National Technical Assistance Agroforester
UNL-USDA NRCS
SAF Working Group Officer
Plainview, Nebraska, United States
A fourth generation Nebraskan and a sixth generation Great Plains farm girl, Pamela Bergstrom grew up in northeast Nebraska surrounded by the windbreaks of the Prairie States Forestry Project of the 1930s and 1940s. The first windbreak planted for the project was in Antelope County Nebraska, 15 miles from her farm. After graduating from high school, Pamela enrolled in the University of Nebraska - Lincoln as an undeclared natural resources major leaning towards wildlife management. Between her Freshman and Sophomore years and again between her Sophomore and Junior years of college, she became the Nebraska Forest Service's first intern and spent her summer with rural and community foresters alike and she learned about Agroforestry and later transferred to the University of Missouri - Columbia (Mizzou) and obtained her Bachelor of Science Degree in Individualized Forestry Studies Emphasizing in Agroforestry in 2006. She would get her start professionally up in South Dakota for 3 years, before returning to Nebraska working with landowners on implementing agroforestry practices and teaching agroforestry planning, implementation, and maintenance to natural resource professionals. For the last year, Bergstrom has been the National Technical Assistance Agroforester for the United States Department of Agriculture's Natural Resource Conservation Service through an agreement with the Nebraska Forest Service where she is also the Agroforester on staff. With more than17 years of agroforestry experience, Pamela continues to preach the Agroforestry Gospel to landowners, natural resource professionals, and the public. Coming full circle from the 7-year-old farm girl who was tasked to water the newly planted trees in her family's windbreak she is now renovating. She claims every time she asked for a pony, her dad would buy another tree for the windbreak for her to water. She is still waiting for a pony but has a fabulous career.
Establishing a “Certified Agroforester” Professional Credential
Thursday, October 26, 2023
1:30pm - 3:00pm PST