Graduate Exit Seminar - Meghan Edwards

Plan to join Meghan Edwards's graduate exit seminar on July 3, 2025, at 1 pm in Williams Hall, Room 123 in Wooster, or via Zoom. Meghan will present, "Backgrounds, Motivations, and Experiences of Agroforestry Practitioners in the Eastern United States"

Abstract: The intentional integration of trees and shrubs into the production of other crops or livestock, known as agroforestry (AF), has the potential to address a number of pressing problems in the U.S. food system by diversifying farm income streams and providing many of the benefits of traditional conservation without taking as much land out of agricultural production. Understanding the drivers and constraints to AF adoption is an important task for proponents of resilient agroecosystems. However, little research has drawn directly from the experiences of current AF practitioners. For this thesis, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 29 farmers who were practicing silvopasture and/or forest farming in the eastern United States. The interviews gathered information about participants’ prior experience in agriculture, motivations for adopting AF, the sources of information and support that helped them adopt AF, and the challenges and outcomes they encountered. Interview transcripts were anonymized and thematically coded using the QDA software NVivo-14. This sample of practitioners was disproportionately beginning and first-generation farmers, motivated mostly by the expected agronomic benefits and economic payoffs of agroforestry practices. They sought information and support from both established expertise and informal social networks. Common challenges included the slow return on investment for AF, the complexity of AF system management, and environmental stressors. The analysis also examined differences in the experiences of silvopasture (SP) and forest farming (FF) practitioners, and between practitioners with and without a recent family history of agriculture.

Advisor: Dr. Doug Jackson-Smith