FAQs

Yes.

Yes.

No.

See here for detailed information on storing, handling, preparing, and cooking chestnuts.

Fresh chestnuts can store in the fridge for a few months if stored properly. Detailed information on storing, handling, preparing, and cooking chestnuts is available here.

Some of the chestnuts available in Asian grocery stores in the U.S. are Chinese Chestnuts (castanea mollissima) imported from China. If you’re accustomed to those kinds of chestnuts, you’ll find the chestnuts we grow to be familiar — just much fresher and better-quality.

Chestnuts available in U.S. supermarkets are often European Chestnut (Castanea sativa) imported from Italy. Our chestnuts differ from those chestnuts in a few important ways:

• Our chestnuts are certified organic, and we manage our orchards way beyond USDA organic standards — compared to chestnuts at the grocery store, which are almost all coming from conventional sources that use herbicides and pesticides, and are almost always fumigated as part of the importation process.

• Our chestnuts are typically medium to medium-large, can be slightly sweeter, have a yellower color, and are sometimes denser (which lends itself to longer cook times at a lower temperature).

• Since our nuts are grown and processed regionally, they don't suffer from quality issues common with imports like drying out or molding during long transport.

We encourage all customers to check out our guidance on storing and cooking our chestnuts, because it may be a little different from what you’re accustomed to.

The American Chestnut (castanea dentata) was a mighty keystone species of the Eastern Woodlands, and was an important source of wildlife habitat, human food, wood, tannins, and other useful material for millennia — until it became effectively extinct as a result of the accidental import of a fungal pathogen in 1904. In the last century, much work has been done — by the many chapters of the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation (ACCF), and many others — to breed mostly-American trees that are blight-resistant, in order to (re)introduce those trees to the forests of Eastern North America. While those efforts are showing some promising progress, it is important to understand that pure American Chestnuts cannot survive in the wild — and any version of a successful “reintroduction” of castanea dentata would involve either some degree of “melting pot” hybridization between American chestnuts and some of the world’s other wonderful species of chestnuts (including Chinese, Japanese, and European), or (hypothetically) genetically modifying the organism.

Reforesting the chestnuts of the Eastern Woodlands is a noble and worthwhile goal, and it is not our focus. Instead, we focus on transitioning degraded former corn/soy/hay fields into vibrant perennial agricultural systems that create wildlife habitat on agricultural lands, build soil, clean water, and pull carbon from the atmosphere. This requires that we plant trees that can reliably produce delicious, nutritious food, while thriving in today’s pest and pathogen environment, and not depending on the use of toxic chemicals. American chestnuts can’t do that, so we work with hybrids. There are definitely some American genetics in our orchards (as well as some European), but the species most prominently represented are Chinese and Japanese. In addition to many diverse hybrids, the orchards also include some pure Chinese chestnuts.

From a habitat perspective, there is definitely value in restoring “more” American chestnut trees to the forest, if/when that becomes possible — but broadly, the habitat benefits of hybrid chestnuts are far better than the habitat benefits of no chestnuts at all. Most wildlife that want to live in a chestnut tree or eat a chestnut are very happy to do so with a hybrid chestnut. And there is a growing body of evidence that many of the species formerly thought to only associate with American chestnut trees in fact associate with hybrid chestnuts as well. 

By combining the best traits of all the major chestnut species, we and other orchardists embrace a “melting pot” population that is healthier, more vigorous, more productive, and better suited to temperate North America's climate and pest/pathogen environment. We grow open-pollinated seedling chestnut trees from orchards that include Chinese, Japanese, European, and American genetics, as well as many hybrids between those species. By overall percentage, the species most prominently represented are Chinese and Japanese.

“Seedlings” means that each tree we grow is an individual with its own unique DNA and heritage. Compare this with most commercial tree crops (apples, pears, oranges, bananas, walnuts, pecans, avocados etc.) which are almost exclusively based on thousands of clones of a few individuals.

“Open-Pollinated” means people are not controlling which tree pollinates which other tree to fertilize each new seedling — it is up to them, the wind, and chance.

“Hybrid” does not mean GMO — we are talking about the totally natural process by which trees of different (but closely-related) species can pollinate each other to make a new seedling with mixed heritage. For example, a pure chinese mother could be pollinated by a pure japanese partner, or a half-japanese / half-european mother could be pollinated by a partner that is a mix between american, chinese, and european, etc. This is similar to how your parents and grandparents may each have their own heritage, and they came together to make the one and only you.

Almost every food you’ve ever eaten is the result of some process of domestication, hybridization, and breeding, and almost every food you’ve ever eaten originally evolved on another continent. Apples come from Kazakhstan. Rice comes from East Asia. Even foods like corn and beans that are often thought of as “native” staples but were in fact imported thousands of miles to North America from Mesoamerica by Native Americans. Etc. Unless you forage for edible wild plants, very little of the food you’ve probably eaten in your life (besides squash, sunflowers, and a couple of herbs) comes from a “native” plant.

There is certainly great value in increasing the diversity of plants in our landscapes — including species often described as “native”. And there are certainly “non native” species that cause ecological harm in North America. And also, many people overstate and oversimplify the distinction between “native” and “non-native” plants, assuming that any plant that was not widely naturalized in North America at the time of European contact would today cause ecological harm in North America. This is certainly not the case.

Our whole contemporary understanding of what is “native” is actually the result of the landscape shaped by pre-colonial native peoples, who undertook ambitious, large-scale, multi-millennia projects — favoring some plants over other plants, moving plants around, and importing “non native” plants with useful traits over long distances — in order to enhance the landscapes they inhabited and make a more diverse landscape with a greater abundance of human food/materials and fodder for game animals.

As of 2025, approximately 20,000 crop trees and shrubs, including chestnut, hickory, oak, seaberry, walnut, apple, pear, peach, mulberry, and persimmon. In 2026-2027, we anticipate our operation will grow toward ~32,000 crop trees and shrubs, plus a high density fodder silvopasture system.

2018-2019: Before starting Breadtree, Russell had worked as an ecological designer and consultant to landowners and food companies. He came to believe that if we wanted to prove it was possible to build viable farm and food enterprises around perennial staple foods like chestnuts, it wasn’t going to happen by trying to convince clients to do it. In 2018, he started working on a plan to access land and build his own chestnut business, with very little startup cash. He put out flyers all over New England and New York looking for landowners interested in a 30 year, revenue sharing lease (in which the landowner waives annual lease payments in exchange for a % of future chestnut revenues). After speaking with over 50 candidates, he met Brad Wiley and Liz Collins, 5th generation dairy farmers at Otter Creek Farm in Rensselaer County NY who were in the process of transitioning out of conventional dairy into grass based livestock farming. The original 8-acre orchard was financed on 0% credit cards and planted in 2019 by volunteer labor from friends and family. 

2020-2021: Due to the success of that partnership, Brad and Liz were excited about expanding the project. In 2020-2021 Russell, friends, and family expanded the 8 acres to 20 acres at Otter Creek. During this 2020 planting season, Noah and Bug came out as volunteers and developed relationships with Russell that developed into a partnership to continue growing Breadtree Farms.

2022: Noah invested some cash in the partnership, enabling us to purchase the cheapest land we could find: a degraded field on the side of the state highway that had been used for gravel mining, continuous silage corn, and high-grade logging. During 2022 and early 2023, an amazing community came out on weekends to help plant about 60 acres of chestnut and hickory trees on a new orchard silvopasture. Our neighbors from across the river called and asked if we could build an orchard for them as a service, and their neighbor expressed interest in leasing us land — so we ended up expanding that project to 75 acres on both sides of the Battenkill River.

2023: By late 2022 the project was growing beyond our expectations. We had built the largest chestnut orchards in the Northeast, but we still had no budget to pay ourselves, were working other jobs during the week and planting on the weekends, and paying out of pocket to whichever friends we could get to show up and help. It was becoming difficult to sustain, and we started considering the possibility that maybe we could attract investors who might value the company the way we did. Through a year-long process with a lot of learning, we were fortunate to raise $2.3M by welcoming a silent partner and a handful of smaller angel investors, all of whom share our commitment to developing agroforestry in the Northeast for the long-term. We consider ourselves fortunate to have achieved this liquidity without sacrificing independence or becoming beholden to venture capital or anyone else whose interests could run contrary to our long-term mission.

2023-2025: The equity raise enabled us to begin working on Breadtree full time, grow our organization to a full-time team of 6, and expand our land base to about 600 acres. We also began to expand our agricultural program and partnerships to include honey production, pastured lamb, maple syrup, and a number of research trials with a more diverse range of perennial crops. In 2024 we won a USDA grant to fund the development of the largest chestnut handling & processing facility in the country, and during 2024-2025 our “orchards as a service” business grew considerably, allowing us to deepen our field research programs and expand to a full-time team of 10.

The (relative) success of the path we have followed has been made possible by our risk tolerance, decades of business experience, and access to financial capital. Frankly, we don’t think that path would be replicable by most young farmers who are interested in making careers around agroforestry. We are motivated to use our success to lower barriers to entry for other young farmers to adopt these practices. Over the coming years we are working to build partnerships that can offer low-cost, multi-decade financing to support young farmers to access land equity and build long-term agroforestry enterprises.

No! Many well-intentioned people are understandably confused about what it means to grow a monoculture, and the many different ways to grow a polyculture. In practical terms, a monoculture is field where farmers allow literally one kind of plant to grow, and exclude all other living beings through some combination of toxic chemicals, repeated mechanical disturbance, and/or plastic. Most conventionally managed annual staple crops (corn, wheat, beans, soy, etc.) are grown this way, and it definitely causes loss of wildlife habitat, loss of topsoil, reduced water quality, and environmental pollution (including greenhouse gas pollution).

Compared with a monoculture, even a “monocrop” organic orchard with a single species of crop trees can be hundreds or thousands of times more diverse. In addition to the trees themselves, there can be hundreds of species of herbaceous plants in the understory, the many birds and insects that live among those plants, and all of the microbes, fungi, and insects who live in the soil when it is not being killed every year. The system is not dependent on pollutive fertilizers or pesticides, and the perennial vegetation is anchoring and rebuilding soil and improving water quality.

Our approach to on-farm diversity includes:

• We intentionally plant highly diverse pastures to contribute to the health of our soils, and create more diverse habitat.

• We manage all of our orchards “beyond organic”, with no toxic chemicals, enabling much more wildlife activity within the agricultural landscape.

• We manage multiple species of grazing animals in our orchards, and keep honeybees.

• While our first focus was (and remains) organic chestnuts, we also grow a number of other perennial crops, including hickory, oak, seaberry, walnut, apple, pear, peach, mulberry, and persimmon. We are actively experimenting with interplanting strategies that organize multiple perennial tree and shrub crops together in shared fields.

• We intentionally plant seedlings rather than clones, for all tree crops where doing so is commercially feasible. This means the orchard is composed of thousands of genetic individuals, rather than thousands of clones of a handful of individuals.

• We are also actively experimenting with a number of multistrata interplantings and companion plantings of non-crop trees within our orchards, for yields and functions that include timber, nectar flow for pollinators, and winter fodder for livestock.

We have visited continuously managed European chestnut groves with trees between 400-700 years old! Because the trees we grow are hybrids from lineages developed in North America in the last 100 years, no one really knows how long they will live, but we expect some to live for centuries.

Due to the number of inquiries we now receive, we are no longer able to offer personal tours for everyone who wants to come visit. We welcome you to join any of the public events we host every year, including community planting days and informational tours. We also welcome farmers who are interested in gaining hands-on experience to join us for a 3-5 day paid “visiting planter” position every spring. The best way to stay abreast of those events and opportunities is to sign up for our mailing list (scroll all the way to the bottom of this page), follow us on instagram, and keep an eye on the events page.

The chestnut trees we grow generally begin to bear meaningful yields of chestnuts by their 5th year in the field. Some of other tree crops we are researching (e.g. Hickory, Oak) take more time to grow to bearing age, and might begin to produce between year 5-10. For all of these tree crops, yields increase annually at least for the first few decades of a tree’s life. Some individual chestnut trees can produce 20-30 pounds by year 10, and others will reach 300 pounds per tree by Year 20-25, though yields can be variable in early years.

• When sites show evidence of compaction, we subsoil. When possible, we do this in the tree rows before next steps.

• To prepare tree rows, we typically use a rotary deep spader to turn soil about 16 inches deep, reducing compaction and creating favorable root establishment conditions.

• In contexts where it is infeasible to prepare tree rows with a spader, we prepare planting positions with a hydraulic auger mounted on a skid steer. An 18” auger bit is often ideal, but the best size will depend on the size of the tree roots.

• After mechanical planting prep, we then plant diverse seed mixes designed to build soil health, provide fodder for livestock, and offer nectar flow for honeybees and other pollinators. For sites transitioning from conventional agriculture, we recommend at least one full season of preparation with cover crops.

After mechanical preparation, we plant all trees by hand rather than using mechanical planters for better tree placement and higher survivability. For silvopasture systems, we currently plant trees along 40’ alleys, with 16’ in-row spacing, for an initial density of about 68 trees per acre. In cases where we don’t expect an orchard to be grazed, we most often plant on a 20’ x 20’ grid.

We intentionally plant seedlings at 2-3x our intended final density, in order to allow selection of the best-performing trees. We plan to thin to approximately 40 trees per acre by years 20-25, removing trees based on production, form, and disease resistance. By year 10, well-managed trees can easily span 20-25 feet, so wider spacing prevents excessive early competition.

We plant every tree with a 6’ Plantra tree shelter secured to their proprietary fiberglass stake. After extensive trials comparing Plantra tubes, Tree Pro tubes, and welded wire cages, we found Plantra tubes far superior for tree health, rodent management, human safety, and ease of installation. Trees typically outgrow these shelters between years 6-8. If you are looking to procure a quantity of these tubes for your planting, we offer them to peer growers for $8.50 per tube/stake unit.

During Years 1-3 in the field, we give each tree a paper weed mat topped with wood chip mulch. We have had plenty of success with wood chips only, but our side-by-side trial demonstrated that the paper weed mat did a better job of suppressing weeds, and enabled us to use less wood chips per tree. If you’re in the Northeast and looking to buy those weed mats, we wholesale them for a better price than you will be able to get retail - get in touch if you’re interested.

About 2 times each season, we mow the area immediately around each tree row with a Ventrac. Zero turn mowers are also well-suited for this task. As the trees get larger (around year 3-5), a swing-arm mower (sometimes called a “side cutter”) can become a good option for this task. We intentionally allow vegetation in the alleys between the trees to grow tall, for soil health and habitat. There is an abundance of evidence that other plants are not just “competing” with trees for nutrients, and in fact nurturing a more diverse and abundant understory contributes to healthier soil, healthier trees, and more resilience to drought and extreme weather.

We generally recommend people purchase from our nursery partners, Yellowbud Farm. We do grow trees for our own projects, and often have limited quantities of chestnut trees (i.e. 200-500 good quality stems) available for local customers.

If you are looking for tree tubes and/or paper weed mats, we offer bulk pricing to help other farmers access better prices than retail. If you’re interested in this, get in touch.

They are, but we don’t recommend it. Many of our trees will be exceptional mothers, but we don’t recommend propagating seed from our orchards yet because we haven’t gotten to observe the trees long enough to say which ones are really worth propagating. Most years, we order in excellent seed selections from the best orchard chestnuts in the best performing orchards in the country, and if other growers are looking to source seed, you can piggyback on our order. If that’s of interest, please get in touch.

Pruning in the winter, mulch in the spring, weeding/mowing in the summer and early autumn, harvest in early October.

For breeders who are focused on restoring some version of the American chestnut to our Eastern forests, blight resistance is a primary challenge and focus. Comparatively, because our focus is on chestnuts as a food plant, we embrace the “melting pot” and grow trees that come from many generations of open pollination between Chinese, Japanese, European, and American chestnut trees, from breeding projects (dating back to the 1940s) that have been selected for multiple generations of blight resistance, among other traits. While individual trees may show minor signs of blight, the population overall is well-adapted and resistant. We plant exclusively seedlings (each a unique genetic individual) at higher densities to allow selection of the most resilient trees.

We take a whole-systems approach to pest management, focusing on:

• Diverse plantings (including understory species) to reduce pest pressure

• Regular scouting and maintaining tree vigor

• Six-foot tree tubes and pruning to six feet for deer protection

• Mowing around crop trees at least twice per season while leaving tall vegetation in alleys (to divert rodents away from crop trees)

• Localized, organic sprays (like bacteria thuringiensis) only when severe beetle or caterpillar pressure threatens young trees

Weevils lay their eggs in nuts like chestnut, hickory, and oak. Without intervention, those eggs will grow into larvae that will eat the inside of the nut and render it inedible for humans. To interrupt the weevil life cycle, conventional growers use a combination of insecticides and post-harvest hot water treatment. As organic growers, we take an integrated approach that includes:

• Frequent harvesting (ideally daily) during season

• ASAP hot water treatment (120°F for ~20 minutes)

• Good cleanup in harvest areas after harvest season

• Proper cold storage to halt development

• Diverse ground covers that typically have lower weevil pressure

With consistent mowing management, we've reduced vole damage to less than 2% of trees in multi-thousand tree orchards. Our tree tubes have been highly effective for deer protection, and we’re finding that diverse groundcover with many forbs significantly reduce Japanese beetle pressure compared to grass-dominated systems.

Coming soon! We want to help build a viable regional chestnut industry by lowering barriers-to-entry for other growers. Our facility is designed to serve growers throughout New York and New England, and may come to serve some growers from the northern Mid-Atlantic. We expect the facility to be operational starting Autumn 2027.

Through a USDA grant focused on on-shoring organic commodities, we're developing what will be the largest chestnut processing facility in the country, designed to serve as a shared path-to-market for hundreds of other growers across the Northeast. The facility will be certified organic, located at our home farm in Salem, NY, and capable of handling 500K - 1M+ pounds annually. The facility will include equipment for cleaning, sizing, sorting, hot water treatment, drying, storage, shelling, and milling.

We'll focus on both fresh chestnuts and dried products including:

• Fresh in-shell chestnuts (multiple sizes)

• Chestnut flour (fine and coarse grinds)

• Chestnut flakes (similar to oatmeal texture)

• Value-added products (as the market develops)

As of 2025:

• we retail fresh organic chestnuts for between $10-13/lb, depending on size.

• we wholesale organic chestnuts for $8-10/lb, depending on size.

• For growers looking to wholesale chestnuts into our processing facility (beginning 2027), we estimate paying between $3.50-4.00/pound for completely unprocessed nuts (with some burrs, unsized, untreated), though this could vary based on quality and cull rates of 10-20%.

• In the coming years, we hope to develop some kind of sliding payscale so that growers who make the extra effort and investment to bring us cleaner, higher-quality nuts can be compensated for the quality they are delivering.

Analysis from the Savanna Institute suggests a market opportunity for at least 200,000 acres of chestnut orchards in the U.S. Our GIS analysis has identified over 200,000 acres suitable for chestnut agroforestry in the Upper Hudson Valley alone. If just 10% of that acreage were developed, it could produce approximately 40 million pounds of organic chestnuts annually.

Currently, Breadtree has ~300 acres planted or planned through 2026, and another 400-600 acres have been recently planted or are plannedby other regional growers, with potential for around 800 acres in the region by end of 2027.

While there is real potential to grow the U.S. market for fresh chestnuts by several orders of magnitude, we operate on the assumption that market saturation for fresh chestnuts is already inevitable given current plantings. This is one reason we're focusing heavily on dried products like flour. The fresh market may become more competitive, but the gluten-free flour market represents a much larger opportunity for value-added processing that can absorb greater production volumes.

Our (intentionally conservative) modeling projects ~1,000 lbs/acre by year 10 for plantings at orchard density. At maturity, well-managed orchards can yield 1,500-3,500 pounds per acre annually. However, yields can be variable in early years even for healthy trees.

For an individual chestnut orchard without debt, annual profitability can typically begin around year 7-8, with full payback of establishment costs between years 10-12. However, this requires about 12 years before the orchard provides a livelihood, so farmers need other income sources during those years.

Establishment costs vary significantly based on scale and approach:

• Trees: $6.00-50.00 per tree (we recommend $8.00-20.00 range for quality genetics)

• Tree protection: $6.50-15.00 per tree (Plantra tubes at $8.50 recommended)

• Paper weed mats: $2.50-6.00 per tree (optional but effective)

• Site preparation: Minimal (hand layout) to $200-300 per acre (mechanical)

• Labor: 55% of costs if hired, zero if self-performed

Land access is one of the biggest barriers to viable agroforestry. We started out using revenue-sharing leases, and eventually raised some equity investment to buy land. We are happy to share boilerplates for revenue-sharing leases with interested farmers. Given that most farmers who wish to adopt agroforestry practices can’t afford to buy land, we see long-term, low-interest financing as essential for increasing agroforestry adoption.

Through our USDA grant program, we provide technical support including:

• One-on-one consultations for current and aspiring chestnut growers

• Webinars and educational workshops

• Farmer field days and volunteer planting opportunities

• Access to our financial modeling tools

Sign-up for webinars and ongoing information is available here.

Sign-up for 1:1 consultations is here. To get the most value out of these calls, we encourage new prospective growers to do as much research as they can before signing up for one of these. Try to use this call to inform site design / operations planning questions rather than answering basic FAQs that you can answer on the web. 

• Attend our educational events and webinars

• Schedule a consultation to discuss your specific situation

• Purchase our products to support our growth

• Partner with us as a landowner interested in agroforestry

• Join our network as a farmer growing tree crops

• Sign up for our newsletter (bottom of the page) for the latest updates

Breadtree designs, establishes, and manages orchards as a service for client landowners in the Hudson Valley and Southwest Vermont. If you’re interested in learning more, see here or get in touch.