Route 30 has been carrying vehicles throughout Pennsylvania for nearly a century. It is the fastest way to travel east-west in the southern part of the state, a divided four-lane highway that never stops making noise. For the Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education in York, the endless hum of speeding cars and trucks – not to mention the pollution they emit – had long disrupted an otherwise peaceful site for regenerative farming and community programming.
The organization’s staff wished there was a forest to act as a buffer. So he planted a tree.
Trees move at their own pace, often taking decades to reach maturity once planted, but Horn Farms didn’t want to wait that long to address its concerns. Instead, it opted to experiment with the Miyawaki method, an approach to reforestation developed by a Japanese botanist. It houses a dense, diverse assortment of native species in close proximity to each other in an effort to rapidly regenerate degraded lands. Andrew Leahy, the farm’s education and outreach specialist, describes it as “a marriage of competition and cooperation”, a riot of fighting over where trees grow and sharing resources.
Miyawaki forests – alternatively described as micro, small or pocket forests because of their small stature – have been spreading internationally for years. Horticulturist Katherine Packradouni, who has planted many trees in Los Angeles through her landscaping and restoration business, Seed to Landscape, says the movement has “changed the way people think about reforestation.” The method is still taking hold in the US, where proponents praise it for rapidly establishing young forests with myriad environmental benefits and the ability to reconnect people with nature.
In 2019, Horn Farms planted the first Miyawaki-style forest in the eastern US – more than 500 native trees in a 12-foot-wide strip along Route 30. About 100 feet long, it has five dominant species and 23 accessory species. Six years later, a rich grove of oak, hickory and sycamore stands nearly 30 feet tall, surrounded by redbuds, dogwoods and shrubs including elderberry and viburnum. Bluejays and robins nest in the branches, pollinators gather among their host plants, and predators such as wasps eat agricultural pests. On a bright morning in early October, the forest was so dense that the sights and sounds of the highway almost disappeared just a few steps away. Leahy says it is “extremely fascinating” to anyone who spends time near it, but more importantly, it is a haven for biodiversity and a boon for healing soil, air and water.
Although miyawaki forests are often found in urban environments, where land is precious and trees hard to come by, Leahy says they can be a welcome complement to agriculture, especially on farms with a regenerative bent.
“As opposed to creating systems where we’re farming in a vacuum and then relying on pesticides and chemicals to make it possible for things to grow, why not foster the habitat needed for the same predators that naturally keep those things in balance?” He says.
Horn Farms has begun implementing this method on other parts of its land, including a flood-prone plot that borders Route 30. With root systems, it prevented flooding, instead acting as a sponge that absorbed water during storms. The forest helps prevent runoff and soil erosion, while supporting the farm’s effort to rehabilitate a nearby stream that feeds the Susquehanna River. To make way for its young forests, Horn Farms first loosened and aerated the soil that had been used for traditional agriculture for decades, then planted its saplings and gave them heavy mulching, which also included leaf litter collected by surrounding townships.
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