AGROforestry products

[gates]

This guy deserves a big bar of soft chocolate for what he's done & doing
for forests & fungi.  May he get very sticky for the promotion he's
done.  I only hope some people who matter take notice & actively plan a
fungi crop in their forests.  I reckon you can triple the income from
timber with the right marketing.  Everything from paintball games, bird
watchers and hunters to fungi, arial plant sales & medication extraction
is possible in a forest that just isn't possible in the same way on a
prairie, in a field or on a desert.  (Though they can be marketed for
fossils, sunsets & mineral gleaning.)  Further, forests can hide all
sorts of relics untouched by man from the pyramids of the Maya to places
like burial sites.  Much of our history is cuddled by tree roots and
archaeologists would do well to follow clearcutters leading local metal
detector fans, dowsers and others.  It's even possible to rent forest
access for naturism, Pagan worship & camps.  You only need a fire base
or three in a clearing & NO fires elsewhere rules.  The folk mentioned
are very low impact and can even be persuaded to dig & fill their own
earth closets & fire sites but somewhere close to dump litter or sluice
portaloo contents is handy.  Of course there are "patches".  One figure
I heard from the US was 1 million acres of hash in 3 million of not too
thick forest.  Yellowstone Park was it?  Anyway, it goes to show you can
even grow crops amongst the trees.  While your truffles are forming you
can certainly get spring onions, lettuces & cabbage depending on season
& rainfall.  

The people on here often eat & breath trees for timber but are overly
blinkered to new ways.  It would be nice to get some big machinery giant
or whatever to pay to have crops grown amongst trees or otherwise market
areas then turn the land back, after taking their profits of say three
years, for the owners to put money into what will then be established as
a fairly sure thing.  Fire aside, trees are a good protection for crops
and areas subject to floods, winds and the like may well support
otherwise untenable crops amongst trees.  Then of course there's meat.
Not only can a private forest be used for heavy deer breeding
programmes, (you kill them all off before felling/replanting) there's
plenty of market for ostrich, emu, even capybara and agouti.  It could
even be the case that using not much more than firebreaks as activity
areas you could get more meat from 20 or 200 acres of average woods than
a similar size of grassland with beef cattle.  I can even see electric
tracking collars being used to allow easy culling.  Mr. Wheeler is as
much a pioneer of all these ideas as wagon train settlers were of the
opening up of Western USA.  Well I think he's OK anyway.   



In article <6lcm2c$jvq$1 at nnrp1.dejanews.com>, dwheeler at teleport.com
writes
> So how about contributing what other products are
>found in your areas of the world?
>
>Here in the Pacific Northwest, I have found that fungi form a big part of
>this additional cropping. The scientific, common and uses of some of these
>fungi are:
>
>Tuber giganteum                        Oregon Gray truffle      food
>Tuber gibbosum                 Oregon White truffle    food
>Tuber murinum                  Oregon Pallid truffle   food
>Tuber sp. nov.                                                   food
>Trichoderma ponderosa  Matsutake                               food
>Cantharellus formosa   Western chanterelle             food
>Cantharellus subalbidus        White chanterelle               food
>Rhizopogon vinicolor   Wine-staining Rhizopogon mycorrhizae of Douglas fir
>Martellia brunescens   Browning Martellia              food, mycorrhizae of D. 
>fir
>Endogone lactiflua             Milky Endogone                  mycorrhizae of 
>D. fir
>Lentinula edodes               Shiitake                         food, medicinal
>Morchella angusticeps  Black morel                             food, biomass 
>degradation
>Morchella elata                        Morel                     food, biomass 
>degradation
>Pleurotus ostreatus            Oyster mushroom                 food, biomass 
>degradation
>Pleurotus columbianus  Gray Oyster mushroom    food, biomass degradation
>Flammulina velutipes   Enokitake                               food, medicinal
>Calvatia gigantea              Giant puffball                  food, medicinal
>Boletus edulis                 King bolete                      food, medicinal
>Boletus pinicola               Pine bolete                      food
>Laetiporus sulphureus  Sulphur shelf                   food
>Grifola frondosus              Hen of the Woods                food, medicinal
>
>These are but a few of the estimated 12,000 fungi found in the Pacific
>Northwest alone. Add some of your own, or other non-traditional forest
>product (NTFP).
>
>Daniel B. Wheeler
>http://www.oregonwhitetruffles.com

KIND REGARDS FROM:

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  LES BALLARD, TREE WIZARD, C/O BM: GATES OF ANNWN, LONDON WC1N 3XX, U.K.
                            44+(0)1708 863080