It’s time for our annual roundup of conservation activities on the farm! Read below for what’s on our mind and in action at Bellair in 2023 conservation-wise.

New water line being installed in late November 2022. The project is now complete and allows us to better utilize our pastures using rotational grazing. This field is one of the fields we have identified for silvopasture. You can see there’s nary a shade tree in sight!

Silvopasture

Silvopasture means "trees in pasture" and it's a new project for Bellair! We received a small grant from Virginia Tech/Edwards Mother Earth Foundation and we will be doing a little bit of "DIY" silvopasture as well. There are a lot of benefits from a silvopasture both from an agricultural and a conservation lens. Our main goals with our silvopasture projects are:

Provide increased shade access for livestock (cattle mostly)
Improve forage quality with nitrogen fixing legumes (locust trees)
Improve wildlife-value of our pastures (perches, food, and cover for wildlife)
Reduce soil loss (erosion)
[Lower priority] Grow our own fence posts (timber harvest of locust posts)

We will use a mix of species with a heavy focus on locust because of its quick growth, nitrogen fixation properties and the presence of thorns to help keep the cattle off them. We will use other trees to increase diversity and wildlife value. Black locust 75%, Hawthorne species, Persimmon, Blackgum and “other” 25%

Managing animals around young baby trees can be a little more involved. The cattle will eat the foliage, and that's great for their nutrition, but they can kill small trees through consumption, soil compaction, and breakage due to leaning on the saplings. That means we will have to use temporary fencing to keep them off the trees until they are big enough to fend for themselves. This might be as long as 5 years!

Lucky for us, Bellair has a LOT of grasslands, so we can emphasize grazing on other parts of the farm while we wait. This will be a very long-term investment in our pastures and our cattle program!

Additional NRCS Funding for Fence and Water Systems

This winter, we installed another 17,000 feet of fencing and 4000 feet of water lines to service the pastures of the west side of the farm, where 20 Paces' had been leasing. This new fence allows us to greatly expand the useable area of cattle pasture on the farm. This will lower impact on our existing pastures and allow us to experiment with silvopasture and rest some "tired" fields. These fields are all "uplands," which makes it so much easier to scale our cattle herd without putting excess pressure on our easily-torn-up lowlands. We look forward to managing over 300 acres of grasslands for cattle and wildlife!

Baby trees planted by JRA in the center of Bellair. We will be adding another 2 acres of buffer area this spring.

Expansion of James River Association Buffer Planting at Bellair

We are adding another couple acres onto our 4-acre buffer areas! This year, JRA will plant up areas on the west side of the farm. Areas on the east side are doing well! Many of the trees are well out of their tubes -- some are more than 12 feet tall! We look forward to watching this young forest continue to grow.

Ailanthus Removal

Our owner, Cynthia, shares our conservation goals and has made it a priority to begin controlling invasive species on the farm, specifically Ailanthus trees, the preferred host of the invasive and destructive spotted lanternfly. She has agreed to finance the removal of this species from several areas around the farm this summer. Once this "campaign" is done, we may consider other conservation projects!

Nat and other learners pose during a hands-on Learn-and-Burn workshop we both attended

Controlled Burn Learning

Nat and I got our Virginia Controlled Burn Manager Certifications last fall! We are continuing our education through talking with other fire professionals and experienced landowners, continued publications from the Forestry service and VA Prescribed Fire Council and consultations with our local Forester.

Through thinking about fire, I have been thinking a lot about humans and our relationship to the land. Modern preservationist viewpoints tend to put one against the other: humans vs nature. Their response to environmental problems is to remove humans from the equation and "let nature take care of herself." This stance seems fine enough, however, this viewpoint dismisses the indigenous reality: people lived on and manipulated this land for thousands and thousands of years. The indigenous viewpoint rejects the separation of humans and nature and says instead, the land NEEDS humans as humans NEED the land. The relationship is reciprocal and therefore 'doing nothing" is not a desirable outcome. People who have experience with fire have pointed out to me that you can see this concept in practice. After a burn, there is a brief time where there's some level of setback or destruction -- a visibly blackend earth, but following that is an explosion of life that otherwise would not have occurred on that location. This concept of disruption as a part of the natural cycle of growth is something we see in other parts of what we're doing on the farm: grazing, tillage, and more.

We know that fire is a necessary component of some ecosystems that are on the brink of extinction in our preservationist/fire excluding culture of today. In this area, fire would have been used extensively. This area (central Virginia) had a pre-colonial fire return interval of less than 4 years. That means any given area experienced a wildfire event on average every 4 years!

Fire can be a scary concept, but often that fear is rooted in ignorance. Fire is a powerful tool, and if used safely, can help us with many of our conservation goals on the farm:

Is a natural and historically relevant land-management tool dating back thousands of years

Reduces mowing/fossil fuel use

Controls woody species in areas we want to keep open as a meadow

Provides nutrients back to the soil

Removes fescue thatch that prevents to growth of native broad-leaved wildflowers and native grasses

We have identified some areas on the farm that we believe would benefit from the introduction of fire and achieve the above goals. We will be proceeding with much caution. We have neither the skills nor the resources to move forward on burns on our own just yet. We continue to gather knowledge and expand our learning network in hopes of one day re-introducing fire to this landscape.

Interested in Fire? Check out some of these amazing resources!

https://dof.virginia.gov/wildland-prescribed-fire/prescribed-burning/

https://southernfireexchange.org

https://www.vafirecouncil.com/