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when not forced to munch on sudangrass in 90-degree heat.
He waxes eloquently about the wildlife habitat, erosion
control, and sense of calm this land provides. “I love the pris-
tineness, the peacefulness of the trees,” he says in a soothing
drawl as he drives through his ranch as if on a Jurassic Park
agriculture safari. He points out the calf he midwifed earlier,
wet and wobbly in a sweetly scented glade. “Who wouldn’t
want to give birth in a nice shady bed of grass?”
Minus the pickup truck and some electric fencing, it’s a
scene one might have encountered in the Neolithic period,
when humans first domesticated cows from the aurochs
roaming the Fertile Crescent. The practice was among the
earliest agricultural endeavors, but the bare fields and feed-
lots of modern farms and ranches have largely swept it away.
Environmental scientists, though, see the reemergence
of silvopasture as a means to slow down climate change.
Livestock produce two-thirds of all agricultural emissions,
and methane from burping cows is the largest slice of that.
Lanier is skeptical that global warming is real, but his pines,
in siphoning CO 2 from sky to earth, are nonetheless helpingThe viridian-green branches of loblolly pines rise 60 feet
above a carpet of soft, tufted grasses, rippling slightly in the
breeze. The trees are widely spaced, 20 to 30 feet apart, with
their lower limbs removed, creating an airy, cathedral-like
canopy speckled with sunlight filtering through the needles.
The woodland has a strangely serene, primeval feel. A
sudden wave of grunting reveals large black shapes moving
in the distance. A pickup approaches, further breaking the
reverie, and out hops a slender middle-aged man in a ball cap.
“Buron Lanier,” he says, extending a hand. “Sorry I’m late.
I was just finishing up with a calf.”
The shapes, Lanier’s Red Angus cattle, amble over. This
forest, 100 acres of his 400-acre Piney Woods Farm, is their
grazing ground—a modern incarnation of an ancient tech-
nique called silvopasture, an integration of forest and fauna.
To Lanier—a third-generation grower whose ancestors
raised tobacco where his pines now stand—the unusual
scheme, which he’s cultivated over the past 30-plus years,
is common sense. The trees boost his bottom line through
periodic timber sales, and cattle fatten up 20 days quicker
Along a stretch of rural highway
in the coastal plains of North
Carolina sits an unusual forest.
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