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Farm Businesses
Grow your ecological farm's viability, profitability, business strategy, and climate resilience.
Farm businesses are more than just balance sheets - they are complex living systems. Moving towards truly regenerative agriculture requires engagement with what is unique about your land, markets, and people. AppleSeed brings decades of experience analyzing complex agricultural landscapes and businesses as we work to support the development of profitable regenerative farms.  
Whole Farm Planning

AppleSeed supports farms of all scales and forms of production seeking to transition to industry-leading carbon farming and regenerative agriculture systems.

Our services support clients engaging in new agricultural enterprises, diversifying an existing farm business, retrofitting a farm property for climate change, or undertaking master site planning for mixed-use properties. Each project is customized to meet the unique needs of your land and business.  We offer:

  • Focused farm business strategy development
  • Detailed land quality and enterprise suitability analysis
  • Whole farm landscape design and land resource planning
  • Specialty enterprise budgets and financials
  • Whole farm business and financial planning

See below for more on our Agroforestry Production and Keyline Water Planning services.
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    Q Farms

    AppleSeed worked with Q Farms to understand their goals and design a plan that would serve their desire for a sustainable homestead (a home, vegetable production, firewood coppicing) and diversified income from the farm (fiber, dairy, and meat animals; fruit, nut, and berry production; dry bean production).

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    Q Farms

    AppleSeed uses the current landscape and topography to inform the plan, understand the drainage and potential for natural irrigation, and visualize what farm products will do well on a given landscape.

  • Diversified Fruit & Small Livestock

    Whole Farm Design

    This farm property in the lower Hudson Valley was impacted in soil health and productivity from decades of overgrazing. AppleSeed’s whole farm design process developed a restoration and intensification pathway for 14 acres under cultivation, plus woodland silvopasture, maple sugaring stands, and stormwater management.

Agroforestry Production

We can increase the amount of carbon sequestration that a landscape is able to carry out simply by adding trees. Silvopasture unites animal grazing with a forested landscape. This form of management brings significant benefits—to farmers and to broader systems: 

  • Increased farm biodiversity
  • Improved farm finances (land considered marginal in production, high quality on-site fodder, higher overall yields per acre)
  • Improved livestock health 
  • Resiliency from extreme weather 
  • Increased carbon sequestration and reduced carbon emissions
  • Increased capacity for regional regenerative food production.  

AppleSeed is committed to helping farmers increase the ecological integrity of their land and the viability of their business. We have extensive experience in  agroforestry, focused on:

  • Silvopasture and tree fodders
  • Chestnut production
  • Holistic orchards
  • Multi-enterprise forest management 
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    Wright-Locke Farm

    Wright-Locke Farm had a goal of encouraging productive agroforestry and actively involving the community in its use while preserving open space. Our design includes fodder windbreaks and strips of goat fodder, coppiced hillside plantings, a silvopasture orchard, and multistrata forest gardens.

  • Silvopasture

    Silvopasture depends on an intensely managed herd of animals rotating through pastures.

 Wright-Locke Farm was featured in Edible Boston's Winter 2020 issue. 

...Today Wright-Locke grows organic fruits, vegetables and flowers; offers farm-based educational programs; hosts public and private events; and practices environmentally sound growing methods. One of those methods is agroforestry. Agroforestry is a system of land management in which trees and shrubs are grown amid pastureland, which increases biodiversity and reduces erosion. “At Wright-Locke,” said McIntyre, “it includes adding bioswales to reduce nutrient runoff, adding fodder strips to provide food for our goats while providing a wind block to prevent soil erosion, creating a silvopasture area for our goats to graze in the woods, and planting a fruit orchard.” 

Check out the full article
Keyline Water Design

Keyline design is a water and soil management strategy best suited to gently sloping sites with silt or clay soils suffering from compaction. This strategy often involves: 

  • Small ponds places at inflection points in a site’s topography
  • Irrigation ditches moving pond-collected water to larger areas of land
  • Keyline plowing—off contour subsoiling
  • Integration of soil-building forages, tree crops, and rotational grazing patterns

Keyline water design provides resiliency in the face of increasingly unpredictable precipitation events, both heavy downpours and drought. We work with the contours of the land to provide appropriate water storage, irrigation, and drainage, using a natural systems approach. 
Keyline plowing in action.
Get Started

Our work with farm businesses begins with an on site consultation. Please contact us to schedule a site visit today! 

design@appleseed.design   -    845-377-5444  -  PO Box 3 High Falls, NY 12440