We work with landowners, land managers, businesses, and organizations to plant trees on farms. 10 years ago, we didn’t understand why “agroforestry design” didn’t come with a business plan, so we started doing it ourselves. Though we’ve planted over 200,000 trees with our clients and partners, we’re not *just* a tree planting contractor. We help our clients develop a vision for their land, and then actualize it. We balance long-term landscape function with the realistic next steps of today. We’ve planted over 30 farms to date, and we’d love to make trees happen on your land.
We plant trees on farms.
But we’re often asked *how* we work.
Trees produce benefit for the environment and society: clean water, clean air, biodiversity, flood mitigation, climate stability. Some tree planting is funded publicly, and for the most part those trees are strictly for conservation.
But we plant profitable tree systems that yield those same ecological benefits. And we move faster.
We founded Propagate in 2017 with the mission of scaling and replicating agroforestry into a cornerstone of farming. We’re business people, and we know private enterprise is the most responsive, reliable, and innovative way to change land.
We move fast and plant trees.
Come work with us.
I’m a huge fan of this tree. We harvest fence posts, mill it for lumber, and plant thousands of black locust saplings every year. It’s great for bees, provides shade for livestock, and it’s a profitable farm asset.
Black locust is native to the Allegheny Plateau and surrounding bioregions. It sends up shoots from the roots, but it doesn’t grow in the shade, so it won’t displace existing forest. It has 1/2” thorns on its juvenile wood, but the tree loses its thorns on trunks and branches over 5” in diameter.
If you’ve seen large multi-prong thorns on a locust tree, that is honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos), which is a totally different tree species.
As with most things: you get out of it what you put into it, and black locust requires more active management than pine trees do.
If you’d like to plant trees on *open* land that you own or manage, comment “Locust,” and I’ll send you more information.
American chestnuts have incredible branding: nostalgia, ecology, and patriotism. But they’re not as actionable as blight-resistant Castanea mollissima and mollissima-dentata hybrid chestnuts.
We’ve planted over 150,000 chestnuts on farmland in the eastern United States. Follow along if you’d like to learn more, and send me a message if you’d like to plant *chestnuts that live* on non-forested land that you own or manage.
I love paying taxes. Doesn’t everyone?
The federal and state governments already fund *some* tree planting (not a meaningful amount), but it can be easier and more efficient to just do it yourself.
Take the write off, create an appreciating timber asset, and increase biodiversity all at the same time.
Comment “Timber” and I’ll send you info on the tree species we plant to make this happen.
Chestnuts are making a comeback, but not in the way you may have heard about. Chinese chestnuts are a viable tree crop for US farmland, and we’ve planted over 150,000 of them. If you’d like to learn more, comment “chestnuts” and I’ll send you more information.
Costa Rica is a tropical country, just north of Panama, and it has one of the highest standards of living in Latin America. Quite a few years ago now, they dissolved their military and placed their focus on services. Not just education and public health, but ecosystem services. Water quality, flood mitigation, biodiversity, weather stability…
I first met @scottplantstrees at an agroforestry course in Iowa in 2014, and we met up again in Costa Rica in 2022. Scott is an agroforestry practitioner based in Costa Rica, and has worked there for over a decade. Today we dove into the agriculture, agroforestry, and agrotourism of Costa Rica. We talked about how trees create experiences, and how recreation might be the most accessible ecosystem service for farmers.
We talked syntropic farming, and making it accessible. Understory and overstory tree crops, perennial vegetables, how we *experience* some of the best food you can grow.
How do you design agroforestry for a hospitality operation? Where is the overlap between agrotourism in Costa Rica, The United States, and Italy? Without further ado, please welcome Scott Gallant.
What if we could transform a low-value tree into a premium product? Curly poplar is a glitch in the matrix, and we’re pretty bullish on it for water quality, livestock shade, windbreaks, and farm income. It beats out pine any day of the week, and it thrived in damp soils that aren’t great for row crops grazing before summer.
If you own or manage non-forested land and want to plant trees, comment “poplar” and I’ll send you the full overview.
Also: image search “box elder flame.”
This tree is a game changer. Why? Because it makes conservation *more* economically viable for land managers. Higher value lumber = more trees planted.
Sometimes we think of conservation as foregone income. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
I wrote up a solid overview of curly poplar.
Comment “Curly” and I’ll send it to your inbox.
You’re debating between buying a boat and planting a food forest. Here’s the thing: you can always buy the boat later, but you can’t go back in time and plant trees.
Beyond infinite snacks, meaningful interaction with nature, and a viable substitute for screens, food forests and agroforestry are good for the world around us: pollinators, birds, and all sorts of life.
Comment “Food” and I’ll send you more information.
Tree planting is tax deductible in a variety of ways, because the government values trees. It turns out that we can plant trees for profit *and* conservation — and deduct the associated expenses.
If you don’t like where your tax dollars are going to, or you’re simply keen on trees for profit *and* conservation, comment “tax deductible” below and I’ll send you more information.
Podcast out: We’re planting all of these trees, many of which carry the goal of ecological benefit: conservation, regeneration, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood mitigation, relative homeostasis in weather and climate. But what does intact nature really look like in the forested biome (biomes) of the Northeast United States? The Mid Atlantic, Great Lakes, the Humid midwest? How can we know? How can we get there?
There is no one answer, and often many answers are inherent, given that diversity is the spice of life and the spice of the forest.
Ethan Tapper is a forester from Vermont.
He’s an internationally-recognized ecologist, and bestselling author of How to Love a Forest. An Audobon-endorsed forester, Ethan works with landowners to steward forests for both wildlife habitat and income.
Ethan works as a consulting forester across Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine, and served as the Chittenden County Forester from 2016-2024. Ethan stewards Bear Island, his 175 acre forest, homestead and sugarbush in Vermont.
On 1st, as part of Birding Man, Ethan will be in Trumansburg, NY at Ramble On Farm. Lynx for Birding Man and the Plant The Trees podcast both in my bio.
