Mark Shepard

Cultural

Mark Shepard is the most-cited contemporary practitioner of perennial-polyculture agriculture in the temperate world. He bought 106 acres of degraded former corn-and-soy ground in the [[driftless-area|Driftless]] coulee country of southwestern [[viroqua|Wisconsin]] in 1994. In 1995 he started planting trees — initially chestnuts and hazelnuts (the species J. Russell Smith had identified in 1929 as the staple-grade tree crops awaiting development), then apples, then a thickening matrix of shrubs and groundcover and integrated livestock. Thirty years later, New Forest Farm is one of the most-visited working examples of temperate perennial agriculture in North America. It produces commercial volumes of chestnuts, hazelnuts, apples, raspberries, asparagus, grass-fed beef, pastured pork, and pastured poultry from a single integrated system that is now dominated by tree canopy.

The book that made Shepard’s work portable is [[restoration-agriculture|Restoration Agriculture]]: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers (Acres U.S.A., 2013). The book lays out his framework explicitly:

1. Model the system on the original native ecosystem. For Shepard, that ecosystem is the oak savanna that covered much of southern [[viroqua|Wisconsin]] before European settlement — scattered large trees, herbaceous understory, browsing herbivores, periodic fire.
2. Populate it with productive perennial analogs. [[chestnut|Chestnut]] replaces the dominant oak ([[chestnut|chestnut]] yields a higher-grade staple). Hazelnut replaces understory hazel (an existing native; Shepard’s contribution is the systematic breeding work). Apple, plum, currant, raspberry fill the shrub and small-tree layers. Cattle, hogs, and poultry replace the bison, elk, and turkeys of the original system.
3. Design at watershed scale using keyline principles. Water management — keyline plowing, swales, ponds — comes first; trees are sited to the keyline; animals run through last.
4. Select ruthlessly. STUN — Sheer Total Utter Neglect. Plant heavily, give no special care, see which individuals survive and produce, breed from the survivors, throw out the rest. This is [[j-russell-smith|J. Russell Smith]]‘s “find the genius tree” program executed at industrial scale.

Water for Any Farm (2020) is the keyline-water companion text — how to do the water-management half of [[restoration-agriculture|restoration agriculture]] on any farm, not just [[viroqua|Wisconsin]].

Why Shepard matters to 0mn1.one

Shepard closes the loop between theory and practice that the foundational-sources tier (Smith, Howard, [[bill-mollison|Mollison]], Holmgren) opened a century ago. For 0mn1.one’s autonomous-farm work and bioregional-densification work, Shepard is the working model: this is what [[permaculture|permanent agriculture]] looks like when a competent farmer executes it at commercial scale on degraded American ground over thirty years. The Driftless location is also directly relevant — Shepard’s farm sits inside one of 0mn1.one’s existing bioregion clusters, and the wiki should treat New Forest Farm as a substrate-builder reference operation for the Driftless and adjacent bioregions.

Shepard is also a practical breeder of [[chestnut|chestnut]] and [[hazelnut|hazelnut]] — the two tree crops Smith identified in 1929 as most ready for staple development. His chestnut and hazelnut work is the contemporary state of the art and is essential reading for any tree-crop ingest the wiki does going forward.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[j-russell-smith]] · [[bill-mollison]] · [[albert-howard]]
• Member of: [[person]]
• Voiced by: [[restoration-agriculture]]
• Operates: [[new-forest-farm]]
• Operates: [[new-forest-farm]]