STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
We regenerate landscapes, ecosystem processes and soils through profitable farm enterprises that are beneficial to all. We also serve our community as a place for interaction and connection, health, creativity, beauty and abundance. ABOUT OUR FARM
Nestled in a high valley in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York, Silver Tree Forest Farm is home to 8-acres of perennial forest gardens, a useful plant nursery, market gardens, a mushroom yard, chicken and duck silvopastures, and multiple ponds surrounded by silver-maple wetlands. Using the tools of permaculture design, regenerative agriculture and holistic management, we cultivate human-scale, organic, ecological production systems. Our products include flowers, mushrooms, herbs, fruit trees, berry bushes, vegetables and herbal tinctures for sale on farm, online or though our CSA program. We observe and encourage beneficial relationships between plants, animals, humans and the soil, designing polycultures of resilient species that maximize function, beauty and abundance. Serving our community as a demonstration of a highly diversified micro farm, we seek to build healthy soils, store carbon and increase biodiversity, all while providing food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizers, “farmaceuticals” and fun.* We strive to cultivate conditions conducive to life and let nature (humans included) thrive!
* Thanks to our teacher, Dave Jacke, for this wonderful description of the products of a forest garden. VISION
We envision the broad-acre restoration of monoculture farmlands into bio-diverse, abundant and highly useful perennial ecosystems managed by and benefiting all members of our community. Mimicking the oak savannahs and old-growth forests stewarded by indigenous people on this land before European colonization, we see our work as a path towards the dynamic regeneration of our soils, waters, farmlands and communities. We acknowledge and respect the Onondaga Nation, firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands our farm now stands. We believe that humans are one of many highly influential participants in the cooperative, interdependent network of plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms that make up our living world. As stewards of this land, we feel we have not only a right, but a responsibility to actively participate in the creative design, implementation and management of productive biological systems that meet our needs and produce a surplus of useful, edible crops and ecosystems services that benefit all. We look to practice and share our experiences with our community, inspiring others to re-envision a more equitable and just approach to land ownership/use and to co-create a human culture deeply rooted in our relationship with (and as part of) nature.
“In many ways, the function of farming is to set the stage for the sun and plants and animals to do the real creating of value.”
– Ben Hartman “The Lean Farm”
