BF 235: Silvopasture

Integrate Trees, Livestock, and Forage for Multiple Wins on Your Farm

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Add Resilience To Your Farm with Livestock + Trees

There are many ways of combining trees, forage, and animals in useful, efficient, practical, and profitable arrangements. But none of these outcomes is guaranteed, and there are a lot of decisions required! When you take this course, you’ll be able to describe, plan for, and evaluate particular silvopasture practices and understand their place in the broader categories of Silvopasture and Agroforestry. You’ll also understand the potential pitfalls that differentiate good silvopasture from poor land management. You’ll leave with the tools to create silvopasture plans for your farm, and to engage with the topic of silvopasture as a practitioner and experimenter.

Target Audience

All levels. Learners at all levels of experience will be able to benefit from this course, but you will get the most out of this course if you have some baseline knowledge of rotational grazing, management of livestock, orchards, or forests, and what it's like to manage enterprises across several years of development. We’ll talk about tradeoffs and cost/risk management, and how our choices fit within decisions about general farm operation/enterprises/infrastructure/equipment. So the more experience you have with those kinds of topics, the more relevant our discussions will be.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:
  • Plan a silvopasture project of your own, and understand how your plan relates to other silvopastures, and how it fits into the larger category of practices that involve trees on farms.
  • Articulate goals, clarify functions, plan layout and species, and choose implementation methods.
  • Understand the guardrails of silvopasture practice, and have the tools to avoid unmanaged forest grazing.
  • Have the tools to evaluate and make the decisions that will get you to a functional silvopasture

Webinars

The bulk of the course happens on your own time, with discussions, readings, and assignments in Teachable, our virtual classroom. To add to the experience, webinars will be woven into the online interface of the course to allow you to meet on a weekly basis to learn from presenters and ask questions in real time. If you miss one, they are always recorded and posted for later viewing.

Webinar Schedule

In 2026, this course will be offered live for 6 weeks on Wednesdays from 6:30 – 8:00 PM (Eastern) from January 14 – February 18. While we encourage live attendance, so you have the opportunity to engage with presenters and ask questions, all webinars are recorded and posted in the online classroom to watch anytime. Once enrolled in this course, you will retain access to all materials indefinitely, and can return to participate in the live webinars in future offerings of the course if you wish. Join us!


Your Instructor


Eli Roberts
Eli Roberts

Eli Roberts helps people manage trees—on farms and in the woods—through Sunfleck Consulting. He is interested in setting up agroforestry systems that are robust, effective, easy to manage, and easy to explain. Eli has also been a livestock farmer, orchardist, and elementary school teacher. He studied Psychology at Villanova and Forestry at Yale (and they both help with land management planning). He lives and gardens in the Hudson Valley with his partner Lauren and between 3 and 11 resident and foster cats.


Course Curriculum


  General Course Resources
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  Week 1: Many Ways to Silvopasture
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  Week 2: Characteristics that Make Silvopasture Work
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  Week 3: Planting Silvopastures into Open Fields
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  Week 4: Starting with the Woods: A Narrow Path to Success
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  Week 5: Tree Leaves as Animal Feed
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  Week 6: The Big Picture: Money and Decision Making
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Frequently Asked Questions


When does the course start and finish?
The course officially starts and ends on the dates given above, when the instructor gets involved and begins hosting live weekly webinars. If you are registering after the webinars have concluded for the year, you will have immediate access to all the course materials, and will be able to participate in the next year's webinars if you choose to.
How long do I have access to the course?
How does lifetime access sound? After enrolling, you have unlimited access to this course for as long as you like - across any and all devices you own.
What if I am unhappy with the course?
We would never want you to be unhappy! If you are unsatisfied with your purchase, contact us in the first 7 days and we will give you a full refund.

Online Course Tiered Pricing

The Cornell Small Farms Program offers a tiered pricing model to provide greater access to our online courses. To determine your course enrollment cost, please consult the chart below, and honestly identify your current financial situation.

A table with numbers and text AI-generated content may be incorrect.We realize that not everyone is able to afford the price of our courses, so we also offer a small number of scholarships each year to New York State residents. To apply, please read scholarship requirements and complete the application here.

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