Why Chestnuts?

The U.S. is the only ecologically appropriate region that lacks a significant commercial chestnut industry. According to the Savanna Institute, as of 2021 the U.S. was home to only 1,587 farms producing chestnuts commercially on only 4,228 acres in aggregate. A majority of chestnuts consumed in the U.S. are imported. The same study identifies the opportunity to quadruple domestic production, just to meet present demand.

On a longer term, the growth potential is much larger. China consumes 2+ lbs. of chestnuts per capita per year. If within a few generations, the U.S. could match that level of consumption, we would be eating >1 billion lbs. of chestnuts annually, which would imply >500,000 acres of production. If any significant percentage of that production is developed in the Northeast, it will amount to a multi-billion-dollar, regenerative regional export.

There is a long history of analogous crops — e.g. peanuts, soy, oats, almonds, peas, chickpeas — that, once proven, grew exponentially:

• Almond production in the U.S. has grown over 400% since the early 1990s, resulting in the planting of over 2 million acres of almond orchards.
• Soy production in the U.S. multiplied by almost 100x between ~1920-1940, as a recently-little-known forage became a major cash crop.
• Peanuts went from a southern regionalism to a national cash crop after the Civil War, owing much to the work of Dr. George Washington Carver.
• Dry bean production in the U.S. has grown significantly in a few decades; for example, red kidney bean production in Minnesota alone grew from 2 million lbs in 1980 to 90 million lbs in 2010 (a 45x increase).

Unlike those examples, the growth of a chestnut industry will be a massive net-positive for ecologies and the climate. And we are working to ensure that the growth of a chestnut industry does not just enrich the few “at the top of the pyramid”, but instead creates widespread, lasting equity and opportunity for the people that make it possible.

Trees grow by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in soil, vegetation, and biomass. Replacing annual staple grain production with perennial staple tree crops is a very effective strategy to counteract climate change.

Tree crops also allow farmers to re-integrate animals into the orchard (a practice called silvopasture), and to integrate multiple crops via intercropping and multistrata agroforestry. Project Drawdown, a meta-analysis of climate change mitigation strategies, identified these practices as amongst the most effective solutions worldwide.

The Carbon Farming Solution very conservatively estimates that temperate silvopasture in North America can sequester at least 9 tons CO2e / acre / year, with a lifetime stocking potential of at least 370 tons CO2e / acre. Even using these conservative figures, the ~15,000 acres of new production necessary to meet current U.S. chestnut imports represents an opportunity to sequester at least ~5,550,000 tons CO2e.

Agriculture costs the U.S. millions of tons of topsoil annually. The cropping systems that our farms replace (corn and soy fields on steep New York hillsides) are actively contributing to this loss of topsoil.

Comparatively, trees build soil: their roots stabilize the soil and restore mycorrhizal associations; their canopies cool the surface of the soil and improve the health of soil microbes; and they produce a significant amount of leaf litter that decomposes each winter.

On our farms, we subsoil when appropriate to decrease compaction and increase penetration of air, water, and microbiotic life across otherwise-resistive soil horizons; in combination with silvopasture, this rapidly builds healthy topsoil.

Annual production systems are often fragile and susceptible to disruption by drought, flood, or extreme weather events. In the Northeast, we currently import the majority of the grains we consume from the Midwest and overseas — a dependency identified by the New England Food Vision study as a major challenge to regional food security.

Long-lived tree crops are naturally much more resilient than their annual counterparts, which have often been bred to thrive only under intensive management and specific input conditions. A chestnut industry can thus “on-shore” the region's staple food supply, while also making that food supply much more resilient to future changes in the climate.

Many annual cropping systems depend heavily on toxic pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, which accumulate in the soil and the food we eat. They also require regular application of fossil-fuel-intensive synthetic fertilizers, literally mining fertility to compensate for the fertility being annually extracted from the soil. Meanwhile, runoff from synthetic fertilizers and livestock manure is causing ocean acidification and dead zones, which accelerate global warming.

If managed well, perennial crops like chestnuts tend to produce a food yield while naturally increasing soil health We manage our chestnut farms “beyond organic”, using no synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or fertilizers. When we integrate animals into the orchard, our management practices keep manure on-site (where it can fertilize plants) and out of the watershed. We are also developing on-site compost production and fertility cycling.

In recent years, the economics of annual agriculture have tended to put farmers in debt and beholden to large agribusiness, as the underlying condition of the land being “worked” tends to decline. Perennial agriculture comparatively tends to increase the economic value of landscapes year-over-year, building intergenerational equity in rural communities while aligning people's livelihoods with the long-term health of the land.

To ensure that the economic rewards of our projects are shared, we are developing legal structures to allow people who contribute labor to gain a long-term revenue share in each farm where they work.

Tree evapotranspiration releases moisture that feeds the hydrological cycle and creates more rain. By increasing soil carbon and organic matter, trees greatly increase water retention, which recharges aquifers and increases resiliency to flooding (a growing threat in the region). And tree roots stabilize soil, reducing erosion and sedimentation in waterways.

Adding trees to agricultural landscapes is one of the most cost-effective practices for reducing water pollution — improving habitat for regional fisheries and benefitting public health and budgets. Local governments and utilities are increasingly adopting tree planting programs to reduce costs for water treatment facilities (e.g. New York City has saved billions of dollars by investing in land-use practices surrounding its reservoirs).

Chestnut agroforestry can enable long-term land tenure for other forms of regenerative agriculture. We are building a network of partner producers to integrate other regenerative agriculture practices on the land that we manage.

For example, someone might graze cattle through an orchard’s alleys, while someone else manages bees for value-added chestnut and acacia honey, and a third partner produces compost in adjacent areas not suitable for orchard planting. These strategies can be mutually supportive (e.g. a compost producer providing fertility to accelerate the growth of chestnut trees, while interplanted biomass tree crops are chipped and used as inputs for that compost production).

If you’re a farmer seeking long-term land tenure, and are interested in managing regenerative agriculture operations within a broader agroforestry system, please see this one-page summary of the land access opportunity at our new site, and this listing on New York Farmland Finder.

Agriculture is the single greatest cause of wildlife extinction worldwide, often eliminating wildlife via habitat destruction, physical exclusion, and the use of toxic chemicals. Loss of biodiversity threatens us all, undermining human food and water security and increasing the presence of infectious human diseases.

Tree crops mimic the forest, creating diverse wildlife habitat and corridors between fragmented ecosystems. Integrated polycultures of other plants and animals magnify this effect. We manage our farms for a biodiverse understory, and (where feasible) pursue site-specific designs such as beaver dam analogs to create wetlands, edge plantings to create pollinator habitat, or drainage to increase infiltration rates and minimize erosion and sedimentation in the watershed.

When grazing animals are transitioned from open pasture to silvopasture, shade access creates a number of significant positive health effects, including impacts on weight gain, conception rates, and overall pregnancy rates. These effects can be amplified by planting perennial forage and fodder crops like locust, willow, poplar, and alder, which create nutritional diversity, make animals less susceptible to infections, and increase forage availability during midsummer and droughts. And livestock “return the favor” by fertilizing the trees. Our orchards are currently grazed by beef-cattle and sheep, and we plan to implement silvopasture as a primary strategy as we develop new farms.