Kickstarter

Greetings friends,

In the meantime, our friend and powerhouse research assistant Daniel Plane has been painstakingly refining the extensive species database that he's been amassing over the past few years. This resource is extensive, and with it, comes some seriously detail-oriented work, consolidating data, choosing a layout and framework, and making the information he's helped gather an accessible and digestible product. Thanks for all your hard work Daniel!

In the mean time, I've been deep in the midst of the 3rd round of revision and expansion of Chapter 5 (out of 8) - The Economy of Coppice. I just finishing combing through more than 70 research papers and academic journal articles, further fleshing out the expansive list of products we'd already developed. I'm now going to do what I can to fill in any identifiable gaps before I revise it once more and pass it over to Dave for review. It's a monster of a chapter - 50,000+ words at the moment, but we believe that the economics of coppice systems is one of the most important parts of a well-planned and truly sustainable system, so we're striving to provide readers with as much useful detail as possible.

Our basic format for this chapter includes profiles of each individual product with all sorts of interesting and useful information about them. I've included a list of the products we've identified below. Take a look and let us know if you see anything we've missed. Honestly - we really want to know if you know of coppice-related products that you don't see here.

- Woodchips: Soil-improving mulches, wood-chip clay walls systems, wood chip heat/biofuel
- Fertility
- Fodder
- Fuelwood
- Faggots/Fascines
- Charcoal/Bio-char/
- 'Carbon Farming'/Carbon Sequestration
- Garden Products (tree stakes, bean poles, pea sticks, flower stakes, hedging stakes, plant stands)
- Hugelkultur materials
- Holiday ornamentation (stump culture Christmas trees, wreaths, swags)
- Culinary and Medicinal Mushrooms
- Food/Medicine/Wine
- Fencing
- Windbreaks and Noise Barriers
- Hedges
- Besom Brooms
- Clogs
- Hay Rakes/Forks
- Tool Handles
- Utensils
- Walking Sticks
- Baskets
- Rustic Furniture
- Bodging and Green Woodworking
- Thatching Materials
- Roof Shakes
- Garden Structures
- Yurts
- Traditional dwellings (tipis, wigwams, longhouses)
- Log Cabins
- Cordwood Buildings
- Roundwood Timber Frames
- Arborsculpture
- Ecological Restoration (erosion control/bioengineering structures, phytoremediation, etc)
- Habitat
- Nursery Propagation Stock
- Woody Cut Stems for the Floral Industry
- Understory Production (shade tolerant herbs, spring ephemerals)
- Education and Professional Training

So once again, for each of these individual products, we're compiling profiles from a wide range of resources that include information including:

- Desirable wood properties/qualities 

- Most promising species 

- Materials Volume Required 

- Skill Level to Produce 

- Time to Produce 

- Special tools or machinery required 

- Price Range for Completed Product -

If you have experience producing any of these products and would like to share your thoughts, we'd be delighted to include them in our research. Send us an e-mail and let us know what product you make along with any of the above information you can share. You can reach us at coppiceagroforestry@gmail.com

We're ever grateful for your support and eagerly awaiting the rapidly approaching growing season.
Wishing you all the best
Mark

While I don't want to encourage you all to start asking us questions--we would rather focus on writing/editing the book and pulling together our species databases--Mark and I did get an information request from one of our Kickstarter subscribers recently that I responded to because I was in a place to actually try using all of our databases for the first time to answer his question!

This person asked: "I've got Robinia pseudoacacia growing on some east facing, moist slopes but am looking to plant some locust on a south-facing, droughty slope. I thought the drought tolerance of the R. neomexicana might be a good fit. Any thoughts? Do you know of anyone in the PNW that has tried it?"

I took the opportunity to use our database resources to give him a quick response:

"Here is some of what we have in our database on R. neomexicana:

It sprouts from stumps and root crowns. New Mexico locust spreads by rhizomes, forming dense thickets.
Because of its rapid growth and prolific sprouting, efforts are made to suppress New Mexico locust, especially
after timber harvest. However at least one reference says it grows slowly, so it seems there is some conflict in the data on it, in that if it grew slowly efforts to suppress wouldn’t be noted, probably.

It is considered to have high hedge tolerance.

The following reference has some data on its use as a fodder crop:
Urness, P. J., D. J. Neff, R. K. Watkins, and Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station (Fort Collins Colo.). 1975. Nutritive Value of Mule Deer Forages on Ponderosa Pine Summer Range in Arizona. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station.

This ref states that leaves in June had crude protein of 25% (higher than alfalfa) but they had very low digestibility for mule deer (only 39%); may be even less digestible for cattle, goats, etc., but that is a guess on my part.

We have no data on its use/quality for firewood or medicine.

The bark, root and seed are said to be poisonous by one reference, but there is also evidence of the flowers being edible, as well as the fresh seed pods and dried pods, too.

No evidence of basketry use that we have found. It is used for erosion control.

It's a multistemmed shrub: implication: it may not yield poles of as high a quality or large a size as R. pseudoacacia. It has been used for fence posts and fuel. It is of little use as lumber due to its small size and limited distribution, but the wood is hard, heavy, elastic and durable. Native peoples used branches for cradle boards and arrow shafts and the wood for high quality bows.

The USDA says it grows to 4 feet tall in 20 years, which seems rather slow and may not be very useful to you, though its max height is 25’. They also say it is only MODERATELY drought tolerant.

So as for your exact question re: drought tolerance on south facing slopes: I’d say black locust is probably a better bet, both in terms of drought tolerance and in terms of usefulness of the material.

I do not know of anyone working with R. neomexicana. Perhaps Mark does."

The fact I was in a position to relatively easily pull up this range of information, gathered from dozens of different resources, demonstrates the reality that the coppice/resprouting species databases are turning the corner. We have as of today or yesterday, ended our "in breath" of gathering information from all over the world on almost 900 (mostly North American native) woody plants, and are beginning the long and tedious process of editing our databases to consolidate the information into useful form. The response to our questioner gives you a sense of the kind of information we have gathered, even for a relatively obscure species like Robinia neomexicana. We are getting there folks, we are getting there! As I said to someone recently, we are at the apogee of the elllipse--the point furthest from the center of the ellipse, and are turning the corner to begin heading back home and bring this thing to completion!

Given that it has taken us three years to get to this point, we are hoping that it won't take us three more years to get back from this point. I think we are gathering speed. But life throws its curve balls, so we don't want anyone holding their breath. But it will be a damn fine piece of work when we are done, that is for sure.

Hi folks

We recently spent some time exploring some fantastic on-line resources on coppiced willow biomass production for heat and electricity from the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.  While we plan to only truly skim the surface of short rotation biomass coppice systems in our book, the fine folks at Cornell (amongst others) have done much to help develop the state of the art for growers in North America.  

While short rotation forestry (SRF) presents a different scale and end product than much of what we'll be exploring in Coppice Agroforestry, we absolutely believe there's strength in diversity and that these systems may be of direct application to some of your lives and livelihoods.  Check out the videos below to learn a bit more about the types of the planting and harvesting equipment used to manage these systems and marvel at the ingenious technology that's gone into their development.

http://willow.cals.cornell.edu/videos.html#video10

Best wishes and happy autumn,

Mark and Dave

Happy September friends,

Can it really be that we're rapidly approaching the equinox? Yet another growing season feels as if it's coming to a rapid close. While Dave and I have been remiss in keeping you fine people updated as to our progress on Coppice Agroforestry, we'd like to share that we're still steadily making headway, though the height of summer; back to back workshops, design courses and speaking engagements; new land purchases (Mark that is, in New Haven, VT); and occasional free time invested in cultivating our personal lives has claimed much of the past six weeks. As much of that work begins to slow though, Mark will once again resume part-full time work on the manuscript, while Dave and Daniel Plane continue to forge ahead fleshing out the ever-expanding coppice species database. We're still so deeply thrilled to be immersed in this process and are continually learning, reassessing, refining and framing our thoughts, findings and experiences. We're both carving out much of the fall/winter months to bring the manuscript to a point where it should be ready for refinement into a finished work and we're feeling ever-confident that we'll be making an invaluable contribution to the expansion and development of the state of the art of coppice agroforestry.

From my end, Dave just recently sent me his edited version of Chapter 1 - A Cultural History of Coppice Agroforestry. I've only just begun to pour over the myriad changes and comments he's made, and while positively overwhelming (said with honest gratitude), I can most definitely tell that the end results of this back and forth will result in a highly-readable, enjoyable, well framed and thorough end product. This is our 3rd round of editing to date and each time around, the book becomes more refined. I've attached a screen shot of part of a single page of text to show how thorough Mr. Jacke's editorial comments and changes are!

In the meantime, I'm working through each individual chapter, identifying gaps, fleshing them out, working to stitch the pieces together and integrate relevant academic journal articles into each from the monumental literature database Dave has assembled. Now deeply immersed in Chapter 3 - The Ecology and Biology of Woody Plants (the book comprises 10 chapters total), I've read over 80 journal articles that I'm going to begin integrating into the text this afternoon to further expand on how coppicing works at the level of the individual, patch and community. It's an ever-enlightening process.

I include a photo below of a cottonwood stool (Populus deltoides) that I pass fairly regularly on my journeys on foot around Burlington.  In just a single season, this insanely vigorous stool has put on well over 10 feet worth of growth with stems well over 1.5" in diameter!  It's incredible.  And this is just a 'weed tree' growing along the edge of an old building foundation!  Not bad!  Thanks to Ammy for offering some scale

As far as Dave and Daniel's progress on the species database, we now have the Coppice-ability, Timber Uses, Basketry, Edibles database first drafts complete, and the Medicinals and Other Uses databases are not far behind—though they still need a lot of editing. We also have the first round of fodder research—gathering references from all over the world—almost complete—only two more genera to go out of 28 we focused on, but we've gathered over 600 references relating to the fodder use (crude protein and digestibility, primarily) of 75 genera along the way (thanks to our various volunteer researchers for their help, and to the indefatigable Daniel Plane for his ongoing efforts). We now have the unenviable task of combing through all these papers to dig out the nuggets we need for the species of interest and trying to make sense of them.

Now that we're back in the saddle, we'll make more of a concerted effort to keep you all abreast as to our progress and what new insights pop up in our mind's eye. We deeply appreciate your patience and support and continue to pursue our work with diligence to create a product that will serve our community for years to come. This has been an enormous process but we're both still feeling deeply energized and inspired. Thank you for being there for us!

Mark and Dave

Hello friends

Happy spring!  (Mark here) It's an incredibly gorgeous day here in Burlington and I hope you find something similar wherever you may be.  Things are starting to ramp up here as the weather grows ever nicer and it seemed a good time to share an update as to where things are at in our process.  

Last week I printed the manuscript for the first time (at least for myself - Dave's done it once before).  It contains 10 chapters, 180,000 words (nearly 300 pages single spaced) so there's no shortage of content - but we want to make sure that the content that's there is as potent, relevant, accurate and practical as can be so I've begun what will likely amount to a serious amount of harsh editing.  I feel as if I've entered 'phase 3' of a three part manuscript development process.  

The first phase involved writing everything I felt I knew or could offer our original outline framework.  Then I've spent the last 7 or so months reading and integrating over 50 related books into that manuscript.  Now, I'm going through what I've written, pruning, consolidating, clarifying, and further identifying areas that need fleshing out.  This step will take some time as I'm concurrently going through our extensive list of academic journal resources, seeing what they have to offer and fitting them into the manuscript as appropriate.  It's exciting to see individual chapters starting to take their true form.  

At the moment, I'm refining Chapter 1 - A Cultural History of Coppice Agroforestry and it has me reading some fascinating research.  I've included some photos that show the articles I'm currently diving into, an awkward photo of me with the manuscript (it's hard to take a decent photo of yourself), and a sampling of the hard edits I've been undertaking on the manuscript to date (yes, that's right I've graded myself - A+ - no, just kidding, I was using letters and numbers to indicate where to place different sections as I rearrange things).

I hope this helps you all feel connected with our process.  It's been an involved one.  No one said it would be easy (or fast) and that's absolutely proving to be the case, but I can say that I find myself still thoroughly enjoying the process, learning new things every day, and feeling a deep appreciation and a humble drive to serve you all as best I/we can.

Thanks again for all you do!

Best wishes

Mark and Dave