Opening the Door to Emerging Forest Markets
Emerging forest markets, including agroforestry, carbon, ecotourism, biochar, and more, are creating new income streams for landowners across the country. But those opportunities don't reach everyone equally. Historically underserved landowners – including Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other landowners of color, as well as limited-resource and heirs' property owners – have long been left out of the technical assistance, financing, and market access pipelines that more established landowners take for granted.
The US Endowment for Forestry & Communities engaged New Leaf to help change that: working alongside the Sustainable Forestry & African American Land Retention Network (SFLR), Asekia, and Khuba International to research, translate, and disseminate clear, trustworthy content that meets historically underserved landowners and the organizations supporting them where they are, and helps them participate in emerging markets on fair terms.
Why Information Is the First Investment
Working forests sit at the intersection of climate, biodiversity, water, and rural livelihoods. When landowners can access emerging markets on fair terms, forests stay forests and rural communities capture more of the value those forests generate.
But the path from market concept to landowner participation is full of friction: unfamiliar terminology, opaque program rules, limited trusted intermediaries, and education materials that often miss the practical questions landowners actually ask. Better information, delivered through the channels landowners already trust, is one of the highest-leverage investments in the future of America's forests.
What We're Putting in Landowners' Hands
Tailored informational packets. Practice- and commodity-specific guides developed for landowner audiences across the East Coast.
Agroforestry trainings. Curriculum and delivery for select agroforestry practices, designed for workshop and field-based learning.
Two-page primers. Accessible, plain-language overviews of emerging market topics, built for quick reference and easy sharing.
Market directory and stakeholder mappings. A consolidated resource identifying the programs, buyers, service providers, and organizations operating in each emerging market, alongside maps of the relationships that move work forward.
EmergingForestMarkets.com. A central website that brings all of the above together in one place, making it easy for landowners, partners, and the public to find what they need.
Taking a Boots on the Ground Approach
We don’t just write from a desk. Before producing a single page of content, we conduct site visits across our network partners – meeting landowners, technical assistance providers, and local organizations on their ground – so the content we develop reflects the questions, vocabulary, and conditions of the people it's meant to serve.
That field-grounded approach is paired with deep expertise across agroforestry, carbon, water, ecotourism, mass timber, and the emerging markets still coming into view. We turn complex market mechanics into materials that landowners and their support organizations can actually use, designed to flow through the channels partners already run, whether that's a newsletter, a field day, or a website, rather than competing with them. And as markets evolve, so do we: we track engagement, gather feedback from the field, and refine materials continuously.
