An interview with New York chestnut grower Russell Wallack about establishing an organic chestnut orchard — and a market — here in the U.S.
Acres U.S.A. We recently published a piece by Austin Unruh of Trees for Graziers, as well as an interview with him, that are promoting one version of agroforestry — silvopasture — establishing trees in existing pastures solely for the focus of livestock, as opposed to harvesting the fruits or nuts for people. And so, we thought it would be good to complement that with the perspective that we should also consider harvesting these tree crops for human consumption.
Russell Wallack. Yeah, I agree with a lot of what Austin is saying, though I think I am a little less conservative on the price pressures that Austin suggested in his article.
We’re running a farm business that’s producing chestnuts, and we hope that our work can inspire other people to plant chestnut trees. But fundamentally, we are a farming business focused on growing and selling food — we’re not getting paid the more trees we plant for other people, necessarily.
We only take on tree-planting projects for other farmers/landowners as part of a minimum five-year management relationship. We want to ensure that projects we establish have good follow-through to carry them into production. At that point the landowner or farmer can choose if they continue to hire us to manage and get an off-take rate for their yields, or they can take over an operation that’s productive.
Our theory of change is not about trying to evangelize chestnut growing — it’s about trying to make it work, and then if other people want to join in, that’s great. We do a lot of free sharing about where we’ve messed up and where we’ve learned, and where we’ve been able to bring establishment costs down. Paying for tree tubes is worth it!
If people are going to get into this, we want them to understand where it can be made more efficient and where the risks are, and what the unknowns are. We openly say “we don’t know” when that’s the case. We try to be pretty honest and blunt about what we’ve experienced so far, and if people still want to get into a fairly young industry, they can do so.
It’s really important to acknowledge how much work has been done in chestnuts, even though it’s still small in the U.S. We are building on decades of work by farmers and researchers here and internationally. So, it’s both an underdeveloped industry and a totally existent and multi-century industry here.
Acres U.S.A. Right. So, what’s the context of your farm?
Wallack. We’re managing almost 800 acres of former dairy land in the Upper Hudson Valley of New York. About 450 of that is woodlands, riparian zones and wetlands, and roughly 330 is open-field agroforestry. We currently lease to a neighbor who is sugaring a couple hundred of those woodland acres for maple syrup. There’s also bitternut and hybrid hickory within that closed-canopy forest, and we’re intentionally moving that forest to being a more harvestable landscape, where we can hopefully use that as an oil nut; we’re exploring that opportunity. But, when we’re talking about the corn, soy and hay land that we’re transitioning to chestnut and hickory silvopasture, and tree/shrub intercropping, that is about 330 acres.
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