes TOO industrial in production, it will also face the problems common to all such systems.
Thanks for sharing this Josh and Dave, you guys rock.
Howdy Dave! You don't know me, but I'm starting a 55 acre permaculture food forest and paulownia plantation. I believe that you and Paul Stamets will save the world. So I'll be promoting this video! Cheers!
I'm about to give up on this book. I STILL haven't seen any news announcing a release date.
at 38:28 what is the name of the book and author (translated as 'leaf stories') on the 'Meadows in the air slide'? I can't read it
Clarification" in the comment below, I am using the definition of 'agriculture' as: The prductio of food, fiber, and/or fodder. 'Fiber' would inlude, in my view, not only materials like cotton, silk, and wool for clothing, or horsehair and mohair for upholstery (one mill in the UK is still making horsehair upholstery fabric!!), carpeting, etc... but also materials for basketry, and fuel for burning. In this view, coppicing is an agricultural technique, as is animal husbandry via herding (in many variations in many regions, but including the Mongolian herders, and the Masai). It seems Jacke is thinking of 'bare earth' industrial-style agriculture.
4 years after the kickstarter and they still don't know when it'll be done. That's kind of depressing.
Hey it took Mr. Heller 8 years to write catch-22, and he didn't even research anything
sheepblitzer I'm suspect he was self-funded, which is a little different from crowdfunding.
true, but my point is writing can take a long time, regardless of who's paying you
do you have any info on coppicing in the Northwest US?
I have a few bits and pieces of info:
Bigleaf Maple, Willow, and Poplar all coppice pretty readily (in fact, this year I cut a two separate Bigleafs in the middle of SUMMER and the resprout vigor is incredible)
Also, be wary of where the light will be when doing winter coppicing. If by Northwest US you mean the PNW, our spring light levels aren't all that great.
Ryder Hughes Pretty much all maples are very tolerant of massive pruning, including coppicing. An aside- bonsai arists have long worked with the ability of these species to resprout and resprout. Their techniques include leaf pruing (folding and cutting the leaves in half) and 'leaf plucking'- leaf removal. Of course, there are limits... While not directly applicable to permaculture- or wait, since maple leaves are edible by humans (though I've heard not tasty, butwhich species? At what stage of early leaf development? ) and by animals, maybe these practices can lend us a little useful insight. I also recently learned that the seeds of maples are edible, and those I have tried tasted pretty good raw, nibbled right off the end of the samara. And, you probably know that basically all maples can be tapped for sap, used either as-is or made into syrup or sugar. Not everyone is aware that some (most?) silver maples have a higher % or sugar than sugar maples. Has anyone ever tested big leaf maple sap?
Any update on the status of the book?
This is the economist vs. physicist conversation you were referring to. I highly recommend this website for a general understanding of the basic physical considerations underlying our energy problems. physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
Steven Gubkin Thank you for sharing this link. Thought provoking, and sobering. A 'reality check' that everyone ought to be familiar with. People need to know that there are alternatives, opportunities to thrive without destroying the life-support systems of the planet. Best regards-
Great presentation! Anyone knows when the book will be coming out?
I am wondering the same thing! I would love this book
www.kickstarter.com/projects/coppiceagroforestry/dave-and-mark-write-a-coppice-agroforestry-book/posts/3097558
So is this actually coming out this year? [Or even this decade?] Or am I going to be an old man before having this resource material?
Just give it up Luke. They're so immersed in their research and their teaching gigs they've completely forgotten about actually publishing the book.
So where is the book!?
So... do we have any news on when this book is going to be finished?
Luke Confidential It can be a bit frustrating waiting for something we know is going to be so good, eh?! But genius takes time. If you have read 'Edible Forest Gardens' you will appreciate that whatever Jacke is writing is worth the wait. Personally, I would rather wait for the deeply researched and thorough treatment of the topic this is sure to be, than to have it rushed in any way, but that is just my view...
Jefferdaughter I do understand what you're saying, and Edible Forest Gardens is a heck of a volume of work.
It's just frustrating being in the development phase of a piece of property, seeing a product being marketed that holds information you really really really want to apply... and then watching and waiting as the years tick by and the thing doesn't hit the shelves.
Boom
What he neglected to mention about Black Locust is it's highly toxic if you feed too much to animals.🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
You're at 7151 views Let's see what we can do!
24,000+ 2/23/21
Doubled
Charocal & fuel
- Isn't it interesting that barbeque charcoal kept coppicing alive in Britan, but Americans were sold fake 'briquetes', and then propane. Food cooked on the coals of a wood fire or real wood charcoal is superior in flavor to that cooked on a propane grill, imho.
- For heating, rather than charcoal, rocket mass stove heaters are probably a better option in most applications. Or even the ceramic/masonry mass stove/heagter/fireplaces traditional in the northern most parts of Europe and the alps. A lot of heat is lost in making charcoal, and there are emissions. Rocket mass stove heaters also burn nearly all of the emission by-products generally released into the air.
- Osage orange has ruined many a wood stove not rated also for coal. It burns that hot. Once a widley used hedgerow species planted for windbreaks after the Dust Bowl, the wood has a rot resistance that far excedes black locust when inground contact. It does tend to grow with the major branches arching, thus one of its common names: bow d'arc. Discouragaed when grown- often coppiced, for posts for fences, pole buildings, etc, the natural arches could have natural building applications.
Jefferdaughter Osage orange is also said to be immune to termites. (Termite damage can also be prevented by a healthy soil food web including nematode species which feed on them, some seeking out the queens and eliminating them.) For fns of the edible food forest, (though osage orange is more of an edge or hedgerow species needing plenty of sdunlight) - orsageorange also offers human edibility: www.eattheweeds.com/maclura-pomifera-the-edible-inedible-2/
Several leaps of intuition and conjecture in here claimed as science, particularly in the beginning. The story regarding the economist and the physicist also belies credulity as SO MUCH solar radiation hits the earth and is otherwise untapped, i think we have plenty of breathing room left for man's energy usage before we need worry about boiling away the oceans. Not to mention that inbound solar radiation, is of a different wave length which then radiates out the atmosphere. Thermal radiation produced by 'work' is of the later variety. Yes, it could eventually be an issue, but I doubt it is as close as the doom and gloom scenario presented here.
I can tell you right now the issue with pollard and coppice in the meat industry is a complete non-starter. There is a reason why farmers keep down trees in the field: Lightning. One storm, one bolt of lightning striking a tree can wipe out an ENTIRE flock of cows who have sought refuge underneath. I've seen it. A photo with a lightning-struck Oak, with 50 dead, bloating cows underneath. Perhaps there are work arounds, perhaps not. Only in the last recent years have I heard of farmers starting to allow shrubs in their pasture land. For trees, you're going to have to see major margin shifts in beef before these people start taking risks, because 20 cows dead is a farm-closing failure.
This is what he is referring to.
dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
1. We should transition away from animal-based diets anyway because methane is roughly 10 times as greenhouse-inducing as carbon dioxide
2. Lightning rods are a thing. A pollarded tree is kept much shorter than a lightning rod. Atmospheric electric discharge 'wants' to follow the path of least resistance, so it will preferentially arc toward lightning rods with a deep buried ground rather than a short tree.
3. I have only watched this once, but I believe what he's indicating is at some point of energy production, we warm the planet through greenhouse effect so much that we generate a much greater net loss of water from the planet. Clearly he isn't saying this is going to happen in the near future, the point he was attempting to illustrate is that we cannot have *infinite* scale-up in energy production because we love in a closed system with finite parameters and increases in energy production have dire repercussions on all other earth systems.
It would be so much better a presentation if it didn't make out that us Europeans are not interested in coppicing, or that we are not willing to share knowledge about it. Rather rich, from a people who have destroyed the native cultures that did practice it in North America and are one of the largest energy consumers on the planet. As for not sharing, we too regret how much knowledge got lost during two world wars, when millions died.