BELFAST, Maine — Most Americans stop climbing trees when they grow up.
But not Shana Hanson, a 52-year-old social worker and homesteader who has defiantly marched to the beat of her own drummer for most of her life. She raises a small flock of milk-white dairy goats on 3 Streams Farm in Belfast. She feeds the curious, friendly goats hay, apples and seaweed, but reckons that about half their food comes from the plants they browse on the 39-acre property.
Most days, Hanson takes her goats out for a walk on the property so they can find fresh food to eat. And most days, the short, wiry woman picks up her small bow saw and climbs one of her homemade ladders that can be found throughout her woods. She climbs the ladder and often shimmies much higher into the trees to aggressively prune them in a way that provides food for her goats and allows the trees to thrive.
The practice of pruning trees for animal fodder is called pollarding and was first done in Europe thousands of years ago. But Hanson stumbled on to it accidentally after she got her first goats.
“The goats first taught me what they like to eat,” she said. “I reinvented the pollard without knowing the word in 2010. Within a year, I got this book called ‘Lost Crafts,’ and it had the word pollarding in it. … It was kind of like coming home. I’m normal! There’s a village in the past where I would have fit right in.”
That hasn’t always been the case in American society, where Hanson has long tried to be more conscious and sustainable about her lifestyle in a way that can feel very different and sometimes very solitary. For example, when she was a girl, her family rode bikes together a lot, and Hanson realized car exhaust was very toxic. So she didn’t learn to drive until she was 25 and living in Maine, where being without a car is challenging.
“It’s really hard to be outside the envelope and not isolated,” Hanson said. “But I’m in good company over the centuries.”
In Maine, she lived for a time in the woods of Somerset County, where she learned how to grow her own food and be self-sufficient. She then went to the University of Maine to study clinical social work, and moved to Belfast in 1999 to pursue her career and to live near more like-minded people. At first, Hanson planned to downsize her homesteading lifestyle. But that didn’t work.
“As soon as I got my land, I got sucked in,” she said. “I’m an easily rooted person. Plus, the world didn’t look very stable and I had a son. I wanted him to learn how to live well.”
They grew vegetables, grain and legumes in a big garden on the farm. She saved seeds, so she wouldn’t have to rely on someone else to provide them, but a couple of wet summers in a row meant the plants never dried out and the seeds couldn’t be salvaged.
“But I had a couple of goats, and they were doing fine,” she said. “The animals seemed like a more sustainable option in the face of climate change and instability.”
So Hanson changed her focus to her herd and let much of her garden return to the wild. And although she counsels clients in private practice, that work is “very irregular,” she said. She supplements her income in myriad ways. In the spring, she sells the piglets from Nosenia, her guinea hog, and rents out the hog’s services as a “friendly work pig” to people who are looking to clear land or turn sod to start a garden. In the summer, she runs her goat CSA, and in the winter, she prunes fruit trees. She also sells a custom line of goat garments and seeks people who will live on and help with her land.
“Everybody should have some recession-proof income,” she said. “I spend very little on my own sustenance … having enough going on here so I can at least pay my property taxes is a good thing.”
On a recent winter walk, the goats followed her in a single file line through snowy trails and over partly frozen streams. She climbed a ladder to prune several tall, slender red maple trees, and the goats enthusiastically nibbled at the branches that fell to the ground.
“Does that taste juicy?” she said to them.
The browse they eat adds nutrients to their milk and makes the goats healthier than if they just ate hay, she believes. And her woods are thriving, even though many of the trees appear to have been decapitated. Pollarding, which is also known as creating an “air meadow,” actually makes for a healthier forest, she said.
“Most of the trees that I’m pollarding, or pruning for fodder, have been broken by storms,” she said. “I’m like a controlled storm. I’m doing a much neater job. In a way, I’m storm-proofing the woods.”
The goats love eating trees such as cedar and yellow birch, and the milk they make after browsing is appreciated by the families that participate in her summertime goat milk CSA. Her customers lease the goats from Hanson, paying her for their care and feeding in exchange for rights to the milk. Running the CSA is one way that Hanson keeps from being isolated. She also enjoys playing her fiddle at musical gatherings and has been teaching new homesteaders about pollarding.
While she worries about the direction in which the world is moving, she is still holding fast to her sustainable ideals. The way she lives costs little in the way of cash but reaps big dividends.
“I suspect that life as we know it is on hospice,” Hanson said. “But we’re still here. We’re still alive. Let’s do it right, and let’s do it richly, with a lot of life and greenery.”