Eleven Acre Farm: Agroforestry Business and Designing for Lifestyle, Rest, and Resilience

By Sydney Blume

Each month, Farm to Plate will be featuring stories of Vermont farmers using agroforestry related practices. These stories and related mapping project were created by recent UVM Food System's graduate Sydney Blume in collaboration with Farm to Plate's Agroforestry Priority Strategy Team. To see other featured stories, visit the Vermont Agroforestry Storytelling Map.

Chris Chaisson’s agroforestry interest started early in his life, wandering forests where he grew up and learning to forage. This era of his life started a deep-rooted value of forests and biodiversity that has led to a life working with agroforestry – the intentional integration of trees and perennial crops in agriculture. While Chris continues to engage in diversified sources of income, working off-farm jobs, he has been steadily expanding his own agroforestry projects at Eleven Acre Farm in Charlotte, Vermont. 

Chris entered into agroforestry work in earnest 30 years ago as a young person freshly out of high school. “I started studying medicinal herbs, and that was sort of my gateway in, through foraging and getting out [in the forests]. Then I was exposed to a permaculture farm on Martha's Vineyard that summer in 1993.” Interning on this farm, he learned about both permaculture and agroforestry, while also working on vegetable farms and in some nurseries. 

In 1998, Chris moved to Vermont, and within two years, he had started his own nursery. He also studied landscape design and horticulture at Vermont Tech for two years, and received his Permaculture Design Certification (PDC). In addition to the nursery, Chris also was a part of starting a consulting company called  Whole Farm Services  where they built root cellars, and other kinds of infrastructure and eco-structure work in addition to agroforestry installations and farm planning. Since that time about 25 years ago, Chris says, “I've always had a nursery and/or done other things and agroforestry stuff, whether it was design and consulting or building or installing or business planning. Not just agroforestry, but agroforestry was always sort of where I came back to, and all the plants that I had in my nursery were all native edible and medicinal plants.” 

Agroforestry and nursery work created a nice symbiosis; the nursery plants “tended to be either perennials or woody plants,” which typically don’t need constant attention. Chris says, “I think that's really what the basis of my draw towards agroforestry always was. You're sort of building this natural capital that’s very easy to see the appreciation of, both in terms of the root growth, the top growth, the relationship with the plants, and the ability to come back year after year and continue to see that growth.”

However, the nature of agroforestry plants and nurseries is long-term, which brought many challenges for Chris in the years leading up to owning land. Chris’s nursery migrated to about five different locations, sometimes Chris was living on the leased land, sometimes just leasing land for the nursery, and sometimes needing to sell off most of his plants so he could move and restart. Growing on leased land was an insecure foundation for a nursery operation – it was inherently limited in the size and expanse, and when leases fell apart, Chris was left in a bind. Chris says, “one of the hard parts with agroforestry is it's not really amenable to leasing because most of the crops are a 10-year return on investment.” 

As of last year, Chris owns the land that he has been on for the past ten years. “It took me 10 years to afford to buy land in Charlotte, but I finally did it.” In some ways, this delay in owning the land that Chris farms has allowed him to take time to pay attention to the nature of the land and how to make a farm plan that’s amenable to it. Chris says, “it's held me back, but at the same time, it's also made me a lot more keenly aware of these different things, and influenced what I'm enacting now.” On his first visit, this 11-acre plot, aptly named Eleven Acre Farm, had wild currants and gooseberries in the woods, woodland ephemeral medicinals and mushrooms, a pine forest, and massive oak trees (that were unfortunately logged in 2018). Chris says, “I was kind of infatuated with the forest and its older feel, and the trees were pretty phenomenal.”

Part of Chris’s agroforestry work on Eleven Acre Farm, then, has been a process in enhancing the pre-existing fruits of the land. Most of the mushrooms Chris has sold have been foraged. Chris says, “I have had $1,000 harvests just out my back door – boletes that were blowing up.” Though the forage harvest is variable, Chris likes that it’s an “added way to be in touch with chefs” and increase consumption and awareness of foraged foods. Like the foraged mushrooms, Chris has also sought to benefit from and enhance the local population of medicinal plants. Because of the plentiful bloodroot on property, he’s divided some of the plants for the nursery, a population that has also been diversified and enhanced by bloodroot plants that have been rescued from construction sites. In addition to the pre-existing currants and gooseberries, Chris has also planted about 15 different varieties of berries and nuts including hazelnuts, elderberry, and chokeberry (Aronia). He says “I’ve been slowly building this place out, farming the woods for the mushrooms and the different medicinals that are out there, and now and then also tapping for maple. Now we're slowly looking at other ways that we can incorporate other agroforestry practices. It's not really suitable here for [annuals], I can't really just strip-till and put in a big vegetable garden.” 

Having stable land tenure has also allowed Chris to further develop his nursery. In comparison to the past 20+ years of keeping a nursery, Chris says that at Eleven Acre Farm, his nursery has become “more refined. I've really focused on basically weeding out and refining and trying to do less and have more focus, and that's still hard. I think agroforestry people are multitaskers and have a lot of different things going on. I still do, but in that realm, I've mainly focused on seaberry, elderberry, currants, black chokeberry (Aronia), and then different perennial medicinals.” In fact, his nursery is one of the only places that is cultivating Coomer and Berry Hill elderberry strains. 

The medicinal plants in Chris’s nursery are less for creating products and selling plants, and more for “qualitative research on hardiness” and product development. “The nursery has always been this way of getting genetic material, and then finding the best of it and then keeping what I wanted, which to varying degrees, I've had success with.” While in the past, he has sold berries or herbs to herbalists, he isn’t actively marketing while he slowly sets up his operation. All considered though, Chris says, “I've been able to hone in on some different products that I may be releasing in the next couple of years.” 

One of those many things Chris is dabbling in is experimenting with growing passion flower in his greenhouse. He says, “no one's really ever done that before, and it's working without heat.” This is part of an interest to expand the perennial plant offerings in Vermont’s cold winters by  “moving marginally hardy plants into greenhouses and high tunnels and cold frames and seeing how they can endure more hardily, and be truly perennial.” For now, Chris says that the experiment is to explore the concept because he hasn’t scoped out the business plan around it. 

With about 30 years of experience in his field, the slow pace of planning and development of Eleven Acre Farm might come as a surprise to some, but to Chris, a deliberate, well-researched plan is important to a successful perennial system. In fact, Chris has been studying the land he is now on for over 10 years. He says, “I taught farm design at  Yestermorrow  from 2010 to 2016, and we would bring the class here, so we did a lot of studies on the land, and I did a lot of background research. And even still, I haven't really honed in on a final master plan.” Chris has also drawn extensively from all the experiences of consulting and working on other farms. “Within the realm of agroforestry, it was good to get to work with so many people to help them get started because I got a lot of really unique perspectives that I got paid for.” 

From all the past consulting work, Chris has become a big proponent for incorporating business perspectives into design and planning. His advice for starting agroforestry farmers is to design the farm to consider income needs, markets for products, infrastructure needs, and lifestyle preferences. In all of this, he says it’s important to do some forward and backward planning. For example, “if you want to grow elderberries, we'll figure out all the great products to make. Then, think about it in terms of how much money you want to make, and then how many elderberries you need to grow to make that” or what proportion of your income you want to derive from it. In that, he adds infrastructure considerations for adding value to agroforestry products (making syrups, extractions, jams, etc.). “Then,” he says, “it's really finding a couple of cash leaders that work well for what you want to do, and that you have some familiarity with, and or are proven, or you know there are definite markets.” 

Chris recommends choosing “cash leaders” to help avoid overwhelm while still distributing risks and helping to ensure income. This goes back to focusing on realistic returns. In contrast, Chris says, the permaculture or agroforestry “dream farm” often includes an extensive diversity that is hard to feasibly manage, let alone market products from. “That's a lot of different sales people to be talking to, and it's harder to get farmers to really dive into sales, just because they're usually tired at the end of the day, and they usually are wanting to farm more.” Instead, Chris recommends to “start with a real farm” and then gradually turn it into a dream farm. 

Part of this design advice also taps into another big risk: burnout. While Chris says he discourages people against a super diverse, ideal agroforestry set-up to begin with, it’s not because he doesn’t share the values of biodiversity and integral design. Rather, he says, “unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of burnout and turnover in the ag field” due to this overwork. Instead, he advises to design in a way that allows for rest. “Make sure you're designing in time off, and make sure you're designing in the lifestyle that you want to have. I think [agroforestry] can support this because you could have your entire agroforestry crops all be set up for a certain season of the year.” 

Beyond his own business planning, Chris’s approach to this has included always taking off-farm income and growing very slowly. “I know that the biggest thing that burns people out is long hours and low returns, and so having other incomes allows me to continually, slowly build things out and manage them, and maybe not even take any income from that for a couple of years. For example, Chris says, “In the past, I used to sell $5-20,000 in elderberry products, and that would be just one little piece of income, but it would help to pay for itself. I could reinvest and buy in some juneberries or get some blueberries or focus on growing those other plants the next year.” 

At the end of the day, Chris says, “navigating all those things is really hard, but if you can put it together in a plan and like actually stick with it, the benefits are pretty huge.” Even though it takes focused time and money to get established, an agroforestry system will continue to produce year after year. Beyond production benefits, Chris shares that another important aspect to him is the “preservation of soil structure and the building of different soil textures through the addition of cumulative carbon inputs, whether it's root slough or leaf litter or animal and biological soil microbes” that are supported by agroforestry. 

This care for biodiversity at the macro and micro-level to support abundance and a stable livelihood speaks to Chris on a level beyond farm planning and business predictions. “I would say the agroforestry for me is a nice metaphor for how I kind of envision ideal life. If we could both treat ourselves more like that – in terms of having more focuses in our lives and allowing ourselves to have more breadth in who we think we are and what we do – I think it would be a positive thing.” Chris extends the metaphor for how we might choose to navigate our lives, “sometimes you have to clear cut some [stuff] out, but hopefully, when we do that, we replant it with what we want and ideally, stuff that will feed us.” 

Whether it is for economic, ecological, lifestyle, or metaphorical reasons, Chris is encouraged about the future of agroforestry. Agroforestry is aligned with or adapted from many traditional agricultural practices around the world, and yet, Chris still notes a sense of beginning in the current state of agroforestry. “I feel like we're still in the foreword of the agroforestry story, and I think that it's just out of the nature of what happened with the Green Revolution. We're sort of just realizing that we can't just tear up the world, and throw a bunch of chemicals in the ground.” In that transition, Chris is a resource for design, business consulting, agroforestry nursery plants, and product development. In parting words, Chris says, “I'd say find your tree, your triad of your nut tree, your fruit tree, and your berry bush and go from there . . . I do think that it's going to continue to just get better and better.”