Why Chestnuts?

Soil is the basis for human life. It takes a long time for mother nature to make new soil, but not very long for her children to wash it away. Today, agriculture costs the U.S. billions of tons of topsoil annually. We take a different approach.

We seed perennial pasture and plant trees on steep hillsides that have been used for decades to grow corn, soy, and hay. Trees build soil: their roots stabilize the soil and restore soil biodiversity; their canopies cool the surface of the soil and improve the health of soil microbes; and they produce leaf litter that decomposes each winter.

We then graze animals in rotation on diverse, deep-rooted pasture plants, which helps reverse compaction and pumps air, water, and microbiotic life back into the soil.

Conventional farming systems are often fragile and vulnerable to disruption by drought, flood, or extreme weather events. In the Northeast, almost all of the food we eat comes from California, the Midwest, or overseas — identified by the New England Food Vision study as a major challenge to regional food security.

Growing food on trees in organic systems is naturally much more resilient than "conventional" annual production, which often depends on toxic chemicals and energy-intensive inputs. Staple tree crops (like chestnuts) can help “onshore” the region's staple food supply, while also making that food supply much more resilient to extreme weather and changes in the climate.

Conventional farming systems depend on toxic pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, which stick around in the soil, rivers and oceans, the food we eat, and our bodies. They also kill beneficial wildlife like pollinators, a heavily threatened population that is very important for ecosystem health and human food security.

Conventional farming also tends to require regular application of energy-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, killing fish while accelerating global warming.

Organic agroforestry farming can produce food yields while naturally increasing soil health. We manage our 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.

In recent years, the economics of annual agriculture have tended to put farmers in debt and beholden to large agribusiness, while the land being “worked” tends to decline. Even if you live in the city or the suburbs, all of the stuff you depend on (clothing, food, building materials) comes from the country, so your prosperity is connected to the prosperity of rural communities.

Perennial agriculture 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, everyone on our full-time team has a path to partnership and a share of profit.

Trees naturally release moisture that feeds the water cycle and creates more rain. By increasing carbon and organic matter in the soil, trees greatly increase water retention, which recharges aquifers and increases resiliency to flooding (a growing threat in the Northeast). 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).

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.

Agroforestry farming lends itself naturally to collaborative land management, creating the potential for many farmers to gain long-term land tenure. For example, one farmer might graze cattle on pasture between orchard trees, while another manages bees for honey, and a third produces maple syrup in surrounding woodlands.

If you’re a farmer seeking long-term land tenure, and are interested in managing regenerative agriculture operations within an orchard agroforestry system, please get in touch.

Agriculture is the single greatest cause of wildlife extinction worldwide. Loss of biodiversity threatens us all, undermining human food and water security and increasing the presence of infectious human diseases.

Organic agroforestry farming mimics forest and "forest edge" landscapes, creating diverse wildlife habitat and corridors between fragmented ecosystems. Incorporating polycultures of other plants and animals into the orchard magnifies this effect. We manage our farms for a biodiverse understory, and (where possible) pursue site-specific designs to create additional wildlife habitat.

Compared with most meat animals in the U.S. (generally raised on grains in captivity), animals raised on pasture are much healthier and produce much healthier meat. Agroforestry farming offers the potential for livestock systems that work much better than even common pastured grazing systems. The introduction of trees to a pasture gives animals access to shade, which creates a number of additional positive health effects, including improved weight gain, conception rates, and overall pregnancy rates. Adding perennial forage and fodder crops adds nutritional diversity, makes animals less susceptible to infections, and increases forage availability during midsummer and droughts. Livestock “return the favor” by fertilizing the trees. Healthier animals = healthier meat = healthier people.

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.