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.
We started with leases. I got the business started on a revenue-share lease agreement that I pitched around the region to see if I could find a landowner who was interested. The idea was that I felt like I could bootstrap a chestnut operation, but I didn’t think I could also buy land. I just didn’t have the resources. I wanted to figure out a way to basically backload the lease payments, and so all of my lease payments were attached to revenue from chestnut production, meaning they wouldn’t start till year five or six.
That was in 2019. I’ve been planting chestnut trees for a decade now, but Breadtree Farms started in 2019 on just eight acres. The folks I leased from had just ceased operating their dairy on Otter Creek Farm in Johnsonville, New York. Brad and Elizabeth were moving their 500-acre farm into a diversified livestock operation with 100 percent grass-fed beef, pork and broilers.
They were interested in diversifying the land base and moving away from leasing corn and soy land to neighboring dairy farmers — they wanted to transition more into perennial systems. They had a listing on the Hudson Valley farmland finder website. Within half an hour it was pretty clear that they were the best prospective partners I’d ever talked to, and they saw my interest in being there for three decades as a true asset and a commitment to what this was all about.
Acres U.S.A. Thirty years — that’s important.
Wallack. It is. I will also say I wouldn’t recommend that as a way to start a business, but if you don’t have the money to own land or to pay lease fees on an enterprise that won’t have revenue for five to seven years, then you take risks. It was a risk I was fully aware of. I’m a little concerned about other people going too hard on leases. As my business partner frequently reminds me, a lease is basically as good as the lawyer you can pay to defend it in a civil court. So, I don’t advise young farmers, if they can avoid it, to get started on a 30-year lease where they’re putting tens of thousands of dollars of time and cash on the line and someone can mess with them.
Acres U.S.A. How is the soil where you’ve been starting these trees? Is it healthy or pretty worn out?
Wallack. Almost everything we plant was either corn, soy or hay land. None of it has been active pasture. We disked corn stubble in April 2019. We seeded-down clover and rye, and then we planted chestnuts into that. Our first trees were going into bare earth, and that’s been the story of pretty much everything we’ve planted. With each successive project, we have been trialing new interventions to improve soil health, including subsoiling for decompaction, inoculation with forest soil from oak-hickory stands, overseeding with increasingly diverse pasture (now up to about 70 species), and remineralization with rock dust, biochar and humates, and we are now looking into ocean-farmed kelp-based biostimulants.
Acres U.S.A. Do you in any way regret not taking a year to do a couple rotations of cover crops to build the soil up before planting? Do you think you could’ve been at the same place or even better if you’d done that?
Wallack. I don’t really know. I was kind of eager to just get it going. The question really boils down to, “To what extent can agroforestry systems serve to rebuild soil while getting new cropping systems established, rather than needing to do one before the other?”
In my case, the first season was a mess; I had the trees in a nursery and was hoping to find land. By the time the ground was dry enough to seed it down and then to actually plant trees, most of the trees had a foot of growth on them from that year. We put those trees through a lot, and they still did fine. The tallest trees are 18 feet tall now and we sold about $2,400 of chestnuts from that orchard in the sixth season.
To your question, we are planning to run some cover crop rotations as part of our soil prep for a particular degraded field at our farm in Granville, New York.
Acres U.S.A. What kind of tree tube has worked best?
Wallack. The first planting, I tried three different tree protection systems. We trialed Tree Pro, Plantra and some welded-wire cages we built ourselves out of 100-foot rolls of welded wire; all were six-foot high. Plantra’s six-foot Sunflex tubes were far and away the best of those three options. I even tried Plantra tubes with DIY stakes out of metal conduit, and I highly recommend their fiberglass system. It’s just so much more resilient to wind and to cattle bumping into it. Everything else is rigid, so once it gets bent, it’s stuck in that position.
The only modification we make to them, which I’ve started seeing other people doing as well, is we fray the tops of the tubes. This is a nitty-gritty detail we tell everyone who we give tubes to — we cut four slits about eight inches down in the top of the tube, which makes it so that when the tree comes out, it’s not encountering a rigid edge; there’s much less damage on the trunk of the tree. I believe Plantra is doing R&D on how they can incorporate this into their manufacturing.
Acres U.S.A. And how many years are the trees in the tubes?
Wallack. We’re planting one-year-old seedlings. We’re not using any grafted stock. Some will start to peek out of the tubes in year one. By year two, basically everything’s grown out of a tube, but entering year six, we haven’t taken tubes off any trees. A lot of the trees are self-supporting, but we have a risk of buck rub in our orchards.
Plantra tubes have two attachment holes that you put the twist-tie through, and there’s continuous plastic running down the middle of those holes, and we slice a seam all the way down between the holes. So, then, you effectively have a tube that has a continuous slit that can accordion-open as the tree grows. Our thought is that as long as those tubes are in good enough condition that they can stay on and be a protective layer against buck rub, there’s very little reason for us to take them off. By year four or five, there are plenty of trees in the orchard that are self-supporting that we could pull the stake off of. But even so, we just leave the tube in place to prevent damage.
Acres U.S.A. And if you’re putting poly wire up against them, then they won’t ground out on the tube, right?
Wallack. Yeah.
Acres U.S.A. And how did you acquire the rest of your land?
Wallack. So, we had 20 acres on lease, and then my business partner, Noah, started joining some of our work weekends and our events to get trees in the ground and was really excited about the business. We spent about a year getting to know each other and thinking about what it could look like to partner. And ultimately, in 2021, he brought resources into the business that would allow us to buy land. So, we bought about 115 acres of the most affordable land we could find that was suitable to our type of agriculture. We planted about 60 of that over the past two years.
By the fall of 2022, I had never paid myself, Noah had never been paid for this work, and I had a two-year-old daughter, a full-time job, and a house I was renovating. And I was like, “This is amazing — it’s going so much better than I ever dreamed — but it’s going to break me and my family if I keep going.” So, we started to explore what it would look like to fundraise, and we researched a bunch of different debt opportunities. People were showing how excited they were about the work we were doing and understood the vision. Hearing that interest in our businessbmade us realize we could likely avoid the risks of taking on debt by engaging investors as long-term equity holders.
We ended up taking on equity investment from a handful of private investors who are aligned with our goal of developing agroforestry for the long term in the Northeast. About 60 percent of their investment went directly toward buying land, and then the rest went toward creating full-time positions last April. So, Noah and I have been full-time for about two years now, and we have six other awesome folks leading different aspects of our business on the ground. That’s how we got to the 600-acre number — bringing in other people’s capital.
Really importantly, our agreement with our investors is that any meaningful structural decision for our business has to be unanimous between Noah and me as partners and farmers. We preserved a lot of control over the direction of our business in that way. Neither of us can partner with another significant equity holder and go a direction without the other’s permission.
There’s been a lot of learning about how to talk to investors. I spent seven years building a financial model and finding every data point I could to justify to myself that I wanted to start this business. I’ve changed most of the variables in my financial models multiple times based on on-the-ground trialing — like understanding how much mowing we’re going to do, what tubes we’re going to use, what stock we’re planting, etc. By the time I was talking to investors, it was clear how much thought we’d put into this business and how well we understood the risks we were taking. That went a long way, and that’s the advice I usually give to other folks thinking about that path — how do you think of yourself as an investor first? Have you actually convinced yourself that this is a good idea?
Acres U.S.A. How do you manage grazing in your orchards?
Wallack. Grazing on our farms is a work in progress. We were super lucky with our first partners at Otter Creek Farm. They are moving a cattle herd through our orchards. That is their enterprise. They are awesome. We talk to them on a regular basis. They believe in our business, and they’re our friends. We have great communication, and so we had the best-case scenario of an enterprise existing on site, experienced grazers, people who know grass. We’ve co-designed that with them over the past five years, and we have a meeting every winter to think about how the next year is going to look.
For me, that’s the best way it could have gone. We’re in charge of the chestnuts, and they’re in charge of the grazing. We have great trust, great communication, and it’s two enterprises co-habitating, rather than one person managing a lot of complexity.
Our overall orchard operation has grown more quickly than the community of contract/partner graziers in our area could keep pace. So, after trying a few different grazing relationships with third-party operators, we are now building our own sheep herd starting in 2025, which we plan to build up over the coming five to 10 years. We also may end up with a hybrid arrangement where our own grazing enterprises covers the farms close to our home base and we partner with other graziers to work on the farms that are further afield.
Acres U.S.A. What is the spacing and layout of these plantings?
Wallack. For orchards that we plan to graze, we plant out on 40-foot alleys, and then we plant densely within our rows — 13- to 16-foot spacing between trees. We expect that by year 15, two thirds of those trees will be culled.
So far, our survival rate, totally dry farmed, making a lot of mistakes, at our oldest farm is about 83 percent through 6 seasons. We had a lot of buffer in terms of making mistakes, and we still are going to have to make cull decisions proactively rather than just letting trees die.
Acres U.S.A. What will that leave you eventually in terms of trees per acre?
Wallack. In the 30 to 40 range. Ultimately, by year 25, I think the number will probably be more like 25 to 30 trees, from what I’ve seen from folks mostly in Ohio using similar seedling stock. We’ve sourced some of the parent trees from folks like Bob Stehli at Wintergreen Farm and Greg and Amy Miller at Route 9.
Acres U.S.A. And what are you hoping for at that point in terms of yield per tree or yield per acre?
Wallack. The best we know of is Bob Stehli — he has a tree producing 300 pounds a year at 25 years; it would be wild if we had 30 of those in every acre. We are planting children of that tree, but we don’t expect every one of its children to produce 300 pounds.
Today, all of our financial modeling is built on 1,500 pounds an acre, which is intended to be conservative compared to what others in the industry are talking about. I’ve seen folks, using similar genetic stock, getting between 20 and 30 pounds a tree at year 10. So, we would be at our projected climax yields at year 10 if we were achieving those same yields.
Again, that is trying to be conservative and trying to not convince myself I’m going to be a much richer man than I am. There’s always going to be a late frost where you lose your whole crop and things like that. There are people who will say 2,500 pounds an acre, 3,000 pounds an acre, and in Michigan there was even a bumper crop year where a few orchards harvested 6,000 pounds per acre.
Acres U.S.A. Have you been working yet on supplying precise nutrition by way of sap testing?
Wallack. Not yet. We’ve been more focused on establishment; we want to add in sap analysis in as we get more toward production. That might be wrong-headed; it’s just that our land is in such transition. It’s going from conventional corn and soy to organic-managed, diversified, perennial pasture. Our most recent seed mix we put down was 15 different species, and even in pastures where we seeded two species, I’ve lost count of the number of plants that are growing.
There’s really interesting things we’re seeing. Microbial life is way higher in our five-year-old silvopasture, but carbon isn’t actually that much higher. We’re just in the early stages of this. We did a full soil analysis last year, and we’re trying to bring in scientific partners this year to start to get a bit more detail. But one thing we’re seeing is that it’s taking a bit of time to really wake up that system. I’m curious to see when that curve starts to transition — when the system starts waking up and changing the way it’s cycling nutrients like carbon.
Acres U.S.A. It will!
Wallack. Yeah, it will. I’m not freaking out about it, but I’m a little cautious of jumping to conclusions about what we need to be bringing into the system until we’ve actually seen a little bit of balancing out in that transition.
Acres U.S.A. And floor management — I assume for the places where you’re not grazing, you’re mowing?
Wallack. Yeah, last year we invested in a Ventrac. It’s a brand that’s honestly more popular for public works departments and golf courses. It’s rated to about 30-degree slopes when you have its dual tire system on. And some of the slopes we are planting on are that steep. Some exceed the rating on a Ventrac. This is not Midwest agroforestry — this is more like French mountain chestnuts than it is Midwest forestry.
So, we use the Ventrac for our in-row management, and we are hoping to trial an articulating mower arm as well. We’re working with Rears mowers in Oregon, and we’d like to do a trial with that this year. We’re a little cautious about doing it with trees in years one to three. We’d like to be able to wait till year five or six, so we just have a bit more caliper in the trees.
We also have been a little worried about using an articulating mower arm on the grades and variable terrain that we’re on; my understanding is that the sensors on some of these swing-arm mowers can be quite sensitive and there’s only so much variability in terms of the plane of the flail deck. Because we’re not working on flat ground, I’ve been a little concerned that we might be setting ourselves up to be replacing hydraulic sensors twice a year.
So, right now, we’re using Ventrac for in-row mowing, basically just dipping in and out of the rows. And then we mow our alleys with a seven-foot flail deck from Rears.
Last year we mowed right along the trees and then did our in-row mow, and we left the center of our alleys to fully grow up. This allowed us to have substantial honeybee and native pollinator forage throughout the growing season. Until we have a full herd across the 250 acres, we really want to trial different mowing patterns and see how that’s impacting the vegetation mix on site.
Acres U.S.A. And then harvesting — how do you do that?
Wallack. So, we do a finish mow pre-harvest. We’ll set the flail deck as low as we can go — although it won’t be the finished mow or bare ground that you see in California’s almond orchards, for example.
Right now we’re trialing a battery-powered push harvester. It’s from Organic Tools in Austria. It can pick up about three times what a human can. It’s not the hundreds of thousands of pounds solution. But we’re interested in it as we’re ramping up. The benefit of this system is that we have a lot of time to figure out the most efficient way to harvest.
We’re not ready to buy the mechanized harvesting options from brands like AMB Rousset, FACMA or Monchiero here in year six; when we’re only harvesting a few thousand pounds, it just doesn’t make sense.
We’re working our way up to more mechanized harvesting. There’s a variety of vacuum harvesters, then there’s sweeper harvesters that have a vacuum attachment but look more like a Zamboni. We’re probably three years away from needing something like that. Right now it’s hand and appropriate-scale-tech harvesting, but I wouldn’t say that’s what the industry should be built on. We’re figuring it out as we go.
Acres U.S.A. How tall will the trees be when they’re fully mature? Is some sort of tree shaker for harvesting an option?
Wallack. The tallest trees of similar genetics that we’ve seen are nearly 80 feet tall, and they’re 100 years old. Additionally, chestnut bark is fairly brittle. As far as I know, no one is doing any kind of aerial harvesting with a tree shaker for chestnuts. The only version of that I’ve seen is using bamboo poles that are 20 feet long and basically smacking the branches. Again, that only works to a certain scale.
Acres U.S.A. Can you speak to your present and future marketing considerations? Is there even a way to wholesale organic chestnuts in the states these days?
Wallack. The Savanna Institute put out a helpful market report on chestnuts recently. An interesting thing about chestnuts is that even though a lot of us don’t think about them often or eat them, today, even with that small demand, we import roughly 90 percent of what’s consumed in the U.S. So, there’s a whole import market that can be offset by domestic production. Additionally, less than 1 percent of U.S. production is organic. By producing organic chestnuts, we believe that we will have a differentiated market that we can be selling into.
| Savanna Institute’s Chestnut Impact Investment Report: savannainstitute.org/chestnut-impact-investment-report |
We’ve now documented organic chestnuts in grocery stores selling for $12-$20 per pound. Today we sell them on our website at $12 a pound for organic chestnuts, and we expect to sell out to restaurants and retail customers. We’re selling at a minimum order of five pounds, which is already creating a barrier of entry, and people are still signing up to buy them a year in advance. So, we’re getting pretty good signals in terms of people’s interest. There really is an interest in this crop, especially from first- and second-generation immigrant communities that are a little more in touch with chestnuts and their role in their food culture.
But then we’re also going to be doing a lot of market development. One of the big pieces of news on our front is that we secured a USDA grant under the Organic Market Development program that covers a number of activities, including a feasibility study with visits to international processors. As far as I know, there isn’t processing of a 200,000+ pound scale in the U.S. for chestnuts, and definitely not for organic chestnuts. So, we’re visiting producers and processors across Italy. The idea is to see the equipment they’re using and their facility designs and then to convert our barns, working with an architectural team, into what we believe would be the largest organic chestnut facility in the U.S.
We’re also working with Blue Hill Restaurant and Dan Barber’s team to engage the culinary community — to start doing some trials on product development and to build the conversation around this crop. To give you a sense of the level of interest, we don’t have a huge following on social media or anything, but we’ve sent this out to our email list and posted it on LinkedIn, and I think we’ve had 90+ farmers contact us who are fired up about this being a resource and how can they work with us. Some have already planted chestnuts; some are interested in planting chestnuts in the future. Our belief is that if we build a facility that can serve roughly eight times our production, that immediately reduces risk for anyone who wants to plant chestnuts and manage them organically in our region. They can drop off a macro bin at our back door, get a wholesale price, and we’ll take it to market.
We expect to have other ways to collaborate. For example, larger producers can contract with us to process, and then we give them ready-to-sell nuts and they go to market so that they can get that price. Alternatively, they can process their fresh nuts and just send their flour-grade chestnuts to our facility for drying, shelling and milling. We’re planning to build a facility that can serve about 1,000 acres of production in the Northeast. And my best guess is that there’s maybe 500 acres planted today in the Northeast.
Acres U.S.A. How big of an advantage, if any, is it to grow chestnuts in, say, the Willamette Valley or in California?
Wallack. Well, they don’t have blight, so they can grow more European cultivars than we can. Other than that, I guess it depends on how you’re thinking about the future of water and climate change and what version of risk that is. We are entirely dry farming right now; I don’t think that is a viable option for many western growers.
Another huge piece of context for us is our agricultural and real estate prices. If you take out the woodlands and riparian zones that we’re not going to plant, we’ve spent basically $5,000 per plant-able acre. As far as I know, if you’re planting tree crops in the Willamette Valley or in the Central Valley of California, you might be spending four to 10 times that.
That changes the business model. It also decreases the willingness to innovate on a crop that’s fairly unproven at scale in the U.S. We’re kind of in this sweet spot — we’re in a region where we can grow this crop, and we can grow it dry farmed, which allows us to be doing it in different landscapes and in more versatile ways in terms of how we’re laying out our orchards. And our land prices are low. In Iowa, some farmland is going for $35,000 an acre now.
For someone like Austin, buying land at $40,000 an acre in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to plant chestnuts might not make sense. He’d need to raise almost 10 times more capital than us to plant the same acreage. That number and context alone is part of the reason why I’m not walking around saying, “Everyone should plant chestnuts everywhere.” The feasibility is different in different places.
Acres U.S.A. Where do you see agroforestry going in the next couple of years?
Wallack. There’s a really interesting conversation about agroforestry right now. I think we need to be careful not to see it as one monolithic conversation or project. It’s really a thousand different context-specific conversations. I don’t think there’s a better or worse between what Austin’s doing and what I’m doing. It would be like saying, “No one should grow cherries because apples are great.” That type of argument doesn’t get us far.
There are folks doing silvopasture timber crops. I have a buddy who’s doing productive riparian buffers with native blue elderberry in California. For us, our focus is on transitioning hay, soy and corn land into diverse and healthy pastures with tree crops planted in them. We are prioritizing getting trees established and then introducing the livestock enterprises as a subsequent layer of complexity. Beyond that we are looking for opportunities to continue to integrate forest-farming complexity, alley-cropped shrub fruit, honey production, and likely leaf fodder pollards to supplement late summer forage — but ultimately, chestnut production is the tent pole standing this all up.
I love how many people are fired up about agroforestry, but I don’t think it’s helpful to make it all one conversation. I can have a conversation about growing chestnuts in the Northeast U.S. If someone wants to hire me to be an agroforestry consultant in the Willamette Valley, I’d probably be a horrible consultant! I think more of us being honest about what work we actually want to be doing, and not trying to solve all of the world’s problems with one thing, is probably a productive move.
