Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education

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For the Whole Stream: Riparian Buffers

Part 3: Beyond the Stream

Click the links to read For the Whole Stream Part 1: Upstream and Part 2: Downstream

For the Whole Stream is the first installment of a new series called the Horn Farm Ecosystem. Through periodic articles, we’ll walk the land in writing: visiting the forests, regenerative fields, and ecological action sites of the Horn Farm Center to explain our stewardship work, uplift nature, and inspire love for the land.

“… riparian buffers represent another example of an agroforestry system that’s a win-win for ecological outcomes and community well-being and livelihoods.”

– Sarah Derouin (2021)

Our visits to the Horn Farm’s riparian buffer in this blog series have covered the extensive environmental benefits of restoring plant life in streamside areas. From capturing sediments, pollutants, and carbon upstream to healing water and habitat downstream, it’s apparent that our impetus for bringing 17,000 trees and shrubs to the Horn Farm Center comes from the awareness of a beneficial feedback loop that ripples outward. At home, we can do our part to slow erosion, uptake more water, create more shade, and support a myriad of birds, insects, and aquatic life; at the same time, by helping lands and waters at home, we take the responsibility necessary to address an ailing Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay. Land care travels like water: fluid and pooling. In time, the small becomes sweeping.

But while the ecological benefits of buffer planting are promising, it’s important for us to avoid positioning ourselves as sidelined observers of these benefits. We are, of course, not just nature sentimentalists: we are embedded in and dependent on the land that we are restoring. Capturing water and mitigating pollutants directly impacts our wellbeing; our breathing sways in time with the respiration of the green life around us; insects pollinate our food and nurture these soils. The land right around us has always provided more materials for humans than our modern imaginations can fathom. It’s essential that we recognize these facts as climate change pushes us into increasingly unfamiliar terrain and challenges the standard of living we’ve taken for granted. Recognizing the services of our local landscapes, and RE-localizing our impacts, are the steps we need to take to secure a livable future.

With this vision of a functioning ecosystem that thrives not in our absence, but in our presence, the Horn Farm’s riparian buffers become more than healing spaces for the land.

They’re learning spaces too. We’re learning (or better, re-learning) ways to unite the needs of natural cycles with the material and caloric needs of people nearby. It’s a vision reconciling abundance in a world where ecological and societal wellbeing are often polarized: we CAN prioritize the protection of water, soil, and habitat while supplying goods for people, with annual harvests that actually promote the health of the buffer. Luckily for us, there is a word predating our work that describes this mosaic of purposes: multifunctional.

Volunteers helping out at a buffer planting workday in in the spring of 2021.
View of a vegetated area in the riparian buffer, July 2023.

The What and Why of Multifunctional Riparian Buffers

Generally speaking, a multifunctional riparian buffer is a vegetated streamside zone that improves and maintains stream health while providing direct and material benefits for the people who interact with them. These benefits often include perennial fruit and nut crops, raw natural goods like lumber and fiber, and other products that can be harvested year after year for use on site or to garner additional income.

Pennsylvania has a history of state-wide initiatives to incentivize riparian buffer planting on stream-adjacent agricultural lands, but the multifunctional appeal is a relatively new addition. In many ways, it’s strategic. One of the state’s original programs for funding buffer installations–the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, or CREP–prohibits farmers from generating income from the buffers it finances. While this is positive for the wild spaces it compensates, it’s a tough sell. Many farmers, especially those that operate on a small-scale, are reluctant to sacrifice acreage that could be used for crop yields. Additionally, while some to all of the planting costs are covered by the program, farmers are expected to handle the upkeep required for their riparian areas to succeed–a tall ask for folks who are already juggling demands. Taking farmland out of production like this easily sours the taste of ecological restoration despite its virtues, partly contributing to the decline in enrollment that has recently pressured the state to explore other possibilities for meeting its targets.*

So, in PA’s latest efforts to “reboot” riparian restoration, multifunctional buffer design has catapulted to the front of incentives available to streamside farmers. At the very least, it’s having a moment. From a purely economic standpoint, allowing landowners to monetize areas set aside for ecological restoration is more attractive than restoration alone. Fruit and nut crops from woody plants and florals can be lucrative, even exceeding profits of conventional row crops. Design inspiration that simultaneously favors stream health and harvest capacity is out there, primarily focused on the creation of “zones” for certain uses, with the least “touched”/most protected area residing nearest the stream, and diverse production areas spanning the periphery–hosting crops like nut trees, fruit trees, berry bushes, and ornamentals.

As we hope to capture through the Horn Farm’s buffer, the selection and placement of plants can be creative, ecologically sensible, and economically viable, not to mention restorative for us: reawakening an awareness of our material and emotional relationship to the local and natural.

Assessing a row of willows planted in our riparian buffer in advance of a volunteer workday, where we spent the morning coppicing (taking cuttings) from these plantings for basketry and brushwood bundles (December 2022).

Indeed, with design schemes, management manuals, and news features abounding (this blog being no exception), it can be easy to forget that the ideas underpinning multifunctional riparian buffers are not new. Take the entire human history of land tending, and farming land with this holistic approach becomes prominent, not peripheral. In fact, we might consider Pennsylvania’s shift to multifunctional buffer planting an echo of land use strategies and ethics that pre-date the state.

Prior to the onslaught of forest clearing for colonial monocropping, Indigenous peoples in this bioregion altered landscapes and tended forests in ways that demanded much less of the soils and waters. Versed in ecology, they engaged in the  “ … deliberate maintenance of trees and other woody perennials in fields and pastures [ … ] help(ing) meet the demand for a variety of goods and services, while ensuring the forest was not destroyed” (Alcorn, 1990). Fire ecology was one approach that spanned the area where we live. Folks leveraged routine controlled burns to supply nutrient-rich ash to soils and favor the plant types that provided food for themselves and the wildlife they hunted. The aim of this and other indigenous land practices resembles the refrains we see in the programs and articles justifying multifunctional buffers: actually building soil and ecological richness while providing for people.

These modern buffers are the outcome of land degradation and agricultural overreach, so they certainly don’t mirror the ways indigenous peoples managed landscapes as a continuous and proactive practice; but they are a way of re-remembering interactions where the land is a subject, not an object. Even as we partly impose human will on the land, our labors foster ecological well being in the long term. The land moves from a pantry to an exchange: a “give and take” rather than an unfulfilled borrowing, and what’s given is more diverse in utility and nutrition.

Multifunctionality defies the notion that regenerating ecosystems and producing a harvest are inherently at odds.

The buffer is a new collaboration of old ideas, applied with the urgency the ailing land asks of us.

Woodland Steward Wilson Alvarez teaching a class in the riparian buffer (March 2023).

Meeting the Horn Farm’s Multifunctional Buffer

So who are the flora animating our particular buffer? Before exploring some examples of what they may do for us and the ecosystem, it’s worth noting their commonalities. From the dogwoods to the willows to the sycamores, all are native, perennial, and capable of withstanding periods of extended moisture. This means that human hands in the buffer–and even human vehicles as need-be–will not compromise the integrity of the soil, water, and habitat that our planting primarily addresses. Perennial plants, once established, require less management and are therefore less intensive from an agricultural standpoint. Because of their longer staying time and adaptability (being rooted in the ground year after year instead of half a year!), they are better capable of reducing soil erosion, absorbing and diverting superfluous chemicals, conserving soil water, providing above- and below-ground habitat, withstanding weather impacts, and curbing our dependence on fossil fuels for management. Long story short, they fulfill the ecological goals of buffer planting to such a degree that visitation and harvest themselves still protect the stream.

It’s also worth noting that, to many, these perennial trees and shrubs are less familiar than the cereals, oilseeds, and vegetables of annual agriculture, and many are surprised to learn about their diverse uses. Therefore, the buffer contributes to local knowledge about what native plants have to offer us, and over time, it can be an incubator for new “markets” of raw materials that are currently outsourced because they are not locally available at scale. Sourcing local food is becoming increasingly common, but the buffer offers even more: things like medicine, oils, craft materials, timber, and biofuel–all seemingly beyond the realm of local availability, as our globalized economy would have us think.

“Human use” need not even be exclusive to our bodies and households. Most of the plants that make up the Horn Farm’s riparian buffer are capable of “live staking,” or producing shoots that can be pruned and “staked” into the ground to develop into an entirely new plant. This is an evolved characteristic of wetland- and streamside-dwelling plants: an ability to sprout from severed stems and branches as a response to living in shifting and unpredictable wet environments. For renewing natural lands at the Horn Farm Center, the implications are exciting. The landscape provides us with a place-based restoration nursery that will support future planting and rewilding, both on our 186 acres and in the places our students, volunteers, and community supporters are working to bolster nature. It should go without saying that ecological restoration falls under that header of “human use.”

Cuttings arranged for different uses during a willow coppicing volunteer workday in January 2023. The cuttings on the right are suitable for live staking. This means that they’ll bud and grow if inserted into the ground in early spring. The cuttings on the left were taken home for decoration and weaving experiments.

A sampling of the native plants that are making a home in our multifunctional riparian buffer are described in the drop-downs below:

American Hazelnut (Corylus americana)

The American hazelnut, which flourishes in disturbed sites, not only provides shelter and highly nutritious food for wildlife, but its nuts can be sold and eaten as well as used to make flours, candies, butters, oils, moisturizers, tinctures, and essential oils, all of which provide a great source of income.

Black Willow (Salix nigra)

Black willows thrive in moist, streamside soils and have fibrous roots that mitigate stream bank erosion. They contain salicylic acid with fever-reducing and pain-killing properties. Like many other shrub willows, dried and rehydrated stems can be used for weaving. For examples of willow baskets, check out Foggy Blossom Farm (Western PA) and Living Willow Farm (OH).

Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis)

Known as “Nature’s Medicine Chest,” in addition to providing fruits consumed by wildlife and flowers that beckon birds and butterflies, elderberry berries are used to make juice, pies, syrup, jellies, cough drops, and wine. Its flowers can be used in herbal tea or to flavor jellies and candies. Elderberry is also a source of vitamin C, fiber, and antioxidants, and its products sell for high prices.

American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis)

Sycamore, one of the largest tree species in eastern North America, is exceptionally well-suited for rehabilitating degraded sites and can withstand the compacted soils and air pollution prevalent in suburban and urban areas. Its large stump provides shelter for diverse animal species, and with its grandeur, sycamore is valued for providing shade and beauty. Increasingly, like black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), sycamore is planted in silvopasture: systems designed to incorporate trees and livestock on grazing land to help sequester carbon and improve ecological and animal wellneing.

Dozens of additional species occupy our multifunctional riparian buffer, making whole the diverse interactions that are possible in the space: food, crafts, medicine, infrastructure, live staking, habitat for nesting, breeding, feeding, and more. A full listing of these plants and their personalities may be on its way, but for now, it’s worth mentioning a few others: Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum), Black Raspberry (Rubus occidentalis), Black Walnut (Juglans nigra), Common Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), Pussy Willow (Salix discolor), Red Osier and Silky Dogwoods (Cornus sericea and Cornus amomum), Sandbar Willow (Salix interior), Serviceberry (Amelanchier laevis), and Smooth Alder (Alnus serrulata).

Hand-drawn map of the Horn Farm’s 6-acre multifunctional riparian buffer, created by Seasonal Land Steward Rue Sterner in summer 2022 and labeled by Education and Communications Intern Mel Beans in summer 2023. Plantings in the top left and center are differentiated by species, while the rowed plantings on the right are randomized to maximize biodiversity–a component of the Miyawaki planting method (blog forthcoming!).

Hands and Hearts on the Land

Conservation has a way of suggesting that the removal of human influence is the key requirement for the renewal of fully-functioning ecosystems. This may be true to some extent, but it leaves us with a dichotomy: where nature is preserved over “there” and we proceed with our business over “here.” What if the philosophy of conservation was applied to “here” too? What if, rather than treating our needs as sacrifices for the health of the land, we worked to temper those needs and fulfill them with sensitivity to the cycles, limitations, and teachings of the land? It may seem like a bold proposition, but our human record tells us that the way we’re living now is the exception: that living for the benefit of soil, water, and biodiversity is rooted in the human story.

Community members practicing the fundamentals of basket weaving using cuttings from willows grown at the Horn Farm Center (March 2023).

The proposition also becomes less daunting when we approach “we” locally. From the black locust tree’s durability for building materials to the medicinal offerings of elderberry, black willow, black raspberry, and others, we can recognize that biodiversity provides far more in abundance than ecosystem services and the joy of time spent in nature (though these are deeply valuable in their own right). By embracing tending and harvest as companions of land renewal, we can reacquaint ourselves with the true extent of the land’s bounty and grow in our self-sufficiency. Altogether, we can redefine our sense of home. In envisioning a relationship between land and people where both can thrive in harmony and reciprocity, our riparian buffer is a model-in-progress.

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

– Aldo Leopold

*In 2016, the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources set a goal of planting 95,000 acres of riparian forest buffers by 2025, in line with deadlines for federal and state Chesapeake Bay cleanup programs. Pennsylvania is currently behind on its commitments.

Sycamores, black willows, and black locusts basking in the summer sun (July 2023).

Stay tuned for our next blog on planting trees using the Miyawaki forest method, publishing in August!

We’re grateful for the funding partners who have sponsored our riparian buffer efforts:

6 acre restoration (2018):

10 acre restoration (2020):

Our heartfelt gratitude also extends to the hundreds of volunteers who have attended planting, tending, and harvest workdays between 2018 and today.

About the Authors:

Andrew Leahy

Growing up in the foothills of Ricketts Glen State Park, Andrew spent his early life in the embrace of Northeastern PA forests, sowing the seeds for his ongoing enchantment with the natural world and its stewardship. While studying English and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student in the college’s Office of Community Engagement. Now, at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew manages social media, develops educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, and collaborates on marketing projects, large events, and organizational capacity-building. Through all of this, he is a dedicated student of the land, with a life’s mission of learning (and providing spaces for others to learn) about bioregional ecology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, foraging, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature.

Mel Beans

Mel is a rising junior at Franklin & Marshall College pursuing a B.A. in environmental studies and public policy. After taking an environmental justice course and diving into research on “forever chemicals,” she realized that she wanted to pursue a career that actively acknowledges and addresses the ways in which the environment is deeply interconnected with and integral to our wellbeing. She jumped on the opportunity to intern at Horn Farm Center, seeing how our mission aligns with her passions and career goals. As the Education & Communications Intern, she’s grateful to contribute to HFC’s essential role in demonstrating not only sustainable, but regenerative and resilient agriculture by assisting with research and outreach. In her free time, she enjoys being with friends and family and in nature, thrifting, listening to music, and watching video essays. On campus, she is a house advisor and the president of Catastrophic Relief Alliance, an F&M organization that addresses housing needs locally and nationally, especially in the wake of natural disasters.

For the Whole Stream: Riparian Buffers

Part 2: Downstream

Read For the Whole Stream Part 1: Upstream here.

For the Whole Stream is the first installment of a new series called the Horn Farm Ecosystem. Through periodic articles, we’ll walk the land in writing: visiting the forests, regenerative fields, and ecological action sites of the Horn Farm Center to explain our stewardship work, uplift nature, and inspire love for the land. To learn more about the Horn Farm Ecosystem blog series, check out our February 17th, 2023 newsletter.

Like a drop of water in a stream, ecology ripples outward.

Actions taken (or neglected) in one place have resounding impacts elsewhere over time. Non-native introductions that did not start at the Horn Farm Center have given us the likes, tests, and uses (note the paradox) of multiflora rose, Japanese honeysuckle, garlic mustard, Japanese stiltgrass, and tree of heaven. Each of these plants–without a native niche or co-evolutionary partnership to balance its influence–was once a newcomer here in some seemingly innocuous form. And now, they’ve all reshaped the ecology of our landscape, in many ways monopolizing our land tending energies. Once a drop, now pervasive, plucked from a place beyond the scope of what we can see.

The same story of compounding impacts unfolds for beneficial engagement with the land. Replanting natives where non-natives have been removed reverberates outward to support the species they host, the plants those species pollinate, and the food chains they underpin. Stopping the cycle of tilling soils in farming bolsters soil stability, improves water infiltration, replenishes soil nutrients and microbiology, enhances crop vitality, and contributes to carbon drawdown from the atmosphere, not to mention the benefits of reduced stormwater runoff on neighboring waterways and habitats. Over time, one lever releases many, and the catalyst of change can begin small. The humble backyard, the wayward farm, the thin edge of a streamside … if you haven’t already taken Douglas Tallamy’s hint about bringing habitat home here, this is your cue. As we work to rebuild ecological balance in one place, that act of recovery may well be exported along the world’s energy flows–carried by the wind, water, seeds, scat, and human messaging. Our riparian buffer, of course, is no exception.

How exactly? As noted in Part 1 of this blog set, our eroded stream deposits into Kreutz Creek, which flows into the Susquehanna River. Kreutz Creek is one vein among thousands tethered to a crucial ecological artery. The Susquehanna River meanders 444 miles south from its headwaters in central New York, carving down Pennsylvania before cutting briefly into Maryland and emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. Given its size and might, the Susquehanna River is one of the primary water channels of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

All of the creeks, streams, and rivers encompassed in the highlighted area eventually drain into the Chesapeake Bay. Source: PA Department of Environmental Protection.

In fact, nearly half of the freshwater flow into the Chesapeake comes from the Susquehanna River, making it the largest water contributor to the bay. This means that Pennsylvanians, not one of us in viewing distance of the Bay, have a surprisingly crucial role to play in addressing the degradation of downstream ecologies in the Chesapeake.

As the environmental pressures of development and agriculture continue across the watershed, the Chesapeake Bay has become a collecting ground for chemical and nutrient pollution, excess sediments, and other waste carried away by the exposed waterways that feed it.

Indeed, it’s estimated that 65% of the nitrogen and phosphorous polluting the Chesapeake have come from Pennsylvania.

Carried by stormwater runoff, most of this pollution originates from bufferless, steam-adjacent farms that rely on nutrient inputs to feed large-scale crop production on ailing soils (manure is a part of this problem as well). Nutrient pollution at this scale, alongside sedimentation, has spelled existential trouble for the Chesapeake over time. Biodiversity has suffered with seagrasses, shellfish, and fish succumbing to depleted oxygen levels in the water, caused by both over-sedimentation and unchecked algae blooms fueled by nutrient pollution. (Note: algal blooms can cause direct harm beyond aquatic life, potentially harboring toxins that threaten human health). Loss of biodiversity to this degree, echoing the stream habitats in our backyards, has implications that ripple out: destabilizing food chains, upsetting local economies, and undercutting the Bay’s resilience as a storm buffer against increasingly powerful weather.

Since the EPA’s heightened attention to the Bay in 2010, PA farmers and property owners have responded increasingly to statewide calls (and incentives) for waterway protection using riparian buffers. The state fell short of conservation targets in 2017 and recommitted through robust riparian programs emphasizing agroforestry in buffer design–an angle taken up at the Horn Farm Center (more to come on that!).

Between this growing movement, increasingly common torrential rains, and a keen interest in ecological land stewardship, the Horn Farm Center broke ground on our first riparian buffer planting in 2018.

As the planting and learning continues, we’ve come to see the riparian buffer not just as an enactment of our responsibility to ailing lands and waters around us, but as a teaching tool–a window perhaps–into how ecology works. That is: how ecology teaches us that small changes can bring about resonant impacts, and to recognize that our proactivity (or neglect) in one area determines outcomes for areas and systems even beyond our scope. For every upstream, there is an innumerable family of downstreams.

Volunteers planting trees and installing tree tubes in support of our water protection efforts (10/2021).

As beneficiaries of the soils, lands, and waters nourished by the Susquehanna, the Chesapeake, and the generations that tended this landscape before dominant culture abandoned the caretaker lifeway, it’s only right for us to lean back, reacquaint ourselves with the ground, and work to bring back balance in whatever capacity we can. Because when we nurture and bolster an ecosystem at home, we hold the key to rebalancing it elsewhere, and restoring humility to ourselves in the process.

Click here to read For the Whole Stream Part 3: Beyond the Stream

About the Author: Andrew Leahy

Growing up in the foothills of Ricketts Glen State Park, Andrew spent his early life in the embrace of Northeastern PA forests, sowing the seeds for his ongoing enchantment with the natural world and its stewardship. While studying English and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student in the college’s Office of Community Engagement. Now, at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew manages social media, develops educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, and collaborates on marketing projects, large events, and organizational capacity-building. Through all of this, he is a dedicated student of the land, with a life’s mission of learning (and providing spaces for others to learn) about bioregional ecology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, foraging, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature.

For the Whole Stream: Riparian Buffers

Part 1: Upstream

This blog is the first installment of a new series called the Horn Farm Ecosystem. Through periodic articles, we’ll walk the land in writing: visiting the forests, regenerative fields, and ecological action sites of the Horn Farm Center to explain our stewardship work, uplift nature, and inspire love for the land. To learn more about the Horn Farm Ecosystem blog series, check out our February 17th, 2023 newsletter.

Whether you’re gathering for a class at our corn barn or whooshing by on Rt. 30, there’s a site at the Horn Farm Center that can’t be missed. Look east of the farmhouse, beyond the community garden plots, and you’ll see an expanse of tree tubes covering nearly 8 acres of land formerly dedicated to annual monocropping. Dotting the landscape, a twiggy menagerie: thousands of saplings planted between 2020 and this past summer eagerly waiting to outgrow their enclosures and bring large vegetation back to the land. In a time frame that seems tedious to us but a snap for nature, the likes of American hazelnut, sycamore, black and sandbar willow, various dogwoods, and more will cover this swath: a new forest born out of a willful overtaking. We’ve convened hundreds of community groups and volunteers over three years to facilitate this afforestation–or creation of a forest where there wasn’t one before–committing hundreds of hours and thousands of trees to just a fraction of our 186 acres, but why?

A sapling outgrowing its tree tube in the Horn Farm’s 8-acre riparian buffer, October 2022.

It’s of little contention that diverse trees (in tree-favoring environments) are a good thing, especially in a bioregion like ours, which now contends with a centuries-long legacy of agricultural clear-cutting alongside concerning air quality compared to the rest of the state. But there’s more to the story of the 15,000+ trees that have taken residence in our soils since we turned our attention to riparian health.

Venture out to the spot mentioned above and you’ll notice that the tree tube procession parallels a deep trench carving its way down the hillside. This is a human-made seasonal stream corridor, originally dug to drain water from bordering croplands. The eroded cut deposits into a natural creek—Kreutz Creek for York County readers—which then meanders east before emptying, like so many of our regional waterways, into the Susquehanna River. This downstream connection is the primary impetus for our undertaking. What we’re building is a riparian buffer.

What is a riparian buffer?

Picture: a lush array of grasses, shrubs, and trees snaking along both sides of a freshwater stream. This is a riparian buffer. The word “riparian,” from the Latin “streamside,” describes the area’s natural character: a transitional zone between the land and the waters of a river, lake, or stream, sometimes taking the shape of a wetland. “Buffer” designates the riparian area’s function in absorbing the impacts of adjacent land uses on the water. Across PA, riparian buffers have grown increasingly popular (and imperative) in agricultural fields, yards, commercial sites, and along roadsides: any place where the proximity of human activities to critical waterways is apparent and felt. Each riparian planting provides a host of benefits for water quality, soil health, and the surrounding ecology.

Simply put, the presence of trees, shrubs, and other vegetation along a waterway provides natural protection for the water and the life it carries.

Riparian buffers act like safety nets for streams, rivers, and lakes. Networks of tree roots help to keep soils in place, mimicking the porous earth of forests. Forested waterways are also better equipped to intercept sediment pollution, filter contaminants, and slow runoff that causes streambank erosion, all while providing favorable forage and habitat for birds, bats, insects, and aquatic life. Indeed, in the absence of riparian buffers, waterways become degraded. Impacts upstream quickly move downstream. Below are just a few of the ecological problems of exposed waterways:

  • Sedimentation: without vegetation to stop the runoff of solid particles and minerals, excess sediments enter the water and accumulate at the bottom, depleting aquatic oxygen levels and suffocating wildlife. 
  • Algal blooms: “nutrient pollution” from excess nitrogen and phosphorus leaching off croplands promotes a runaway “bloom” of algae on the water surface. This overabundance of algae depletes oxygen levels and blocks critical sunlight from reaching the stream floor. Nutrient leaching, especially of nitrogen, is a common side-effect of intensive agriculture that relies on industrial fertilizers. 
  • Streambank erosion: rapid runoff and unstable soils expedite the otherwise natural process of erosion along the stream edge, creating inhospitable conditions for fish and macroinvertebrates (aquatic insects) that depend on intact edges to spawn. This leads to population declines that can ripple up the food chain.
  • Temperature: without tree cover in the summer, unshaded waters overheat, making them uninhabitable for aquatic organisms. This is becoming increasingly common as our climate changes. 
  • Food availability: fish and aquatic insects require leaf litter that accumulates in the fall and winter to weather the cold seasons. Missing vegetation around the stream results in a lack of these vital nutrient sources, again destabilizing the base of the food chain. 
  • Carbon sequestration: trees and grasses are essential for balancing atmospheric carbon dioxide and absorbing the excess of greenhouse gasses emitted by human activities like the burning of fossil fuels. Simply put, missing vegetation is another missed opportunity to work proactively against climate change. 
  • Human value: Unstable streambanks, eroded soils, and a lack of biodiversity negatively affect our mental health and sense of belonging in the landscape.

While our regenerative farming approach does not apply chemical inputs like herbicides or synthetic fertilizers to the ground, we still see the impacts of a vacant landscape along our stream: drastic erosion, sediment deposits, and fast-moving water that, in 2021, partially flooded our riparian plantings.

Evidence of streambank erosion at the Horn Farm Center (3/2023). At its deepest, the stream bed is 5½ feet below the land that borders it.

Many locals will remember, as well, the destructive flash flooding of 2018 that affected much of York County, which was a major push for the Horn Farm Center’s turn to watershed health as an essential companion to healthy agriculture. Lastly, with runoff controlled by the return of a root web to the land, the farm will benefit from greater infiltration to better recharge our groundwater supply for community gardeners and other uses. Water security on the farm is becoming increasingly unpredictable as we endure drier, hotter summers each year. 

Ultimately, the newly planted 8 acre riparian buffer, which will grow to 10 acres this spring, will have an incredible impact on the farm and the ecosystem we’re a part of–from wildlife habitat to water security.

And like a drop of water in a stream, ecology ripples outwards. This is one of nature’s many teachings: how healthy elements positively affect relationships beyond the scope of what we can see. With this reality, our regenerative landscape is not just for us and our other-than-human neighbors, but for the health of waters, ecologies, and generations downstream.

Winter view of a Miyawaki mini-forest row adjacent to the stream edge (3/2023). The Miyawaki method for forest generation is another tactic we’re using beyond conventional tree spacing and tubing as we rewild the riparian area along our stream. An upcoming blog post will spotlight Miyawaki planting at the Horn Farm Center–stay tuned!

Click here to read For the Whole Stream Part 2: Downstream

Click here to read For the Whole Stream Part 3: Beyond the Stream

About the Author: Andrew Leahy

Growing up in the foothills of Ricketts Glen State Park, Andrew spent his early life in the embrace of Northeastern PA forests, sowing the seeds for his ongoing enchantment with the natural world and its stewardship. While studying English and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student in the college’s Office of Community Engagement. Now, at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew manages social media, develops educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, and collaborates on marketing projects, large events, and organizational capacity-building. Through all of this, he is a dedicated student of the land, with a life’s mission of learning (and providing spaces for others to learn) about bioregional ecology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, foraging, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature.