Farming among the trees: How perennial crops can help breathe life into depleted soil

Emily Wright picks flowers growing safely in a garden tunnel at Three Creeks Farm and Forest in Ashland. Wright saves the tunnels for high value crops such as these flowers, tomatoes and peppers, which are watered through drip irrigation and micro overhead sprinklers. Cory W. MacNeil/Missourian

By: Jana Rose Schleis, Columbia Missourian
On harvest days at Three Creeks Farm and Forest in the Missouri River valley in Ashland, farm owner Emily Wright and her staff collect three varieties of leafy greens from the field.

“We can’t really grow enough,” she said. “We try to have consistent supply throughout the course of our season — which is basically April to December — but it’s hard to keep up.”

Two staff members cut the lettuce close to the root, fan the leaves across their hands checking for bugs or wilts, and toss them in a bright orange basket. From there the greens are washed, packed and driven to town for delivery at local restaurants and grocery stores.

Wright co-owns and manages the farm with her partner Paul Weber, who moonlights as a touring musician. They have been growing fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers for nine seasons in a diversified market garden style farm in the Missouri River hills. Additionally, two thirds of their 15-acre farm is a forest.

“I think of it as sort of my long-term outdoor ecological experiment,” she said.

Wright and Weber plant perennials such as fiddlehead ferns and wild leeks throughout the forest. They also grow native trees including paw paws along the forest edge, allowing them to cross pollinate with and be protected by the more mature trees.

Wright calls the smorgasbord of vegetables, fruits, shrubs and trees on Three Creeks Farm and Forest “complex and chaotic” and said the crops benefit by growing among each other.

“I feel like I’ve witnessed an explosion of biodiversity in the past couple of years,” Wright said. “I mostly see it in insect populations, but I also feel like I’ve noticed new bird species and lots more amphibians and reptiles and just generally a lot of life in this valley.”

Operating a farm within its natural ecosystem is a tenet of regenerative agriculture — a movement that aims to revive farmland soils and by extension diverse farms and rural communities.

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This article was originally published by Columbia Missourian and is reprinted with permission.