Climate Basics Podcast Badger Johnson Interview notes

In this episode, Greg and Ty speak with forester Badger Johnson about how trees and forest ecosystems can be employed in agriculture to improve yields, build resiliency and restore the land. Interview question answers from Badger: What is agroforestry and is it a real alternative to industrial corn and soy fields? Will talk about trees+wheat in Missouri. Agroforestry in US. In parts of Africa, Asia and Central America where it's getting too hot to grow some of the conventional annual staple foods, a little shade from trees can actually benefit row crops. "Shade moderates microclimate, maintaining leaf temperatures closer to optimal ranges for photosynthesis and reducing photoinhibition under high irradiance." Let the drought-adapted trees taking a beating from the sun, let the the crops below not have to bare the brunt of things. What are some challenges faced by agriculturalists trying to get into regenerative practices? Agriculture is risky business. Changes to regenerative practices often means somewhat changing your framework, and so there're many unknowns and learning curves that you introduce. Meanwhile, you may be straying away from USDA crop insurance. Certainly away from your experience base. You might veer into exciting but scary experimental territory if you don't have a cultural tradition of these practices to fall back on. I could share anecdotes about traveling to Italy and Turkiye, getting inspiration from chestnut farmers stacking honey and porcini production in a chestnut orchard. That was thousands of dollars and a month and a half to learn about that, it wasn't in any of the agroforestry written resources on chestnuts that are available in the US. Worth it, obviously. The USDA has several grants meant to advance ag practices - could you tell us your experiences with this process and maybe share a success story? EQIP is through NRCS and pays for tree planting. We had success getting them to pay us per tree for planting chestnuts and pawpaws, even though both species are kind of a round peg in a square hole. Conservation Agents at NRCS are real people, often idealistic, underpaid, sometimes constrained by their CONSERVATION framework which came into existence almost 100 years ago. Another success story: Accelerating Appalachia has a program that was renamed between Biden and Trump 2, now called. Accelerating Appalachia (ACAP) Farmer Funding Program. We've worked with a grazer to get cattle on our land, we've agreed to try alley cropping and forest farming (twist my arm, lol) and in exchange, they helped us buy some implements for our old tractor that make alley cropping possible at the scale of a mid-size farm. Large by peasant farmer standards, small by American industrial size standards... we are transition some lawngrass in our chestnut orchard to grow cool season crops. Garlic, winter canola, rye, winter wheat. Having the growing season focused in fall and spring, rather than summer, means the understory crops don't compete with trees for sunlight and moisture during the summer, when soil is dryer, and tree leaves block the light. In summer, we plant soil-enriching cover crops, but don't fret about commercial yields. Does that make sense? Shifting the production window, via crop selection, to the period of year when it will still be possible to do rain-fed agriculture in my bioregion. How do you expect US food costs to be impacted by the global fertilizer shortage/price hike and are regenerative practices lbetter insulated from these impact? Prices will go up from the price shocks from interrupted global trade of fertilizer and petroleum, no doubt. We see it all the time. Will consumers keep buying food, if you increase your food price to reflect the higher cost of inputs? Regenerative practices that allow production with reduced inputs can certainly help insulate you from this. An example with beef: if you are feeding free-choice minerals in a management intensive grazing system (a salad bar of different powdered minerals available to cows, so they can lick a bit of each that they're not getting from the grass), eventually they poop and pee enough of that stuff out onto the soil surface to bring the levels of micronutrients up to sufficiency level, in the forage. You can tell because they stop licking some of the powders after about 3 years on a site. Another example: the porcini feeds the chestnut tree phosphorous and nitrogen, in exchange for photosynthate. You're always exporting some nutrition from your field because you're exporting nuts. True sustainability would require returning composted night soil, or humanure, to the base of the tree. Unfortunately we have a lot of heavy metals in our diet- yikes- and so when you bring this up, people say our poop is toxic. I think that means we should stop eating heavy metals. That would be to our benefit anyway. Then we can close loop on our broken phosphourous and potassium gap, and stop worrying about mining these things in Russia, or the Pacific Ocean, or whatever. What is the importance of forest management in the global scale of climate change and ecosystem collapse, and what's one ray of hope that you see in all this? Listen, when it's hot, people like to work in the shade. Forests provide shade and are a good place to work if you have to work outside when it's hot. Certainly better than working within the "urban heat island effect". Tending forests to be more supportive of human needs for food/fiber/etc is rewarding work, even if you just do it part time. I'm working with Rising Appalachia, which is setting up a facility to leach and grind acorns into flour for making bread, and pressing wild hickory nuts for cooking oil. It sounds exotic, but this is what the indigenous human culture of this place did for a long time. As I've been working, as a Certified Forester and Ohio Certified Prescribed Fire Manager, to bring back the oak-hickory woodlands for timber production and biodiversity benefit, it's amazing to see that this concurs with making the wild forest essentially into an agroforestry system! Everything old is new again, nothing new under the sun, but also an industrial society has never really turned back to the forest again to find climate solutions to the crises in our food system. So I think this project is cool, and would work anywhere in the Central Hardwoods Region of the US. I know from traveling that there are equivalents to this in other places. In Ethiopia, forest production of coffee certainly preserved more native biodiversity than even their very cool, highly sophisticated and intensive agroforestry systems. In this era of invasive weeds completely swallowing a lot of forest... tending the forest for food production is actually a win-win for humans and forest. References: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255594729_Native_American_influences_on_the_forest_composition_of_the_Allegheny_Plateau_northwest_Pennsylvania https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44415-025-00028-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02344-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-025-01022-5 For more information: https://paradiseecologicalservices.com/ And if you're near Eastern Ohio this fall and want to participate in the chestnut harvest: https://route9cooperative.com/ Also find the Climate Basics Podcast on: TikTok: tiktok.com/@climatebasics Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1gBz1EHEDalGmcv6ebcPZp #Agroforestry #AlleyCropping #ForestFarming #Mycoforestry #Silvopasture