Brad

Ideally I would love to remediate an area of degraded land, incorporating designs based on oak savannas and other natural communities belonging to southeastern MI and design a small scale system for providing food and nursery stock to local growers and gardeners. 

My hope is that I can have some impact in promoting the use of native stock (trees, shrubs, berries, fungi, etc) as part of our local community's food system, to lend some assistance towards food security while promoting biodiversity on our property, serving as a biodiversity corridor and a teaching space for other folks looking to do something similar. We owned a couple acres in central Virginia back in 2015 where were able to learn and apply some skills that we would love the opportunity to scale up on including beekeeping, mushroom farming, and taking a stab at agroforestry and forest farming (paw paws, ramps, wild mushrooms, berries). 

Organic farming is definitely an interest, we definitely have quite a bit to learn, but we are very motivated to make this dream a reality, we just need the opportunity. Being a disabled vet, my budget on acreage is modest but reasonable, the rise in land and housing prices have made finding a good place pretty challenging (we were actually directed to this site from one of my professors who is also a farmer), and we intend to build a house on whatever property we would be fortunate enough to have. Ideally any housing or infrastructure we would want to build would be through the lens of efficiency and sustainable practices that we would continue to improve on. 

One area of particular interest for me is sourcing food bearing plants and fungi from the native community where applicable. With the boom in gourmet mushroom farming over the past decade, we've all seen in the news the encroachment of highly invasive mushrooms (golden oyster for example) invading forests in southeastern MI as a result of cultivating non-natives, the effects of which are not well understood, but could stand to have some significant negative impacts in our already degraded and stressed forests, soils, and other natural communities native to our area. 

One of my plans would be to utilize skills gained in citizen science, my background in biology/conservation, and mycology over the last 15 years to source, culture, and grow edible native variants of popular mushroom species to promote and educate folks on what things are available to source from quite literally our own backyard. The big thing is we want to create a place that supports the community around us, and provides options and knowledge to folks interested in affordable and approachable solutions to sourcing their food in a way that is truly local as well as show that feeding ourselves can be done in concert with the wild spaces remaining in this area of our state instead of constantly fighting it.