Coppice Agroforestry: Tending Trees for Product, Profit, and Woodland Ecology by Mark Krawczyk

I give this book 10 out of 10 acorns.

The author set out to take a really thorough look at coppicing and pollarding - how/where it started, how/where it affected history, and how/where it could change the direction humans are currently heading. I believe he met that goal!

I've often read that "modern permaculture" is really just a compilation and reinvention of ancient ways that humans managed land. Reading Krawczyk's description of coppice management in Britain between the 15th and 18th century is an excellent demonstration of stacking functions and continuity. His review of examples of coppice from the Stone Age to modern times, gives lots of inspiration for incorporating these techniques into our farms, homesteads and even city streetscapes and parks.

Chapter 2 introduces a lot of new and very specific vocabulary which is useful while reading the rest of the book.  Europe has thousands of years of coppiced interactions between humans and local trees. Reviving this relationship from the plants perspective will be just picking up the ball from where it fell 1-200 years ago, which is short in ecological terms. However, it appears that although Indigenous North Americans did do some amount of similar interacting with trees, we do not have that strong relationship that adapted the trees to humans over the same length of time. Making this a healthy permaculture relationship in North America will involve experimentation in all our widely differing ecosystems.

Krawczyk has made considerable effort throughout the book to identify the pros and cons of various approaches, for example starting from seed vs rooting known cultivars vs transplanting. A large area of coppice, managed through a rotation of small clear cut blocks is capable of creating a diverse, shifting ground flora which can support and enhance biological diversity while still providing products humans need.

As with any/every technique, it can be done for the benefit of the soil, or to its detriment. At times in the Middle Ages, so much was taken from coppiced forests and so little left to support the soil, that the soil became exhausted. However, with a well-planned system that incorporates methods of supporting soil such as nitrogen fixing cover crops, mycorrhizae support and choosing a rotation based on the quality of the land, this can be prevented. Similarly, choosing a plan to support water infiltration, can improve the ecosystem and its resilience.

Essentially, coppicing is a woodland management system. I have read for years that a properly "managed" woodlot on a farm, can produce much better quality products than woodlots left to nature alone. A permaculture approach that chooses from a variety of options that stack functions so that both ecological and economical factors are taken into consideration, is needed. Realistic evaluation of the ecosystem and respecting that marginal land is more likely to give marginal returns, is needed. If economic factors are not required, coppicing can be used to repair damaged ecosystems, particularly riparian zones, improving damaged range land through silvopasture systems, and even create novel, less input dependent fruit and nut production.

The book also discusses that there remains areas where High Forest, single-stemmed trees yielding timber, is the most appropriate use of the land. However, to be sustainable, it requires Ecoforester Management Practices which mimic natural forests, rather than the current Industrial Forest Management approach which focuses on a monoculture of an extremely narrow gene pool.

Although some people will invest in a coppice system strictly for on-farm needs, most systems are planned to economically produce products to support the farm. Chapter 5 discusses many of the common products people think of coming from a coppiced forest, some of which are more likely to produce a reliable return at a decent wage. Many of the options require skilled workers, some less so, and include such things as, firewood, charcoal, carbon farming, holiday ornamentation, mushroom cultivation, food/medicine/wine, fencing of various types, materials for basket weaving, building and construction materials, specialized traditional crafts etc. In general, value added products will provide more income than simply selling raw materials, and some of this may be required for the labor costs of maintaining the coppiced forest to be recouped. However, as is the common attitude, many of the examples in the book seem to be environmentally closer to a monoculture, than a traditional, community supported "commons" would have been like.

The book then moves into the nuts and bolts of designing a system, from the access roads needed, to the chosen layout of cants, to the need for fencing to protect resprouting stools, to just how big the project needs to be to provide the product you want in the quantity you need. He includes "patterns" such as a Solo Stool you might have in a garden to produce edible leaves, medicinals, and small-diameter polewood for your garden, to Shelterbelts with side benefits, to Chop and Drop systems for building biomass, to a Graywater Garden to several more. Once the pattern is decided, you need to choose how to establish your plan on your land. Several approaches are discussed with the pros and cons of each. There is no "one right way" and good record keeping, along with photos, is recommended as an important step in determining if management decisions were optimal.

Although Krawczyk touches on pollarding in various parts of the book, there is more detail about this "lost art"  in chapter 8, particularly its use as "tree hay". Tree hay lost out to the efficiency of fossil fuel based grass hay production. As fuel prices rise, learning more about tree hay that grows well and is a good feed for a farm's animals on one's homestead, will likely gain even more popularity. Pollarded windbreaks along roadways can be multifunctional if designed to fill multiple roles and are harvested responsibly.

This book is well worth buying and reading if you have land which needs to sustainably produce products that are wood based. The techniques described will help you learn important components of developing a successful coppiced woodland. There are coppiced forests in Britain that are hundreds of years old, so this is not some "new flavor of the month" but a tried and true system of forest management that lost out to cheap fuel and expensive labor, and now needs a little reinventing to meet our environmental needs.

I am going to order my copy soon!

Here’s something that came in my email today, a webinar.   Maybe someone wants to register and attend.

https://www.regenerativeliving.online/course/coppice-agroforestry-live-2023?&utm_campaign=campaign%3A+Coppice+Agroforestry+Advert+%2863c11794e87ef2001be5b569%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=omnisend&omnisendContactID=635ca06117eb8c001b253afc

I give this book 9 out of 10 acorns.

This book made me realize how much opportunity was missed during my life in the PNW.  I grew up in the wet coastal mountain range in a mostly defunct logging town - a depressed place, though I had no understanding of that as a young person.   Lots of people were quite poor, everyone drove old cars and trucks, some friends had outhouses and outdoor showers,  and most people worked in one of the towns or cities that were 45 minutes away.  

The school was constantly scheming to try to get enough students to be able to stay open.  This was a place that about half of the residents were multi-generational and the other half people coming from other regions, usually big cities, mostly to raise their kids.  But as time went on, most people with kids moved to town and the population dwindled and aged- a common story in the rural United States.

All around us were steep hillsides covered in trees, land both private and public (BLM), which was clearcut in an increasingly fast schedule.  I was astonished the first time I saw a satellite view of my home region.  The land is a patchwork of clearcut squares in differing levels of brown, light green and dark green.

Clearcuts "required" herbicide spraying, both aerial and by crews with backpacks, to stop the regrowth of so-called "trash trees".  In western Oregon, these were everything besides Douglas fir and red cedar.  Hemlock, once a dominant evergreen in this region, didn't grow fast enough to be financially viable.  Chinquapin and yew, oceanspray and vine maple,  plums and cherry, Oregon ash and willows, and above all, the hated red alders and big leaf maples - these were trash trees.  They took up viable space and made shade that slowed the growth of the Douglas fir in their plantations.  Eventually, the medicinal breast cancer fighting qualities of the yew were discovered and that tree gained a certain respect.  But the fast-growing red alder and the resprouting (coppicing) big leaf maples were loathed as problems that needed addressing and cost money and labor.  They either had to be cut out by hand or poisoned just long enough to slow their growth until the Doug firs got tall enough to out-compete them.

The ability of the red alder and the big leaf maple to grow quickly, straight and tall, making trunks the size of my wrist in a year - it was viewed as a curse, not a blessing.  People didn't understand the roles of those plants or see even any alternative value for them.  They were troublemakers and problems, not nitrogen fixers, erosion/flood control, tree forage and soil rebuilders, pollinator, large animal and fungal feeders.  The healers and sustainers of the forest.

The book, Coppice Agroforestry is a book that can change generational attitudes.  In it is not only the history - as much as can be determined thus far - of coppice use in the mostly temperate world but also an instruction manual as to how it can be reborn today.  Communities like where I grew up have a trove of value around them that they just don't know how to use in a sustainable way.  I'm speaking from personal experience, not an intellectual, outsiders assertion.

The book not only reflects many years of the author Krawczyk's experiences, but the decades of experience from those he interviewed, studied with, and the ancestors (of all of us) who he documents.

It's hard to pick a favorite chapter in among so much valuable information, but if my husband and I had to agree on one it's the phenomenal Chapter 1: A Cultural History of Coppice Agroforestry.  Reading that chapter, we were astonished by how intentional the management of forestry was by people hundreds and thousands of years ago.  

Case in point from that chapter, pages 29-30  - a Western Mono cradleboard takes 500-675 straight sourberry sticks and a larger one takes up to 1200.  So a weaver has to harvest up to 10,000 stems of the right length, diameter and type per year just to make a dozen baby-carriers.  And a village of 100 people would require a team of 25 weavers doing this!

With that much coppice required every year, those straight sticks have to be created through intentional practices or there would never be enough of them naturally available.

I miss Oregon and what I could have accomplished there had I known more.  But most thankfully this book is useful anywhere.  Since reading it, I've come up with a coppice plot plan for me and my husband's developing permaculture farm in the desert SW.  It's been a valuable resource for understanding what you can do with trees and how they can be incorporated more fully into a permaculture plan - it's not just nitrogen and shade and chop and drop.  I would say this book is right up there with Mark Shephard's Restoration Agriculture in the breakthroughs in thinking it can create.

A quote from the book really stood out to me as describing what I see as the inspiration of permaculture - trees and their roles in nature.  It made me better understand how almost all forms of human society are based, in one way or another, on the relationship we have with trees.

 Mark Krawczyk in Coppice Agroforestry, Ch. 1, pg. 31 wrote:Imagine what a horticultural society might look like in the modern world and what it would take to internalize a worldview that inspires us to tend rather than dominate nature.

This is a highly valuable book for permaculturists, crafters, woodworkers, livestock owners, woodstove users, farmers and foresters alike.  I think it will become a "bible" or reference on these topics.  It is a completely practical guide and now is at the top of my "must have" permaculture book list.