The team at Tree-Range Farms is pioneering an approach to raising chickens and trees in tandem, storing more carbon and water in the soil while providing an entry point for new and BIPOC farmers often left out of the conventional system.
Source: Civil Eats
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the founder of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance and co-founder of Tree-Range Farms. Together the nonprofit and for-profit business have created an “ecosystem” that includes more than 40 farms and a processing plant in the Upper Midwest. (Photo credit: Leia Marasovich, Farmer’s Footprint)
This article was produced in partnership with Edible Communities; a version of this article will appear in future issues of local Edible magazines.
When you approach the poultry paddocks at Salvatierra Farms outside Northfield, Minnesota, you might not notice how many chickens are hiding among the tall grasses and young hazelnut trees at first. And that’s by design.
On a warm afternoon in June, 1,500 7-week-old hens had come out to mill around—lured by feed and water stations—but many were hard to find.
“There’s an eagle that comes around here,” says Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the farmer and visionary behind the operation. “It has flown over a few times, and it just keeps going.” Soon, he adds, the trees and other perennials will be tall enough to provide cover for the birds, but the grass will suffice in the meantime.
Salvatierra, which was a conventional corn and soy operation until Haslett-Marroquin bought it three years ago, is in the midst of a wholesale transformation. He has planted more than 8,000 hazelnut trees there, created a water catchment pond, begun managing the forest that frames it on two sides, and leveled the land where he plans to build a home for his family.
This summer, he also raised the first flocks of chickens there. As it comes into maturity, Salvatierra stands to become a central hub around which a growing network of farmers, scientists, nonprofits, and funders will rotate—all in the name of regenerative poultry farming.
Regenerative is a complex term with many interpretations. Haslett-Marroquin’s approach combines what he learned growing up in Guatemala—where chickens thrive in multi-story jungles—with a deep understanding of the Midwest’s native ecosystems. Unlike the pasture-based model of poultry production which typically uses mobile barns and is sometimes also referred to as “regenerative,” it involves raising the birds in one spot, alongside trees and other perennial crops as a way to build soil that is rich with organic matter and carbon, capture and store water, and make the land on which it takes place more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.
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