HV Chestnut Planting Fund

Thanks for your interest in Breadtree’s Hudson Valley Chestnut Planting Fund.

Program Summary

Breadtree Farms, with support from the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming, is launching a pilot program to equip Hudson Valley farmers to plant chestnut trees on their farms in 2026. We aim to provide all participating farmers with free trees, tree tubes, weed mats, design/layout consultation, and ongoing farmer-to-farmer technical support and coaching before and after planting.

This program is not designed to provide reimbursement for the time/labor that goes into planting these trees, but — drawing on our experience planting our first 20,000+ trees with support from 250+ community members — we hope to coordinate work-share among participating farmers, and/or support you to host community-supported planting events to plant the trees this program will provide.

While Breadtree has offered a great deal of technical support to current and aspiring chestnut growers, we have never designed or implemented a program like this. We want to shape this program to meet the needs of the farmers who express interest, and we look forward to collaboratively creating a program that helps expand access to chestnut agroforestry in our region.

If you have any questions about this program, please email us at bug@breadtreefarms.com.

The deadline for the interest form / application is August 1, 2025.

If you are a funder interested in helping to expand this program to reach more farmers in our region, please email russell@breadtreefarms.com.

Eligible New York Counties

Farmers in Albany, Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Rensselaer, Rockland, Ulster, Sullivan, or Westchester Counties (NY) are eligible for this program.

How Trees Could Fit Into Your Farm

There a lot of different ways tree crops can fit into a diversified farming operation:

  • If you grow vegetables, you can alley crop with tree crops, or incorporate them into field edges or field / hilly areas outside your primary cultivation.

  • If you graze animals, you can add tree crops to your pasture, which creates patchy shade and offers a number of health benefits for animals, pasture, and soil.

  • If you have fallow fields, fields you hay, or fields you don’t know what to do with, they may be suitable to planting an orchard.

Program Timeline

We are roughly planning the following timeline:

  • 8/1/2025: interest form / application deadline

  • Summer 2025: raise awareness and collect interest from farmers

  • Fall 2025: choose farmers to participate in the cohort

  • Winter 2025/2026: host a few webinars for education and coordination purposes, and do 1:1 consults with all participating farmers to understand your context and needs, and co-design a planting plan for your farm.

  • Spring 2026: deliver trees, tubes, weed mats and other relevant materials; support cohort farmers to implement planting plans for their farms. Depending on everyone’s interest, this may involve some work-share between cohort farmers, and may involve us supporting you to host community planting days.

  • Rest of 2026-2027: We will be available for follow-up coaching and other support for cohort farmers.

Who Should Apply?

We encourage professional farmers with long-term land tenure in an eligible county to apply. You do not need to already have experience with tree crops or chestnuts in order to apply. Our goal and intention is that this program can help farmers who would otherwise struggle to afford adopting tree crops on their farms — if that is you, please apply.

What Kind Of Chestnuts Are These?

We and our nursery partners have put years of research into identifying the chestnut genetics that are best suited for the Northeast, and we are happy for the opportunity to share these trees with our neighbors and peers.

We grow open-pollinated seedlings of the healthiest, most vigorous and productive mother trees in the best-performing chestnut orchards in the temperate U.S. Those mother orchards include parents of hybrid American, Chinese, Japanese, and European ancestry, many of whom have been thriving in similar climates to the Northeast for 40-75 years. All the world's chestnut species are relatively "close cousins", and freely pollinate each other; over a few generations of this process, the best traits of multiple chestnut species combine to produce more vigorous trees who grow more and better food, and are better adapted to the climate and pest/pathogen environment.

Growing seedlings means that there is much more diversity in the population than most other kinds of fruit and nut orchards, which generally consist of thousands of clones. Each tree we plant is a genetic individual with its own unique heritage, just like all of us — e.g. some trees might be pure Chinese, some might come from a half Japanese / half European mother pollenized by a Chinese partner, and some might combine all four species in different proportions. There is also a lot of variation within species as well, just like every other living being. This approach means these populations are more resilient and resistant to pest and pathogen pressures, and that every planting is an important part of a larger, collaborative breeding project.

What To Do If You’re Interested:

If you are interested in applying for this program, please complete the following form by 8/1/2025:

If possible, we would like to keep the administration of this program lean, so that we and you can focus on farming, not doing paperwork. Our goal is for this form to serve as the application for this program.

We plan to select participating farmers for the cohort based on responses to this form, and follow-up conversations. If form responses suggest that other steps are called for, we will follow up with those steps.

More Information:

Beef cattle, honeybees, and organic chestnut silvopasture in early spring 2025 (year 6)

Why Chestnuts?

Chestnuts are grains that grow on trees. For thousands of years, chestnuts have played a key role in wise human cultures all over the world — sheltering stranded soldiers in storms, feeding peasants in famine, and supporting anti-colonial movements in North America, across the Mediterranean, to East Asia. Here in North America, chestnuts were a major food source until the early 1900s, when an invasive blight decimated the native chestnut population. 

Chestnuts are a staple carb — like potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, wheat, and corn. You can roast chestnuts, boil them into soups or stews, or dry them to make gluten-free flour, and foods like polenta, pasta, pancakes, tortillas, and bread. For this reason, cultures around the world have called chestnuts the “bread tree”. 

Because chestnuts grow on trees, they get planted once, and they live for centuries — while producing staple calories, building soil, improving air and water quality, creating wildlife habitat, and sequestering carbon.

Shifting more of our grain consumption from annual grains to perennial grains like chestnuts can contribute to healthier landscapes, healthier food, healthier human communities, and a healthier climate. We see chestnuts as a keystone crop that can support the growth of resilient and sustainable food systems at a watershed scale in the Northeast. You can learn more here about the benefits of chestnuts and our approach to farming.

For millennia, chestnuts have been a keystone food in wise human cultures all over the world, from North America to the Mediterranean to East Asia. Many of these cultures have called chestnuts the “bread tree”. 

Fresh chestnuts, dried whole chestnut kernels, milled chestnut flour

About Breadtree

Breadtree is a farm and food company building new, sustainable ways of farming in the Northeast. Over the last 6 years, Breadtree has grown from a grassroots, community-supported volunteer effort into the largest commercial agroforestry operation in the Northeast U.S. We’ve transitioned ~300 acres of conventional corn, soy, & hay fields into organic nut and fruit orchards designed to be grazed by sheep and cattle, across 800+ acres in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley and Southwest Vermont. We farm using certified-organic practices that reduce erosion, enhance water quality, improve wildlife habitat, and support a healthy climate.

We are first-generation farmers working to be good ancestors and leave a more vibrant and resilient home region for future generations, by seeding cooperative agricultural industries that create equity and opportunity for many farmers across our region. In service to that goal, we’ve offered free mentorship and technical support to hundreds of young farmers. We’re excited that this program creates the opportunity to offer material support to help young farmers adopt agroforestry practices. To learn more about our work, see here and here.

How it started (2019): bare earth, herbicide residue, and corn stubble

How it’s going (2025): beef cattle grazing on pasture between organic chestnut trees

Regional Processing Facility

Site of Breadtree’s future chestnut processing facility, at our home farm in Salem, NY.

With support from the USDA, Breadtree is building a chestnut processing facility at our home farm in Salem, NY, designed to serve as a shared regional resource and path to market for other chestnut growers in the Hudson Valley and western New England. The facility will have the capacity to clean, sterilize, size, and bag fresh chestnuts, as well as drying, shelling, and milling chestnut flour.

If you're interested in growing chestnuts but do not want to build your own sales channels for the nuts those trees produce, you will be able to wholesale them to us (provided you farm with organic growing practices). If you want to retail your own nuts but don’t want to invest in post-harvest processing equipment, you will be able to use this facility for a reasonable fee.

As part of this project, we are providing free 1 on 1 technical support and educational webinars to current and aspiring chestnut farmers, who are helping to codesign the aggregation network that will center on this facility. You can learn more about this project, and sign up for webinars or technical support here.

Annual Care Responsibilities for Chestnut Trees

We planted our first 20,000+ trees with support from 250+ community members over the last 6 years.

To give interested farmers a clear sense of what they might be signing up for, we wanted to share an overview of what’s involved in establishing and caring for young chestnut trees in an organic system.

Year 1 Establishment:

  • If your ground is compacted, consider subsoiling.

  • You can make planting much easier by preparing the planting rows by either strip tilling, drilling holes with an auger, or running a single-shank subsoiler/ripper.

  • You can mark out tree positions either with rulers or GPS surveying equipment (which we would loan out).

  • Each tree gets hand-planted, which involves some shovel work and some skilled hand work. We will teach participating farmers how to plant trees well.

  • Each tree gets a stake and a tube to protect the tree from rodents and deer.

Year 1-3 Annual Care:

  • In the late spring / early summer, each tree gets a paper weed mat (to suppress competing vegetation) and some wood chip mulch. Wood chips can be forked out of a trailer or the bucket of a loader. After year 1, you don’t need to replace the paper mat — just add some mulch.

  • Twice during the summer, you’ll need to mow a strip on both sides of each row of trees. This helps manage competing vegetation during tree establishment.

  • In the winter, you’ll need to remove the tube from each tree, and prune the tree to a single central stem. Once the trees pop out of the tube (generally by year 2) pruning can be more at your discretion. We will teach participating farmers how to prune.

Year 4 and Onward Annual Care & Harvest:

  • Twice during the summer, you’ll want to mow a strip on both sides of each row of trees.

  • When trees start producing (generally year 4-5), you will want to mow around the trees in September to make it easier to harvest nuts. The world is home to a wide range of chestnut harvesting gear — ranging from hand tools up to 240 HP mechanical harvesters — and depending on the scale of your project we can help you identify good solutions for harvesting your nuts!

Tradition: smoke drying chestnuts for 40 days in the Pistoia Mountains (Photo Credit: Tad Cooke)

Chestnuts have sustained the mountain peoples of Southern Europe for centuries. (Photo Credit: Gianfranco Bini)

Tuscan flatbreads (castagnaccio) and crepe / wraps (necci) from 100% chestnut flour. (Photo Credit: Tad Cooke)

Chestnut trees can continuously produce for 500+ years. (Photo Credit: Costa Boutsikaris)

Breadtree & friends visiting a chestnut tree planted before the birth of Christopher Colombus (Winter 2024)

Basic Chestnut Economics

To give interested farmers a sense of the growing markets for chestnuts and chestnut value-added products, here’s a quick summary of some of the basic economics:

  • Today, chestnuts are grown commercially in 27 countries; 2024 worldwide production was valued at $3.8B. The U.S. is the only ecologically appropriate region that lacks a significant commercial chestnut industry.

  • As of 2022, the U.S. was home to 2,845 farms growing chestnuts on 10,049 acres (includes trees that have not yet reached bearing). The majority of US chestnut production occurs on farms smaller than 10 acres.

  • The communities in the U.S. who most actively seek fresh chestnuts tend to be folks with roots in places where chestnuts still play important roles in food culture (for example, Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-, Italian-, French-, Turkish-, Croation-, Bulgarian-Americans and others).

  • In the U.S. today, there are very few sources of organic, ecologically grown chestnuts. The large majority of chestnuts consumed in the U.S. are imported, and it is nearly impossible to import organic chestnuts to the U.S. Chestnuts have particular needs for shipping and handling, and the quality of most imported nuts are significantly degraded through the process of importation. As a result, local growers can offer much-higher quality produce, and many U.S. growers sell out of their whole crop quickly each fall to retail buyers. Conventional chestnuts retail for $5-12/lb and organic chestnuts retail for $10-20/lb.

  • In 2021, the Savanna Institute conducted in-depth analysis of challenges and opportunities relevant to growing a chestnut industry in the eastern United States (linked below). They projected the potential for the chestnut market to grow as much as 50x. 

  • Chestnuts can also be dried, shelled, and milled to produce a delicious, nutritious gluten-free flour. The global gluten free flour market was valued at $6.4 billion in 2022, and is projected to reach $9.4 billion by 2031. The facility we are building will create a path for regional growers of all scales to access the growing market for chestnut flour.

  • If you’re interested in learning more about chestnut economics, Mark Phillips wrote a good essay-length summary, and Savanna Institute published a very detailed study.

Resources for Deeper Learning