Josh Davis is not one to rest on his laurels – or in his case, his nearly 700 acres of scenic and productive Georgia farmland.
The land his family has stewarded since his great-great-great grandfather won claim to it in the Creek Land Lottery in the 1830’s is still riddled with the hallmarks of a six-generation working farm and former sharecropping community. There is a tin-roofed farmhouse, a long-time shuttered general store with wooden shelves, a blacksmith shop and a cotton storage house.
Surrounded by the living pieces of his farm’s history, it’s not hard to understand Davis’ pragmatic view of his place in that lineage.
“I’m just a caretaker until the next generation can take over,” Davis says.
Davis never thought he’d work here full-time. He fled as soon as he could, leaving to pursue a degree in philosophy and a job in marketing. But the ties that bound him to the Georgia clay of his home were thick enough to reel him back.
Cattle + Conservation
Frolona Farm is a mixture of ecosystems, pairing mixed-aged and mixed-species forest acres with grassland and pasture areas. When Davis returned to the farm and began a direct-to-consumer meat business, he found an immediate need for infrastructure, specifically so he could protect the waterways on the property.
“When Josh first contacted me for assistance, I was impressed from that very first meeting,” recalls Cindy Haygood, USDA-NRCS district conservationist. “His first issue was that he wanted to fence his livestock away from the water on his property, which is really rare to hear.”
“So, I knew that I was in for a good relationship there.”
Haygood and Davis used funding available through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to help provide the fencing and water infrastructure needed to fence the cattle and pastured pigs away from the natural waterways.
“He put in 11.5 miles of fence for livestock exclusion on surface water and over 5,000 feet of pipeline to get water out to his livestock and the various paddocks that we were helping to set up,” Haygood says.
Now, Davis implements rotational grazing and plantings of warm and cool season grasses to build the soil health in his pastures and feed his herd, now a cow-calf operation.
Following the Water
Sitting at the base of the Brevard Fault Line in a valley means that Frolona Farm is blessed with water. In fact, there are thirteen different water sources on the farm, part of the Chattahoochee River Watershed.
Thanks to Davis’s work protecting those banks from cattle erosion, they are ready for restoration efforts to bring back plant communities that are ripe with potential for habitat.
“We are working to put all of the water into stream mitigation banks, so each of the stream channels will either be put in restoration or preservation,” he says. “When that is restored, there will be a 200 ft. buffer on each side that is planted in native plants.”
One of those species that Davis says is particularly interesting is the shoal bass, a protected member of the black bass family. He is proud to house shoal bass in the streams on Frolona Farm.
Seeing the Forests for the Trees
Now that Davis has tamed his pastureland through infrastructure and grazing and is working to restore his waterways, it’s only natural for him to turn his attention to the last of the farmland’s ecosystem – the mixed hardwood forest that encompasses both his property and contiguous property owned by family members.
He once again turned to USDA-NRCS for support, enrolling in the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) to steward that forested land.
“This year, I finished a crop tree release for mast management, and it has been a linchpin effort,” he says. “For each of these acres, we selected one or two crop trees that were surrounded by competing trees. We then either girdled or harvested the competing trees to allow the selected tree to produce more mast.”
In most areas, Davis is keeping the treetops in the forest floor, which he will be working with NRCS to turn into biochar. He’s also performing sequential patch burning over 577 acres.
“The prescribed burns are the key to all of this, because that is the most important and effective thing you can do to restore and manage forests,” he says.
On more than 200 of his acres, Davis is creating songbird and pollinator habitats.
A Legacy of Conservation Innovation
Davis is the first farmer in the state to tap NRCS’s CSP enhancement for biochar production.
It’s really no surprise to Haygood.
“Josh is very progressive and always looking for some new way to steward the land,” she says. “He is somewhat unique because he came to us not only for production, but conservation is a top priority for him. His conservation mindset is so sincere.”
Haygood says that the strong partnership means that, sometimes, they are working collaboratively to figure out a program or system, like the CSP biochar enhancement. Now that Davis is working toward a Masters degree in natural resources management at Auburn University, she is expecting even more conservation collaboration in her future.
Davis calls his work he is doing on the farm “landscape-scale restoration.” The tinkering and experimenting that he anticipates will change his landscape are really adding up to two ends for him.
He wants to secure his land’s productivity for future caretakers and, generally, he wants the farm’s ecosystem to improve.
“We have a lot of rare and threatened species here,” he says. “We have a huge variety of ecosystem types.”
“I’m just trying to leave it better than I got it.”
America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at www.americasconservationagmovement.com.
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