FAQs

Do you grow American chestnuts?

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. There is some promising progress in that work, but pure American Chestnuts cannot survive in the wild — and any version of a successful “reintroduction” of castanea dentata would involve some degree of hybridization between American chestnuts and some of the world’s other wonderful species of chestnuts, including Chinese, Japanese, and European. 

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. Today, pure American trees are not able to do that. There are definitely some American genetics in our orchards (as well as some European), but the species most prominently represented are Chinese and Japanese.

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. 

What kind of chestnuts do you grow?

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.

“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.

By combining the best traits of all the major chestnut species, we and other orchardists are making a “melting pot” population that is healthier, more vigorous, more productive, and better suited to temperate North America's climate and pest/pathogen environment.

But, isn’t it best that we eat food from “native” plants?

There is a lot of benefit to increasing the diversity of plants in our landscapes, to support more diverse habitat for wildlife. And there is certainly much value in intentionally promoting species often described as “native”. 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.

To put this in perspective, native peoples of North America engaged in ambitious and large-scale projects to influence the landscapes they inhabited and make the landscape more productive of human food and fodder for game animals. These multi-millennia practices of tending the land certainly included favoring some plants over other plants, moving plants around, and importing plants with useful traits over long distances.

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 originates with a plant that 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. Even if the American chestnut were not functionally extinct, people whose goal is to grow chestnuts for food would still probably want to hybridize it with other species to get the best quality, best tasting, most disease and pest resistant, and most productive trees.