2025 Update

Developing Industrial Capacity

Shortly after last year’s investor update we were awarded $1.9M from the USDA Organic Market Development program to create the largest chestnut processing facility in the country. This project is designed to grow this nascent regional industry by supporting hundreds of agroforesters to process and market their organic chestnuts. Unfortunately, this project’s federal funding has been paused for nearly 3 months, and the future of that funding remains unclear. Even if this project were terminated today, we will have supported important next steps for the growth of the chestnut industry in the Eastern U.S. We’ve:

• Reached 200+ farmers and over 100,000 food consumers through Farm Aid, NNGA, PASA, Regenerative NYC and on-farm events.

• Offered free 1 on 1 technical support to 50+ farmers, and provided over 8 hours of webinars that have been distributed to over 200 stakeholders.

• Completed a 3 week full-team research trip studying Italy’s mature chestnut industry. We focused on processing facilities and equipment for harvest and post-harvest processing. Slides from our public webinars documenting this research (including many photos) are here and here.

• Gutted our existing 6000 ft² barns to prepare them for renovation, and launched an architectural design process (with Midcourse Design and Group Work) to guide that renovation.

Strong Financials & Growing Client Service

Over the last 12 months, there has been a significant increase in interest and investment in our work in the region:

Philanthropic Grants

The Novo Foundation has committed a $500k expenditure responsibility grant to support Breadtree’s processing facility development project. 

Public funding

• Breadtree secured a $50k Value Added Producer Grant from the USDA Rural Development Office. We have completed this scope of work, and will now pursue a subsequent grant that provides up to $250k in working capital to support our food marketing efforts.

• Breadtree contracted on over $250K funding through three Climate Smart Commodities programs to support diversification of our pastures, and additional tree planting. Though we did receive $70,000, these programs are now on pause and likely to be terminated given their focus on the climate.

Growth in Client Service

In the last 3 months, Breadtree signed contracts with 3 new farm clients in Washington County (NY) and Bennington County (VT). These projects include site design, establishment, and 5-10 year management terms. Cumulatively, these projects will generate $2.8M revenue over that term, and expand Breadtree’s operation to 25,000 trees on ~800 acres under management, while diversifying our cropping system and conducting nationally-important field research (more detail below). Much of the tree crops from these projects will flow through Breadtree’s aggregation and processing facility to support these farms’ path to market. These client relationships began with organic inbounds from clients willing to buy land in our area so they could work with us. We continue to receive inbound interest in farm services despite no active marketing.

When we completed the equity raise in 2023, we expected a high likelihood that the agricultural operations would require another influx of capital between 2025-2028. But for now, it looks like we have eliminated that need — our current financial modeling suggests that client-service revenue, paired with our growing food sales revenues, will cashflow our farm and food business until food sales revenues can carry it on their own.

Expanding the Vision for Northeast Agroforestry

In 2019, we started establishing chestnut silvopastures because we saw chestnuts as a keystone perennial staple crop and a “ready to go” proof-of-concept that viable farm and food businesses could be built around temperate agroforestry. But while you can actually survive on just chestnuts, most people probably don’t want to. If we want to make agroforestry a major contributor to the region’s food system, there are a number of high-potential agroforestry crops and systems that require significant field research and industry development in order to be effectively commercialized and scaled up in the same way that chestnuts are today.

We did not expect to be able to afford trialing these more innovative agroforestry systems until our core chestnut enterprise was more mature, but our new clients’ willingness to act as partners and invest in the future of Northeast agroforestry is allowing us to do so. With these partners, Breadtree is substantially diversifying our overall agricultural operations into several new perennial staple crops, and conducting nationally-important agroforestry field research:

In short, Breadtree is becoming much more than just a chestnut farm. With this spring’s plantings, we’re committed to producing as many as 10 staple foods sourced from regionally appropriate tree and shrub crops — chestnuts, chestnut flour, hickory oil, maple syrup, acorn flour, (potentially) acorn oil, seaberry juice/vinegar, apple juice/vinegar — as well as silvopastured meat. And in doing so, we will be developing and proving agricultural management practices, agronomics, harvest and post harvest processing, and market development strategies for something that today, does not exist on this continent: a “whole diet” perennial farm and food business.

Growing Industry Through Partnership

Importantly, Breadtree is just one contributor to this growth and diversification, which is being advanced by a coalition of players in the region, including our nursery partners Yellowbud Farm, our friends at the Smokey House Center (Danby, VT) and the Hudson Valley Farm Hub (Hurley, NY), and a number of Conservation Districts in Vermont and New Hampshire. There is a clear network of practice forming in Northeast agroforestry, and we are honored to be a part of it.

We are also proud and happy that our role as a proof-of-concept and “bell cow” operation is working. Breadtree is proving and leading the way for a community of many stakeholders to work toward industrial scale through partnership. 

• Our colleague Michael Fernandez, who leads the Bennington County Conservation District, has secured millions in funding from the State of Vermont to support farmers to establish 1000 acres of agroforestry projects by 2030. Much of this will include chestnut and hickory plantings that will likely aggregate to our facility. Michael tells us that Breadtree’s growth and success — both as a leading regional agroforestry farm operation, and as a developing aggregator and processor — has served as an instrumental proof point in his ability to successfully advocate for funding this policy objective. “I could not have done this without you.”

• In addition to our own ~280 acres of chestnut orchards (including upcoming projects), we are aware of 500+ other acres of chestnut orchards recently planted or expected to be planted in the next 2-3 years across the Northeast. Many of these growers are attending our free webinars, utilizing our free 1:1 consultations, and participating in a grower network that can share best practices, learnings, and tools. They tell us they are counting on our processing facility to bring their produce to market.

• A note from one of these new agroforestry farmers, on ~50 acres in Massachusetts: “I just want to take a moment to thank you for the work you're doing to move this small but mighty industry forward. You all are out in front in our region, and that inevitably means taking risks and lots of trial and error, all of which future farmers (myself included) will benefit from. I just want to make sure that you know that the work you all are doing is deeply appreciated and that, regardless of the… federal government, you've already done a ton to move the needle for other projects.”

Expanding Scope = Evolving Strategic Direction

A handful of factors are inviting us to bring fresh eyes to the question of how we can best serve the needs of a truly diverse agroforestry landscape in the Northeast, including:

1. The growing diversity of plants we are putting in the ground, and the larger function we are beginning to play in field research and new crop / farm system development. This changes the design criteria for the processing infrastructure that we plan to develop, and likely suggests that it include the space and equipment to process more crops. This increases the likelihood that some additional forms of private fundraising will be necessary to complete the facility.

2. The currently unknown status of our contracted federal grant through Organic Market Development. This increases the likelihood that some additional forms of private fundraising will be necessary to complete the facility.

3. The likelihood (as we’ve gathered) that the USDA will terminate the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities, including The Nature Conservancy’s Expanding Agroforestry Program, which had been expected to fund the establishment of thousands of acres of new agroforestry plantings over the next 4 years. This creates a huge unmet need for funding and/or financing for farmers seeking to adopt agroforestry systems.

4. The still underserved need for funding for agroforestry field research and germplasm exploration for important novel tree crops.

Our analysis is evolving along with circumstances that are in flux. But at this point we believe it’s likely that — regardless of the future of our OMDG grant funding — we will ultimately pursue a project that is well beyond the means of that grant funding. Over the next 3-5 years, we expect we will seek to raise capital in the $6-8M range to fully realize a processing facility that meets the needs of growing agroforestry industries in the Northeast. Ultimately, we believe our chestnut cash flows could service market rate debt beginning in 2028 or 2029, but we believe it is in the best interest of the region for the timelines of this project not to be constrained by the schedule of our business. We will keep you all informed over the coming months as the timing and terms of our developing capital strategy take shape.

Growing Our Organization and Sharing the Rewards

We continued to grow our team while giving all employees a raise, and working towards a path to profit-sharing and partnership that all employees can vest into. As of this writing we have grown to a full-time team of 8:

• Riley Crognale joined Breadtee as a lead carpenter in July 2024, and has been feverishly building out our agricultural infrastructure, supporting renovation of our barns, and making critical improvements to our home/office at Breadquarters in Salem, NY. 

• Eliza Killo joined us at the start of March 2025 to bring well over a decade of experience growing fruit and vegetables, tending vineyards, and caring for livestock.

• We are grateful to be joined by Elodie Eid, Jason Wollenberg, and SG Groat on our seasonal planting team for this Spring 2025.

• We will have 10 other farmers join us for 2-4 day paid educational planting visits this Spring. This is a new program we are offering as a way for young farmers to get paid to gain agroforestry experience, and start to build a relationship with Breadtree, in case we have future job openings. We’re really excited to be extending this opportunity to widen the breadth of who gets to be a part of this work. Please let us know if anyone in your network is interested in this opportunity.

Feeding Families!

This time last year, we had never delivered food to a customer. Since then, we’ve taken big steps in our process of learning how to be a food company:

• We learned a lot from a “training wheels” 2024 sales season that required us to develop a number of important new capacities, including post-harvest sterilization, sizing, on-farm cold storage, order fulfillment, and expanded customer-facing communications. Despite being first-timers, we delivered! The response has been overwhelming, and many of last fall’s customers have already reordered. 

• We sold 800 lbs (roughly 25% to retail customers and 75% to restaurants) while preserving an average price of $11.42 per lb (95% of our $12 retail price last year). Nuts were aggregated from our farms and several partner farms across NY, CT, and MA.

• We’ve generated almost 4X the retail sales that we had for last season’s harvest, with 6 months to go until fulfilling those preorders. And we are continuing to build relationships with regional restaurant partners who will order in 25-200 lbs quantities.

• By popular demand, we source about 2000lbs of chestnut flour from our friends at Route 9 Coop in Carrollton, Ohio, to give our customers the opportunity to start cooking with chestnut flour while our production and processing capacity grow to the point we can start producing it ourselves (probably 1-2 years).

• Our team is conducting a lot of culinary experimentation with chestnuts and chestnut flour, and we are building up recipe libraries on our site (for fresh chestnuts and chestnut flour) including some excellent originals. We’re inviting customers to contribute recipes to this library, and offering free flour to bakers, chefs, and culinary professionals to participate in developing recipes. Please connect us with your chef / baker / foodie / restaurant friends if you think they would be a good fit for this project!

Continuing to Innovate our Agriculture

We are always seeking opportunities to increase ecological function and the performance of our pastures and orchards:

• We’ve conducted a series of trials (building on the work of the Jena Experiment and Dr. Christine Jones) focused on increasing the diversity of the orchard understory and the fungal communities in our soils.

• We’re experimenting with novel cycling strategies in our groundcover management, enhancing habitat for beneficial birds and insects while suppressing habitat for rodents that predate young trees. These approaches are inspired by the work of Helen Atthowe.

• We’re experimenting with utilizing ferments and other above-ground inoculants to support microbial diversity. This includes trials with AgriSea kelp biostimulants, farmed sustainably in New England coastal waters using the Greenwave methodology.

• We’re developing and implementing remineralization programs to help post-dairy soils transition into productive organic orchard silvopastures.

• We’ve integrated a tree-observation/data-tracking software that allows everyone on our team to track in-field observations to each of the nearly 20,000 trees we are stewarding.

• For the 2025 season, we will be utilizing two new pieces of mowing equipment and a PTO-driven row-mulcher to improve the efficiency, scalability, and quality-of-experience of our agricultural management cycles.