Project Overview
Commodities
- Agronomic: oats, rapeseed
- Additional Plants: trees
- Animals: sheep
Practices
- Animal Production: feed/forage, manure management
- Crop Production: agroforestry, cover crops, forestry, intercropping, nutrient cycling
- Education and Training: demonstration, farmer to farmer, networking, on-farm/ranch research
- Farm Business Management: new enterprise development
- Natural Resources/Environment: habitat enhancement
- Pest Management: genetic resistance, physical control, prevention
- Production Systems: agroecosystems, holistic management, integrated crop and livestock systems
- Soil Management: soil quality/health
- Sustainable Communities: new business opportunities, social networks, sustainability measures
Proposal summary:
The project seeks to combine wood and livestock production in short-rotation hybrid poplar plantations. Traditionally, such plantations are managed at high density rates of 600 to 900 trees per acre on rotations of five to eight years to produce biomass for energy or wood chips for making pulp. GreenWood Resources has switched to lower density rates of around 300 trees per acre and rotations of 10 to 15 years. Fewer trees increases light available to produce quality forage. Greenwood plans to look at ways of pasturing sheep in the plantations from planting through two to four years in a way that provides good forage and limits tree damage. Not only will the project produce wool and wood from the same land, it will integrate nutrient cycling and safeguard soil and water quality compared with open pastures.