Browse plants a list of them .

 

This is a list of browse plants I know of one way or another and some information about copicing and pollarding, which is to say how to farm, harfvest them.
  I put the names of the trees in heavy type.
I will start with an american tree for an american site. I have just read that black locust is a really good forage tree and you are all talk of black locust every so often so i thought that would be good news.
so -:
Black Locust robina false acacia.
      If anyone wonders real acacias are mimosas as far as I can make out.
Look up black locust forage browse in internet. Here in Spain its called a acacia though it is a, robina false acacia.

Its wood, thick switches of it, are  good for making the handles for garden instruments according to a neighbor of my brothers in laws,' their garden if full of them but they are trees that aren't at all spanish. agri rose macaskie
   
  Trees as bushes or hedges .
remeber you can use trees as bushes if you cut them often or if your live stock eat them frequently.
I post a photo of an encina quercus ilex irotundifolia  eaten by goats, the result is the bushes looks like topary work. agri rose macaskie.

     Quercus Ilex Rotundifolia
The encina is a browse plant here in Spain, for all live stock except pigs. It is  either kept as a bush or as a tree when the leaf is given to the animals by cutting big twigs sprays off the tree for the live stock which prunes it and serves the live stock as extra feed in winter it is an evergreen oak.
    It is also pruned to preserve its shape , it is shaped to increase the acorn crop and to provide fire wood. and make prunning and pollarding  fire wood from its branches and banging the tree for acorns easier.  The branches are pollarded  from the main branches for fire wood when they reach the right size.
  as the live stock eat what is prunne d for them they cannot destroy the tree, causeing desertification .
       The acorns go to fatten pigs and if their are no pigs, to sheep, goats, cattle, and horses.

     I post a fotos of bushes of called chaparras probably kept as bushes because the whole bush is cut down for charcooal every fifteen to twenty years and resprouts form its roots. There is a well shaped pruned and pollarded encina tree in the foto too. and the dark hills in the background are dark because they are covered in this tree.
        Spain earns a lot of money exporting charcoal.
       The place is in the province of Ávila, in the village of Solo Sanchez.
 

  Curllleaf Mountain mahogony.
Cercocarpus ledifolius. nut
  This is one of a list of forage trees mentioned by another contributer to these forums and when i find out which one i will write in his name.
      I internetted it.
      It grows in th e west of the united states in dry places and is evegreen.

  As forage
   Its leaves are very good for forage having more protien in winter than the animals need. agri rose macaskie.

  Juan Oría de la Rueda yb Salguero, writes of four maples in Spain guia de Arboles y arbustos de Castilla y Leon". three of which he mentions as beign uses as browse.

acer pesudoplatanus L.
    Whose leaves he says were used to wrap cabrales, a cheese sold wrapped in leave.  Its syrup for wine in Scotland . Birds and snails eat young seedlings of this maple.
      Its [glow=red,]leaves feed sheep and goats[/glow]
      Its seeds are liked by the deer, squirrels and field mice eat its twigs leaves bark and seeds.
  acer campestre L.
    Its leaves are used for [glow=red,goats [/glow] and it is even pollarded in some places for this reason.
    Deer adore its leaves, and feild mice eat its seeds shoots and bark.
  acer opulus mill.
    He does not mention its leaves being used as forage.
      I put the acer monspessulanum l. last, becasue i am familiar with it and so have a lot to say about it growth in the village i know.

    The maple of mont pelliermonsepessulanum is a meditereanean maple the most dry country of those he mentions . So for California for example. 
     It is  forage tree In the province of  Guadalajara, Spain, in the village of Almiruete, there are lines of this tree up on the hills were few people except shepherds go, which i imagine grew in lines because they were kept as hedges whose leaves could be reached by herds of sheep and goats  before the government made laws against coppicing, They are in a wood were oaks quercus faginea were coppiced for fire wood cut down when their trunks got thick enough for wood for stoves, when they have a diametre of about nine centimetres.
I post a photo of a line of maple the sort of line that made me think there maples had once been grown as a hedge . 

     I also post a photo of coppiced maples this is another way of keeping the trees small that is a bit different from keeping them as a hedge or bush. If they are  kept small the live stock here, sheep and goats and the shepherds can get at the leaf, the shepherds cutting branches for their herds.
When trees are copiced the cut down the  trees leaving a stump that then grows a new trunk . The advantage of the system is that the trunks grow back quickly as the tree already has roots .and often more that one trunks grow from the stump  called a stolon if i remeber my English. agri rose macaskie.

  i post another photo of the maple of montpellier, of it's leaves, it is a very decorative type of forage.
The second photo o fleaves is of a tree that lives in th middle of a feild sunlight all round it trees look diferetn according to their situation trees in wood are inclined to look stringier and have a less heavy growth of leaves. agri rose macaskie.

this tree has somtinmes plenty of seeds is absolutely covered in them they are liked by mice maybe hens would like them i tried themand found they are very woody.

  How pretty the colour of these trees can be.

shepherd with sheep below the wood of quejigos, oaks, quercus faginea  and these maples. in fact there is a lateral line of grey in the wood that is these maples that lose their leaves really earyly in autumn the are usually red leaved at the end of septemver long before the other trees loose their leaves .
I f the summer is very dry some maples leaves dry, i thought they tree i saw with dry leaves was dead but the tree  relived the next spring. A freind of mine had the same experience with a maple of montpellier she new in the farms of the Escorial were they also exist. agri rose macaskie.

Here is another picture that includes this maple and shows a whol ecomplex traditional system, this photo icaptures a agricultural a, agro, silvan, pastoral tradition, which is to say a cereal, wood, pasture combined, tradition,  that is still alive. It is a bit of museum of agriculture.

  The wheat is grown in the flat lands near the village, in this case that the village is called Tamajon, in the province of Guadalajara, Spain, north of Madrid.

    Maybe these lands are flat because of centuries of ploughing and if this is the case they have probably eroded down and before were higher and wide . I like the way the feilds look like a river of green. I am very in love with some bits of spanish country side and agricultural traditions.

      Growing cereals on flat ground is good farming practice today to because ploughing leaves the earth loose and bare and if you plough hills this exposes them to beingoeroded by the rain.
  G  rowing trees on slopes is also good agricultural practice they shore up the sides of hills.
  This weat is grown probably in what they call here three leaves, one year of wheat two of pasture.
  the sheep reseed the cereal land  that have been harvested with the seed they have eaten earlier in the day some of which goes through their digestive tracts untouched. it means that the feild will fill with all the variety of plants that sheep like and have been eating on the hills.
  They also fertilise the land with their droppings as they feed. There is also a tradition of keeping sheep on some bit of land for the night land that you want to be specially fertile, such land is called a majadal .
    I have read about this way of seeding land and talked of it with an argricultural expert called Amerigo iwho works in the county council of the Escorial .
  the minute the land begins to rise the wooded land starts.

    The bright green trees are maples of montpellier in flower.
    It is always a good idea to look round you in spring and autumn if you want to see new trees as the trees have very different coloured leaves from each other in these seasons it is easy to see if there are trees that aren't the same as the usual ones for the district around.  If you see a  tree that sticks out for its different colour go and have a closer look at it.

      So maples as forage, they were  probably smaller a few years ago when copicing was allowed, now they have grown too high for the sheep and goats to eat.
    The other trees on the slope are junipers, sabin albares, in latin juniperus thurifera, here at almost their lowest point at a thousand feet. There are a few of these trees on the lower side of the village but  below the next village all the junipers are juniperus oxycedrus, a less high mountain though also a drought hardy, poor soil tree.

      Juniperus Thurifera were used as iron is today in construction, all the beams and posts in the houses were of trunk of this wood harvested when they were young and not very thick as it is a very hard wood .
      At the feet of the trees there are  mostly time bushes and soem gorse that gets browsed. The grass is so over pasuturised as to have been done for here.

    Combining trees you are exploiting for wood with pastures, allows you to clear the wood so as to have an open wood and so reduce the fire damage and still not loose money. This it seems to me could be a cool idea in places like California with a great fire risk in summer. agri rose macaskie.
 

  A picture of the flowers of the maple of montpellier..

to go stright on to the tree that accompanies the maple of montpellier, the oak one of the ones that does not mind th edry mediterenean soils the quejigo or rmore formally the quercus faginea.  agri rose macaskie.

According to Juan Oría de la Rueda y Salguero, in his book guia de Ärboles y Arbustos en Castilla y Leon" this tree is so popular with the live stock that they eat it before it can grow also it is not so usefull as the encina because its leaves are not evergreen so they don't look after it as well.
it fruit acorns feed pigs and if nthere aren't pigs all other live stock. the only oaks i Spain that juan oría does not mentions as havign acorns that fatten live stock are the coccifera and the rubra though he says the acorns of the last feed wild animals.
  there is a list of plants the white tailed deer eat and they really like one of the american oaks.
  A photo of a small quejigo among autumn leaves.   

Another photo of a tiny quercus faginea.

  the quejgos on these hills were about twenty years ago copiced, cut down periodicalloy fo there wood when the trunks eached a b¡diametre of nine cenimetres , for fire wood and for stoves .
  A coppiced tree relives from its stool and normal more than one trunk grows from the stool after it has beencut so you get many trunked trees here is an example of one.

the elaves of wuejigos change a bit from tree to tree, sometimes you see them with long thin leaves though i have not been able to find long thin leaves late in the season they seem to fatten out as summer advances.
  the encina has a round leaf like this and so does the cork oak but their leaves are not at all trans lucent and much thicker with white undesides which are in fact fine white hairs that are also very reflective taking the colour of the ground sandy if the light shines up fromth e ground on to them.

  Another leaf of quejigo, this one is longer and thinner. This is probably a good example of a normal quejigo leaf. I have reaqd the suggestion tha ttrees like this are a cross between a turkey oak and a cork oak. agri rose macaskie.

I have added a list of maples her ean dmentioned if they are reputeldy used as forage or not.rose .

the tree sorbus domestica grows in this wood too. No one says, as far as i know, that this tree is a forage tree but its fruit are eatable, they are sour and have invertid sugars acido málico and so there are various ways of making them eatable. Cut in half and dried and then stewed, used for a cider that the celts used to conserve apples in and other alcoholic bevarages. Apparently they mature with bacterian fermentation producing acohol and aldehido acetico  and you leave them in cereals or straw in your barn for two or up to five mounths before eating them, or they are very acid. YUou use them  to clear cider, the type called pomal is sweeter than other types. Juan Oría de la Rueda y Salguero, "guia de Ärboles y arbustos de Castilla y Leon". This book is a bit expensive but though it looks small has an awfull lot of information in it. A baby book on each tree.
  The wood of this tree is tremendously valuable.
  I post a picture of a sorbus domestica next to a maple of monsepessulanum.
  I also put in a picture of the fruit of the sorbus domestica. Later in the year the fruit goes red. agri rose macaskie