New Forest Farm

Practical

New Forest Farm sits in Vernon County, [[viroqua|Wisconsin]], in the [[driftless-area|Driftless]] coulee country — the same region where Aldo Leopold’s 1933 Coon Valley Project pioneered American soil-conservation practice. The 106-acre property was conventional corn-and-soy ground when Mark Shepard bought it in 1994. He started planting trees in 1995 and has not stopped.

The system [[mark-shepard|Shepard]] built models the original native oak savanna that covered much of southern [[viroqua|Wisconsin]] before European settlement. The structural layers, from canopy to ground:

• Canopy — [[chestnut|chestnut]] (replacing the original oak; higher staple-crop value), interplanted apple
• Sub-canopy — additional apple, plum, [[mulberry|mulberry]]
• Shrub layer — [[hazelnut|hazelnut]] (the keynote understory crop; [[mark-shepard|Shepard]] is one of the most active hazelnut breeders in North America), raspberry, currant, gooseberry, blackberry, honeyberry, sea buckthorn
• Herbaceous layer — [[asparagus|asparagus]], perennial vegetables, forage species
• Ground layer — managed grass and forb pasture for animal grazing
• Vines — grapes climbing the trellis edges

The animal system runs through this matrix: cattle on the perennial pasture, hogs cleaning windfall apples and root-grubbing the understory, poultry following behind on bug control and fertility distribution. Water management uses keyline plowing and a network of ponds and swales to retain rainfall on the landscape rather than letting it run off.

The economic claim [[mark-shepard|Shepard]] makes — and that thirty years of farm operation now substantiate — is that this system produces more calories per acre, more nutrient density per acre, and more economic value per acre than the corn-and-soy rotation it replaced, while building soil, holding water, sequestering carbon, and increasing productivity year over year rather than declining.

Cultural

New Forest Farm is consequential in three ways beyond its own production:

1. Proof of concept at commercial scale. The “permaculture can’t feed the world” critique has historically pointed to small intensive gardens that don’t scale. [[mark-shepard|Shepard]]‘s 106 acres, run for thirty years, on degraded American ground, with commercial yields — moves the argument past that critique.
2. Breeding work in [[chestnut|chestnut]] and [[hazelnut|hazelnut]]. Shepard’s selection programs (STUN method — plant heavily, give no special care, keep only the survivors, breed from them) are now significant North American gene pools for both species. The breeding work is the slow center of the operation and the part most aligned with J. Russell Smith’s 1929 call for systematic tree-crop breeding.
3. Teaching surface. New Forest Farm hosts tours, workshops, and apprenticeships. The number of younger farmers who have learned restoration-agriculture practice on this land is now in the hundreds.

Why this farm matters to 0mn1.one

New Forest Farm should be treated as a substrate-builder reference operation for the [[driftless-area|Driftless]] bioregion specifically and for temperate perennial-agriculture work generally. When 0mn1.one builds the [[driftless-area|Driftless]] directory layer up, this farm is the anchor. When 0mn1.one builds out the autonomous-farm work, this farm’s design is one of the canonical templates. When the wiki ingests chestnut and hazelnut as species pages, this farm’s breeding data is the contemporary primary source.

See also

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

• Shares substrate with: [[driftless-area]]
• Shares approach with: [[tree-crops-permanent-agriculture]]
• Operated by: [[mark-shepard]]
• Member of: [[farm]]
• Practice of: [[restoration-agriculture]]
• Kin of: [[agroforestry]]