By Mike Beacom

The Appalachia Beginning Forest Farmer Coalition (ABFFC) is connecting forest farmers (both new and experienced) with one another across the East Coast, as well as supporting agencies and programs to enhance and grow the agroforestry practice.

The coalition provides members with a network of resources including in-depth, multiday training and technical resources for propagating and managing forest farming efforts through video series, events and various publications.

“We’re connecting dots, aligning different stakeholders with different expertise and sharing that expertise with people who want to learn more and people who have been doing it for a while,” said John F. Munsell, ABFFC project director, professor and Forest Management Extension Specialist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA.

Funded through a USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, the coalition digs into all aspects of forest farming. Among them are sustainability, seed collection to marketing, increasing demands for responsibly sourced products, and policymaking.

“It’s a diverse ecosystem,” Munsell said. “Forests are complex ecosystems; you can harvest timber but there’s also decoratives, landscaping materials, medicine, and the forest farming angle allows for branding…It’s about the techniques and the care and tending of the plants like you do for (traditional) crops.”

Membership is growing, with many online resources and opportunities to connect specifically to practices for growing medicinal, herbal, and other edible botanicals in various forest settings.

“We’re also trying to work on being better recognized for the farming practice, because it is farming,” he said. “People have said ‘it’s just recreation’ but at the end of the day if someone’s going to be investing in growing things, that’s farming; it just happens to be under a canopy.”

Focusing on sustainability allows for increased quality in the products, he said, which can turn a profit as the landowners track and modify their growing practices. That, in turn, provides an option of selling the goods to conscientious consumers concerned about quality.

The coalition also provides training on resource assessment and habitat for state Extension offices and agency personnel as well as education, training and technical assistance for forest farmers through Appalachia.

Partners are located across Appalachia from Georgia through Pennsylvania and include universities, extensions, nongovernmental organizations, and Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry.

Tags: Forestry, forest farming