About two dozen people huddled around Dan Sloan in a lush Cully neighborhood backyard earlier this month.
After introductions and checking to see if anyone wanted sunscreen on the hot Saturday afternoon, the edible landscape designer got down to it.
“I run Portland Food Forest Initiative, which is a nonprofit organization, largely located in the Cully neighborhood, that is focused on popularizing and normalizing food forests in place of grass lawns,” Sloan said.
A food forest is a garden that mimics a natural forest ecosystem while mostly focusing on food production. The initiative currently maintains eight sites around Portland, and started up another four that community groups maintain.
Sloan is hustling to expand the group, and that couldn’t come at a better time.
More than one in 10 Portlanders are food insecure, and the USDA has found huge chunks of the city’s north and east are low-income food deserts. At the state level, hunger had already been skyrocketing for years before Trump administration policies led 70,000 Oregonians to lose SNAP food aid.
Fighting monoculture
The two dozen attendees were at one of Portland Food Forest Initiative’s backyard forests for a tour of two sites the group has transformed. But each person had also come with their own mission beyond that.
“I’m Sharon,” one explained. “I’m from West Linn, and I bought a house a couple years ago and I want to turn it into a food forest.”
“I’m Mike,” he said, standing next to his partner. “We’re from Eugene. I’m a regenerative landscaper, I work for a school district. So, just kind of curious. Haven’t seen a food forest in person before, but interested in seeing what I can do and how I can incorporate these.”
“I’m Crystal,” another added. “I just moved to the Portland area. I don’t actually have a house yet. I’m looking for a house with a yard that I can make useful.”
Sloan explained the group’s work and how it transformed the site from “just a sad lawn” on top of lifeless soil that looked like “baseball diamond dirt” back in 2022 into the wild garden attendees saw in front of them.
Then he led everyone into a world of fruit trees, berries, vegetables and countless other edible plants all exploding from woodchip-lined rows.
“In my opinion,” he said, “I don’t think I’m alone in this — I think it is the only way that we can save the American food system from total destruction, which it’s already there at total destruction with monoculture fruit and grain production, and vegetable production.”
Sloan said food forests are modeled on syntropic agroforestry — an approach to growing food that again focuses on mimicking naturally-occurring, diverse, multilayered forest ecosystems but with a focus on food.
“And,” Sloan added, “the diversity and complexity of this site is what allows us to be resilient in a way that monocultures are not.”
The goal, he explained, was to basically reestablish the curated and balanced food forests that Native nations have long maintained throughout the Americas, especially before Europeans arrived and razed everything they could to plant expanses of individual crops highly susceptible to pests and disease.
“We have this huge diversity of plants,” he said, “and we might get spotted wing drosophila (fruit flies) infesting all the cherries — which is what happens. OK, we’re not getting cherries — but we’re getting lots of raspberries and blueberries and mulberries and peaches and plums, things that are not affected.”
That diversity ensures the forest produces abundant fruits and vegetables from May to December, and even has other edible plants all year round.
Origins and expansion
Sloan created Portland Food Forest Initative in 2022. He had spent nearly a decade running a bike shop but was ready for a change.
“I was feeling like it wasn’t fulfilling work that was central to building community, or creating lasting relationships, or making the world a more alive place,” he explained. “I wanted to work with living beings, people and plants, and ecosystems.”
He sold the bike shop and threw himself into learning everything he could about food forests. He took a permaculture design course from Oregon State University and traveled around the region and the world to see what others were doing.
He also honed his skills and built work experience by offering free fruit tree pruning.
“I put an ad on Craigslist saying ‘Hey I’ll come prune fruit trees for free because I’m trying to start a fruit tree pruning business,’” he said. “And in doing that, I got to practice pruning fruit trees and became much more skilled than I would have if I had just watched videos online or read books.”
Nowadays, he’s using a somewhat similar strategy to grow Portland Food Forest Initative into doing larger projects that return even more to the communities they’re a part of.
“The backyard food forests and the development of them has been this ongoing training program that I’ve developed for myself to become proficient,” he explained to Street Roots.
That’s partly because all the work at the sites is for free. And his role as executive director of the project is also unpaid.
Sloan gets paid some for Portland Food Forest Initative work associated with specific grants. But he also holds down other jobs — a licensed landscaper, a permaculture consultant, an instructor at Portland Community College and a staffer at Portland Placemaking Coalition — to pay his bills (which he aims to keep as low as possible to make the work possible). But he’s not complaining.
“I get a lot of food out of it, so that helps,” he joked.
In addition to providing food to communities, education to class attendees and experience to the nonprofit’s roughly 70 volunteers, each backyard food forest is also a living proof of concept for bigger projects with greater public benefits.
Portland Food Forest Initative has already taken on a handful of those larger projects.
The Hughes Community Church Food Forest is one example. Portland Food Forest Initative is working with Don’t Shoot PDX to convert the historic Black church’s 8,000-square-foot lawn and an old garden into a community food forest and native pollinator habitat.
Portland Food Forest Initative planted the site this spring and will be maintained by community members trained by the project. It will also work as an environmental educational site for Head Start students from the church.
The nonprofit also partnered with Hacienda Community Development Corporation to put in a food forest at a Cully affordable housing community that serves Latine people. The apartments are within a low income food desert, according to the USDA.
“So, once the food forests are producing amounts of food that is beyond what’s going to be consumed by the stewards and the homeowners,” he said, “we’ll then connect with organizations who are doing mutual aid direct to populations who (would) benefit from free, organic, nutritious food.”
Back when he had the bike shop, Sloan also considered becoming an environmental lawyer, or working to keep people out of prison after they get out.
But those would have taken at least half-a-decade of additional schooling, and he landed on the food forest project because of his business experience and the green thumb he developed.
“You’re trying to figure out something to do that would have a larger scale impact,” he said. “I want to make the world more alive and more beautiful and more abundant.”
Hungry for knowledge
Out in the sun earlier this month during their hour-long walkthrough, tour attendees peppered Sloan with dozens of questions as he explained how the site was made and how it functions as an ecosystem.
“So that’s an almond right next to you that is grafted on peach rootstock,” Sloan told attendees. “I’m going to probably either cut it down or graft onto it something else that is compatible, which are apricots, cherries, plums, pluots — anything that’s in the stone fruit family.”
“So you can grow two things?” one woman asked in disbelief. “At the same time?”
With Sloan’s blessing, some attendees tried plants like red currants (they were good!), but the group was still hungry for more information as he led everyone to a second site a few blocks away.
Standing around that site, attendees marveled as Sloan held up a small apple that was plum-colored on the outside and apple-red on the inside.
“That’s the money-shot right there,” one woman exclaimed as the crowd literally made “Oohs” and “Ahs.”
Sloan offered slices, with a smile and an added word of caution: “The flavor is not as good as it could be.”
“Honestly, who needs Warheads,” one attendee joked, referring to the notoriously sour candy after nibbling a bite of the apple. “Eat one bite of that and you’re good.”
The tour — like many the nonprofit offers — was sold out. The same is often true for the classes Sloan teaches at Portland Community College.
After the tour, attendees talked excitedly about their plans.
Crystal, the soon-to-be homeowner, was no exception. The 48-year-old government worker moved here to be closer to family and said she’s considering the nonprofit’s food forest requirements as she looks for her next home.
Part of that is the chance to learn permaculture gardening after a couple decades in Los Angeles without “anything that’s green.” But the group’s mission also speaks to her.
“I love the fact that this organization, they’re like, ‘Hey, we will help you. What are your long-term goals? We can design something, we steward it for a period of time and you contribute (half of) whatever yield there is to the organization as well — I absolutely love that,” she said. “It’s a benefit to you and to the community.”
Lately, Sloan has had to raise the bar on sites Portland Food Forest Initative will work with. Now, the group only takes on front yards that are over 2,000 square feet and have full sun. That way, the food forests themselves function as advertising, showing everyone the approach is feasible, visually appealing and delicious.
This article appears in July 29, 2026.
