CrannMor Advisors, an innovative regenerative farming company based in upstate New York, has revealed its plans to promote a more sustainable and resilient model of farming through the use of regenerative agriculture and agroforestry techniques. Its goal is to implement nature-based solutions that provide nourishing food, enhance the environment, and empower the next-generation farmer, all while being commercially viable.
According to the company’s CEO Kevin Maher, the company’s regenerative methodology incorporates a variety of agroforestry practices that have been recognized by experts all over the world for their potential benefits. Using techniques such as alley cropping, windbreaks, and silvopasture, CrannMor will develop a farming system around chestnuts, hazelnuts, and livestock. This farming system will restore the ecological complexity of the land, capture more sunlight, sequester more carbon, and encourage an increase in biodiversity of all forms.
Put simply, agroforestry is the intentional integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems to create environmental, economic, and social benefits. The total yield per area is actually higher than in monocultural systems where only one type of crop is planted. By consciously designing an agricultural system to work with the life that makes natural systems so prolific, the inputs needed can be lower while increasing productivity and nutrient density.
Maher contends that issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and loss of nutrients in our food, all have their roots in how we manage our land. In agriculture, we’ve made a practice of intervening in the complex ecosystems that we depend upon, even though we are still just beginning to understand them. This provided many short-term benefits, but the long-term costs were hidden and serious. “We locked ourselves into a negative feedback loop by relying on tillage, chemicals, and pesticides that destroy the life that makes healthy ecosystems flourish. This leads to the need for more inputs, which degrades the system further, and down and down it goes. At a larger scale, the simplification and destruction of ecosystems has deprived us of the evolved capacity of living systems to cool the earth by interacting with the phase changes of water via transpiration.”
CrannMor Advisors believes that the degraded condition of our agricultural land is paradoxically where there is the most hope, agency, and opportunity. All of us can play a part in this restoration process.
CrannMor Advisors nature-based solutions approach seeks to sequester more carbon from the atmosphere by rebuilding the soil carbon sponge, enhancing biodiversity, and improving water quality and resilience. According to CrannMor, this focus on restoring ecosystem health will help produce more nutrient-dense food that is beneficial to human health, as well as accelerate ecological economic development.
CrannMor Forest Farm, located in Cobleskill, New York, was acquired by the company in 2021. It is currently being developed by CrannMor Advisors, based on a chestnut and hazelnut perennial crop system. The company has now begun its second project, Long Future Farm, also located in Cobleskill, NY.
“Tapping into these natural cycles is an underappreciated and very powerful lever that many brilliant people have been working on for a long time,” Maher says. “But it hasn’t really reached the wider public’s awareness. We're working to make that happen and provide ways for people who desire to see these positive changes, to participate. We've seen the flaws with conventional high-input agriculture, with tillage, chemicals, and pesticides degrading the soil and landscape. Excessive intervention in natural cycles can result in an immediate positive impact but a long-term negative effect. By re-engaging with natural cycles, we are doing things that have been proven by evolution across millennia, such as adding more biodiversity and holding more water. We believe there is a tremendous opportunity here, there is no downside to emulating nature.”
Media contact:
Name: Kevin Maher
Email: [email protected]
