Planting the Future
What if the same forest that provides timber could also grow fresh food? That's the idea behind Yale's latest agroforestry project, where food-producing trees and shrubs are planted alongside traditional timber management systems. The goal is simple but powerful: combine food production with healthy, productive forests that continue to provide essential ecosystem services.
This experiment, led by Professors Mark Ashton and Joe Orefice with three Yale School of the Environment master's students—Cayce Morrison '26 MEM, Gabriela D'Orazio '26 MFS, and De-Graft Acquah '26 MF—assisting in coordinating the design and implementation, is taking place in a stand at Yale-Myers Forest where a shelterwood harvest was recently completed. In a shelterwood system, foresters harvest trees in stages, leaving some residual trees to provide shade and seed for regeneration. The result is large canopy openings dotted with standing trees—perfect conditions for testing how agroforestry crops respond to different light levels.
To understand how light shapes growth, we divided the planting area into three distinct zones: North Zone (the shaded north side of residual trees), South Zone (the sunnier south side of residual trees), and Open Zone (areas at least 10 meters away from residual trees). This setup allows us to test how food crops grow under varying degrees of shade and competition from nearby trees. Within these zones, we planted groupings of five agroforestry crops, each chosen to represent a spectrum from shade-tolerant to shade-intolerant species: Chinese Chestnut, Elderberry, Black Walnut, Pawpaw, and Persimmon. Across the site, we established 20 replications in each light zone, with five plants per zone. In total, that's 300 trees and shrubs, carefully arranged to show how light and location influence survival and growth.
Looking ahead, by monitoring these plantings over time, we hope to learn how agroforestry crops can be integrated into working forests in New England. For landowners, this approach offers the potential to harvest both timber and food from the same land. For researchers and students, it provides a living laboratory to study forest dynamics, light competition, and climate adaptation strategies.
