Increasing our prospects for survival and thrival depends upon expanding our sustenance possibilities - the options that each food-fuel species and variety represents.  Every food and fuel plant, animal, and fungus species (and variety) represent options for enhancing the fitness between humans and their environment.  The development of this cornucopia allows us to expand the length of our growing season, the range and density of our nutrition and the variety of our fuel sources.  Taken as a whole this expanding diversity allows us to increase the resilience of the human ecosystem and its ability to cope with change.  The work of plant and animal breeders throughout time has dwindled in the face of industrial, simplifying agriculture.  For instance, we now have less than 1% of the wheat varieties that past cultures in North America once cultivated and used.  There have been over 7,000 named varieties of apple; today we typically choose from less than 10.  

Our land development work involves the planting of crops typically cultivated in neighboring climate zones (such as sweet cherries grown in MA and planted in VT) as well as high diversity plantings to allow for hybridization and the emergence of new varieties that are more fit to the environment of the site they are growing in.  Both of these strategies are designing for climate change as well as for the fragility and changing nature of existing economic, social and ecological systems.

We are actively involved in grant writing for, and testing of more than 20 underutilized cold hardy crops that could represent new options for inhabiting zone 3-6 climates.  Thus far the results have been positive and we are beginning to eat fruits such as seaberry and mushrooms such as stropharia in abundance.  These are not the kinds of foods the grocery story or even niche-market retail outlets will be selling anytime soon, but they are two examples of innumerable possibilities.  Let us remember that the foods we eat today are an inheritance given to us by the ecosystem directors and plant/animal breeders of the past.  The people who developed the culinary cornucopia of the past were for the most part curious and ingenious non-professional horticulturists and home-scale gardeners and farmers not corporate botanists and chemists. We can carry on this work of increasing the options for and fitness between our species and the larger life community.

Project galleries include:

Intensive Perpetual Fuelwood Production