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Why Aren’t We Eating Acorns? with Elspeth Hay
303 Plays14 days ago
I’m willing to bet that most of our listeners - like us - have traditionally seen acorns as food for squirrels, not people. But as Elspeth Hay points out in this conversation, that assumption says more about our food system than it does about the acorn.
For much of human history, acorns were a staple. They fed communities across North America, Europe, North Africa, and Asia - and in some cases - still do. They were managed, processed, stored, and celebrated. So how did we go from acorns as everyday food to acorns as woodland debris? In her fantastic book Feed Us with Trees, Elspeth traces how enclosure, industrial agriculture, and a narrow definition of “real farming” pushed perennial forest foods to the margins of our imagination.
In this episode, we dive into:
• Why acorns were once reliable staple crops, not novelty ingredients
• The myth that we can only feed ourselves with annual row crops
• How the loss of commons reshaped our relationship to forests and food
• What Indigenous land management, including fire, meant for food abundance
• The false divide between farming and foraging
• How pigs, oaks, and people once formed integrated food systems
• What it would take to bring acorns and other perennial tree foods back into our diets
More about Elspeth:
Elspeth Hay is the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on the Cape and Islands NPR station since 2008, and the author of Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food.
Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food and the environment. You can learn more about her work at elspethhay.com.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
The Power of Storytelling in Food Perception
00:00:03
Speaker
There are so many people worried about the places where they live who want to do something positive, but we tend to underestimate the power of stories. I think it's a huge reason why so many of us think, okay, acorns fit only for squirrels. It's a testament to the power of storytelling because pretty much all of us have ancestors who...
00:00:24
Speaker
ate acorns until the past several hundred years. But I do feel like we're in a moment right now of kind of changing stories. If we can get people in communities, as a community, to rally around some of these crops, I think we have a better chance of sustaining those shifts.
State of Agriculture: Challenges and Opportunities
00:00:45
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:57
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:01:09
Speaker
Welcome Elspeth. This is a joy to have you on the podcast here. I read your fantastic book called Feed Us With Trees. Absolutely loved the book. Fantastic writing. And it was a a wonderful blend of agriculture and the history of of agriculture and the history of tree crops and how we got to be where we are today. And that's the kind of stuff that i absolutely love reading about.
00:01:32
Speaker
So, Elspeth, could you just start us off by introducing yourself and maybe what led you to write a book about tree
Elspeth Hay's Journey into Tree Crops
00:01:41
Speaker
crops? Yeah, my name is Elspeth Hay. I live on Cape Cod out toward the end of the peninsula, so basically in the middle of the ocean on a pile of sand.
00:01:51
Speaker
And I'm surrounded by oak trees and a lot of really protected land in the Cape Cod National Seashore. which I had always seen as an impediment to food production. I grew up in farm country in Maine. So when I learned that we can eat acorns, I've been working as a reporter on food and the environment for 15 plus years, that sort of shook up all the stories that I thought I knew about food food.
00:02:20
Speaker
led me down a very deep tree crop rabbit hole, which I love being in. So I'm not sure if I'm ever going to climb out of it. It's a great rabbit hole to be in. I'm i am fully embraced that one.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, there's so much to learn down that rabbit hole. Can you share with people your premise, the premise
Reintegrating Tree Crops into Ecosystems
00:02:41
Speaker
of the book? It really touched something off for me of how integral tree crops have been throughout our history. And like you said, that's a piece of knowledge that is almost completely lost.
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, my premise in the book is basically that tree crops all over the northern hemisphere used to be staple foods in a huge variety of cultures. So that's an everyday food, right? Like potatoes, wheat, corn, rice, and that it's really only very recently that a lot of us in modern culture have lost our connection to these foods.
00:03:19
Speaker
And I really try to argue in the book that if we were to reintegrate these crops into our food system, we could hugely change our ecosystems and the way that we relate to life around us.
00:03:36
Speaker
So flesh this out for me a little bit, because I think in most people's minds, if they think of, let's say, an like an acorn, like eating an acorn, like that sounds crazy.
00:03:47
Speaker
And maybe we can think of it as like, this is something that our Neanderthal ancestors may have eaten, but not Not since the dawn of agriculture have we eaten nuts that fall off of trees, right? But this isn't really, this isn't ancient history. Like this is this
Reevaluating Acorn Consumption History
00:04:02
Speaker
is recent history. Can you share like some of the places where this would have been most common in our most recent history?
00:04:08
Speaker
Yes. And before I dive into that, I just want to touch on one point that you raised about sort of this this historic timeline of agriculture, because I think it's really important and really a much newer concept than we think. This sort of idea that there was this agricultural revolution and we used to be hunter-gatherers and then we became agriculturalists and that was this big shift. But There are some historians now, I'm thinking of David Graeber and David Wengro, who wrote The Dawn of Everything, who are basically calling the agricultural revolution the revolution that never happened because it's sort of a story that we made up in the early 1900s during a period of a lot of scientific racism.
00:04:50
Speaker
So when we're talking about people who have relied on acorns as a staple food very recently in the 1900s, we're talking about indigenous cultures, especially in present day California and the Pacific Northwest.
00:05:05
Speaker
We're talking about some areas in northern Africa. We're talking about Korea, some areas in Korea. And when we look at sort of the history of acorn consumption and other nuts too, not just acorns, chestnuts, hazelnuts, a lot of these sort of keystone tree crops used to be really widespread. And as sort of colonialism and empire and capitalism have spread, it's become more and more isolated to communities that are either poor or
00:05:37
Speaker
or of a background that Eurocentric American culture tends to dismiss.
Cultural Narratives of Food: The Acorn Example
00:05:45
Speaker
So it's not a coincidence that this sort of writing of this story of agriculturists as people of the present and like real thinkers and movers and shakers and people who are relying on these tree crops, which are painted as hunter-gatherer societies that are sort of like, oh, we're going to wake up, we're going to wonder where we're going to find food.
00:06:07
Speaker
That's not an accident. That's a really intentional. We're going to stumble upon these trees. Yeah, that's a really intentional story. And I think we tend to underestimate the power of stories.
00:06:19
Speaker
I think it's a huge reason why so many of us think, okay, acorns fit only for squirrels. That's a testament to the power of storytelling because pretty much all of us have ancestors who ate acorns until the past several hundred years.
00:06:34
Speaker
Even in our local area, so I'm in Pennsylvania, in our local area with chestnuts would have been like that's only 100 years ago that people would have sustained themselves to a large degree on chestnuts, both themselves, their livestock, and would have sold chestnuts as you get into. And I love some of the historical facts that you that you bring out on the chestnuts.
Chestnuts in Appalachian Culture and the Blight
00:06:54
Speaker
And that like that hits close to close to home for the work that I'm in.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so I went down and spent some time in Appalachia piling around with a historian named Ralph Lutz, who's a really interesting guy. And I had no idea how central the American chestnut was to Appalachian culture, not just in this sort of nostalgic way that we talk about today, like, oh, roasting chestnuts as this sort of Christmas fall tradition, but actually central to the economy.
00:07:24
Speaker
So chestnut trees before the blight, if listeners don't know, the blight was this fungal blight that came over on Asiatic chestnut trees, came over in the early nineteen hundreds really moved through Appalachia in the 1930s at the same time as the Depression,
00:07:40
Speaker
We lost 4 billion American chestnuts, that's the estimate, and the tree went from being very common in our forest to functionally extinct. So this huge loss, these mountainous communities were places where people were picking up chestnuts and bringing them into the general stores where they could get store credit and paying for half of their purchases for the entire year in some cases,
00:08:05
Speaker
just through nuts that they picked up in the fall. So not like a small amount of their annual income, ah a huge amount. And also raising pigs on chestnuts was really common. And that also had to do with a structure of land ownership that we don't really talk about today. and We don't really see today in the same way, which has huge implications.
00:08:29
Speaker
Have you read the book Lesser Beasts by author Mark Essig? No. It's about raising pigs. There's so many parallels between the history that you chart and the history that he charts as well. And they can kind of converge.
00:08:45
Speaker
Here's a fact that I learned in that book that just blew my mind. Acorn-finished, chestnut-finished pork used to be the most common meat ever. in all of North America.
00:08:55
Speaker
More common than beef, more common than chicken, acorn finished, chestnut finished pork was the most common, most affordable meat in all of America for hundreds of years. And it's based on the same thing. We had a lot of chestnut trees, a tremendous amount of chestnut trees that bore annually.
00:09:12
Speaker
And you had a lot of land that was available to the commons and you could let your pigs live run on those trees. So it's the same dynamic that you raised in your book.
Land Access and African-American Communities Post-Civil War
00:09:24
Speaker
ah Share with me a little bit about what the commons was, and what that land ownership and land use system look like, because I think that's foreign to most people today.
00:09:37
Speaker
Definitely. It was super foreign to me when I first learned about it. I grew up in Maine and was in like a pretty rural area. So as a kid, I was always taught like no trespassing. You know, if you're trespassing on someone's land, you could be shot. You could be, you know, in legal trouble.
00:09:53
Speaker
I learned that really clearly as a kid, and I think most kids in the U.S. learned today very early on, that's private property, you can't go there. And that is actually something that wasn't true in the initial years of American history. So when U.S. s law first went into effect after the United States became a country, it was legal to gather, to hunt, to fish, to forage.
00:10:19
Speaker
on land that you didn't own as long as it wasn't enclosed. So in most places, there were these sort of fence laws. So if land was fenced in or improved, improved usually meant like it had a building or planted row crops on it, then you couldn't go there.
00:10:37
Speaker
But if the land was wooded and sort of unimproved and not being actively managed in that obvious way, Anyone had the right to hunt, gather, forage, etc.
00:10:51
Speaker
There are you know, court cases from the eighteen hundred s that we can find where judges say, you know, that's always been the law. These people have the right to gather, really defending it. And what happens is after the Civil War, the close of the Civil War, when enslaved African-Americans are freed,
00:11:08
Speaker
Those laws change in every southern state within a year of the close of the Civil War. Wow. It's really fascinating. So when formerly enslaved people were then able to feed themselves off of these common lands, which were owned privately but open to everyone,
00:11:27
Speaker
The ruling economic class of Euro-American plantation owners wanted that labor. And the only way to get the labor back was to change these laws.
00:11:40
Speaker
So it has a really ugly, ugly history. And from there, that spread north, that spread west. And now today, it's sort of the norm. But I think a lot of us don't realize how much we've lost in terms of those rights and land access.
00:11:55
Speaker
I think you wrote in the book that while people were still enslaved, the slaveholders, they wanted people to have access to land so that they could take care of their own food and they didn't have to feed them. Exactly.
00:12:07
Speaker
But then once they were no longer enslaved, they wanted to control. They wanted to gain more control over over people. Yeah. Yeah, it was a big shift in power dynamics in terms of if you have enslaved someone and you have to provide them less to eat, then that's to the slaveholder's advantage.
00:12:27
Speaker
If there's a freed person and they're able to provide their own food and they're not interested in working for you, then suddenly that power dynamic shifts. And so that's when this country saw all of those laws change.
00:12:42
Speaker
That's a dynamic that's very similar to how enclosure happened in the United Kingdom. Is that correct? Yeah. So a lot of the tactics that we see play out in the U.S. with African-American and indigenous populations had already been tried out on people living in the u k British Isles in general, and a
Global Land Access and Immigration Patterns
00:13:05
Speaker
lot of Northern Europe. So For this, we have to look go a little bit further back. But moving back to sort of the feudal system, which a lot of us learned about in school, there was like a a lord who was sort of granted an area of land by the king or technically by God, according to this system. And then even though that person owned it and controlled it,
00:13:26
Speaker
People had access to common lands. So there were all sorts of areas of common lands, common croplands, common woodlands, common pasture lands, and sort of in exchange for giving some of what they produced to the lord of the land,
00:13:42
Speaker
people had access rights to gather firewood, to fish, to hunt, to turn out animals. And these rights, they're really interesting. I mean, I'm a history geek, but they're so specific. The right to turn out your pigs when the nuts fall in the fall. The right to fish, the right to gather firewood. If you were a widow, you had specific rights. So they're really interesting if you get into them. And what happened between the fourteen hundreds and 1800s in Europe is that a lot of these laws shifted and landlords were allowed to privatize these common lands.
00:14:17
Speaker
And so we have this whole story about Europeans coming to North America because it was a land of opportunity. But the facts are that most Europeans who came to North America, at least for the first several centuries of immigration, were coming because they had been kicked off of the land where they lived. They had lost access to subsistence rights.
00:14:38
Speaker
And they were basically refugees that were looking for a new home. And I imagine if you're a group of wealthy factory owners in England circa 1700 or wherever whenever the the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was, and you have these these jobs, whether it's ah in a coal mine or in a factory, and they're absolutely horrendous jobs, but you need someone to do those because you're not going to do it yourself. And you don't have you don't have automation to do it for you yet. You've got to find a way to get your labor force up.
00:15:12
Speaker
and privatizing land and not allowing people to get their sustenance off of it. Because even if they weren't getting wealthy or they didn't have a great income off of it, if they can get their sustenance off it, that sounds a whole lot better than having to work in a coal mine or work in a factory. But if you change the laws around, that works to your advantage as the factory owners.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, when I kept digging back and back and back to try to figure out like, okay, some people have stayed connected to these tree crops, but the community that I've come from has gotten really disconnected. Why is that?
00:15:48
Speaker
The further back I went... the more I realized that this sort of artificial creation of scarcity by disconnecting people from subsistence rights and the ability to provide for themselves from woodlands and other wild ecosystems, it really is the founding principle of capitalism. And when you...
00:16:07
Speaker
look at the way that that economic system has spread through colonialism all over the world, you can't really have that system without first taking the land away from people and taking those subsistence rights away. Because like you said, the vast majority of people would prefer to just meet their own needs from the land overtaking these jobs.
00:16:29
Speaker
So it's sort of like the founding secret in some ways of capitalism. and And there was a founding story to go with it, which was when this was all starting in Northern Europe, the elite started telling and promoting this story, which nobody believed at the time, but it's become so ingrained in us that actually, you know, there really wasn't any food out there anyways. So people weren't losing very much when they lost access to this land because, you know, they couldn't really get any food there anyways.
00:16:59
Speaker
And i think that's really a story that we've inherited. And part of what made me really want to write the book was to say, you know, this story isn't true. it's It's made up and it's perpetuated a lot of these systems.
Beyond Farms: Forests as Food Systems
00:17:14
Speaker
You have this through line in the book where you talk about that famous bumper sticker of no farms, no food. That's on so many vehicles, especially if you go to a a farmer's market or something like that, half the vehicles will have a a bumper sticker saying no farms, no food. And you say, that's actually not true. That's part of this more modern mythology because we actually sustained ourselves for most of human history without what we would consider now as farms, right?
00:17:40
Speaker
Yeah, we draw this really weird artificial line today between sort of farms and the other ecosystems around us. But they all have food in them, whether it's a farm or a nature preserve or wherever, of a river. The question is, are we managing the ecosystem for food production, because we can do that in a forest, we can do that in a river, we can do that in a crop field, which we think of today as a farm. But I remember as a kid, when I lived in Maine, my parents were bird watchers, and they used to take me out.
00:18:16
Speaker
And we would go look at birds all over the place. And every ecosystem, they would describe the ways that the birds had these adaptations. So they could get all their food, you know, like the sapsuckers drilled the neat little rows of holes and trees.
00:18:29
Speaker
And then we would go and get our food from the grocery store. And I always thought, like, that's weird. How come we're the only animal that doesn't have a habitat? How come we're the only animal... that doesn't have food.
00:18:40
Speaker
And as I've gotten older, and especially as i researched this book and started learning about traditions that included agroforestry, that included, you know, prescribed fire to enhance the productivity of these nut trees and forest ecosystems, I realized that that is just this imaginary line that we've made up as part of this sort of no farms, no food mythology.
00:19:06
Speaker
And I do, I have to apologize to the, it's an awesome organization that made that bumper sticker. It's just a really catchy phrase. So a good way to describe a mythology.
00:19:17
Speaker
It has a lot of truth to it, especially in the modern day. But if we peel back and we look at the broader context, it might not be as true as we think it is. Yeah, well, and one thing that's happened is as we've sort of taken a hands-off approach to a lot of our quote-unquote, wild spaces or natural ecosystems, what I learned as I spoke with different people from indigenous cultures is that in order to be productive and healthy and provide food not just for humans but for other game species, other insects, birds, etc.,
00:19:53
Speaker
These forests actually really need human management. So this hands-off approach that we've taken, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? It's not that these forests inherently have no food, but when we don't manage them and we don't take care of them, they become places that have less food.
00:20:12
Speaker
And not just for us, for other species too.
Developing Tree Crop Systems: Challenges and Benefits
00:20:15
Speaker
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to develop these perennial ecosystems for food crops. A lot of my time is is more focused on developing feed for livestock so that they can get it and then they can turn it into meat and milk and whatever else.
00:20:30
Speaker
But it seems that one of the main challenges of these tree crops is that they they just take so long to develop, right? And they're they're very challenging to to develop, whether you're planting the tree or you are managing the ecosystem through fire or otherwise in order to have those trees seed themselves and grow themselves.
00:20:53
Speaker
It takes years, if not decades or generations to develop these systems. And once they're developed, they're beautiful in that they are producing year after year with relatively minimal inputs. You can hand it down from generation to generation. So so long as that's being handed down and someone developed them in the first place and you're you're managing those systems,
00:21:16
Speaker
Everything is great. But once you sever that, it becomes really hard to regain it. Whether that's the American chestnuts dying. You can plant Chinese chestnuts, but they're not the same. And they would take you 10 years to get a whole lot off of. Whether it's a natural event like the chestnut blight that killed our American chestnuts, or it's someone having the land that those tree crops are on being taken away from them.
00:21:44
Speaker
In either case, it's really hard to get that back and to to make that investment getting in getting it back. because So it makes sense that we've lost so much of that that culture, that history.
00:21:58
Speaker
and that's where annual agriculture shines is that you may have lost your land. In one place, you may have lost your your trees, but you can go somewhere else. You can go towards annual agriculture, but you never...
00:22:11
Speaker
put down those really deep roots or make that investment in these long-term tree systems. It's like an emergency band-aid, but now that's sort of like our only system, which is like, there's nothing wrong with annual row crop agriculture. It's a great, important part, I think, of any food system.
00:22:32
Speaker
But when it's your only big part and it's your main staple, then you're really vulnerable. You're also working a lot harder than is necessary.
00:22:44
Speaker
You know, we're planting a lot of the acreage that we have in soy and corn is to feed animals, you know, animals that we're going to eat, farm animals. And it's like one of the worst things that they could be eating. It's not good for them. It's a lot of work. It's not good for the land.
00:22:59
Speaker
And I think the challenge, I think a lot of people at this point are aware of that. But like you said, transitioning from this sort of emergency band-aid annual agriculture situation to these more perennial crops, you know, part of me thinks, yeah, that's a real challenge. But part of me looks at the investing, credible financial investment that we have put into corn and soy in this country and thinks, actually, it's it's not really that hard or complicated because we could just stop doing that and do this instead. Like we have the resources, we're just diverting them in a different direction. And I think that one thing that I see as really hopeful right now is that farmers are pretty fed up with that system and are some of the strongest advocates at this point for switching over to some of these perennial crops, especially in the Midwest where we just see these huge huge, huge acreages of corn and soy that aren't working for the place. They're not working for the people.
00:24:04
Speaker
They're not really working socially in these communities, economically. So I think there is a hunger for change. And there are some really cool organizations springing up to respond to that and to help us with this transition.
00:24:17
Speaker
But you're right that it's it's much easier to lose these systems than it is to rebuild them. It takes a lot of very thoughtful effort over a long period of time. And that's that's been one of the things that's frustrated in me as I've looked at the history of of tree crops. And for instance, the book Tree Crops written by j Russell Smith back in 1929, there was momentum there. That book, the Tennessee Valley Authority, there was a lot of momentum up until the late 30s.
00:24:45
Speaker
And then once you had World War II, all of that, the support, for those systems. Government support went away. And there's been little spurts of interest or little spurts of support for these longer term tree crop systems, such as when we had the the oil crisis in the 70s, I believe. There was for a little bit, there was interest in developing perennial hydrocarbon biofuel systems with honey locusts or apples or other tree crops.
00:25:15
Speaker
But then once the price of of oil went back down, we shifted gears and those efforts lost focus. And whether it's the government or universities,
00:25:26
Speaker
It's really hard to to see those institutions providing the kind of long-term visionary support that is needed to really get these systems off the ground has been what I've experienced.
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think that the people who are the the places and communities that I see that have retained their tree crops, have retained access to them and are even working to sort of rebuild systems that have been either lost or degraded are communities where it's culturally important to the people. whether it's an indigenous tribe or a specific township or whatever it is, where people in the community, more than just, you know, a few government employees or a university grant system, are really invested on a deeper level. And I think that part of what made me want to write
00:26:26
Speaker
the book is there are so many people who I know are worried about the places where they live who want to do something positive. But we as humans, like we kind of need a story to rally around. We're not very, we're not very good at shifting culture without stories.
00:26:43
Speaker
And so, you know, it's sort of ah a small drop in the bucket, but I do feel like we're in a moment right now of kind of changing stories and And if we can get people in communities as a community to rally around some of these crops, I think we have a better chance of sustaining those shifts.
00:27:01
Speaker
Let's put you in charge of getting getting our country to, let's say 20% of our staple food diet has been shifted from corn, soybeans, and wheat to chestnuts, acorns, and hazelnuts or whatever. pick Pick the tree crops. What do you think the most likely route looks like? What are some of the best steps that can be taken towards developing that kind of a staple crop food system?
00:27:30
Speaker
Well, one approach that I think... would be really interesting is to change the way that we think about and manage some of our public lands. So we actually have a lot of public land in the US. at Where I live is a perfect example. Cape Cod is like this. We always do the arm. I'm kind of like out here. And mostly from the elbow all the way out is all where our town is 70% public land.
Public Lands for Tree Crop Production
00:27:55
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:27:55
Speaker
There's a lot of areas out west with a ton of public land. So one thing that I think we could do pretty easily. i don't know if easily is the right word, but one thing that would be easy to do on a government organizational level is reintroduce a sort of intentional human management aspect to a lot of these lands You'll go to places like I've talked with foresters in Pennsylvania, for instance, near where you are, and their two jobs are to put out fires and to sort of produce habitat for wildlife.
00:28:31
Speaker
Now, it turns out those jobs are actually totally at odds with each other because you need a bit of fire to produce the habitat for wildlife. But also there's a lot of overlap between what wildlife needs and what these tree crops need for human production. So I would reintroduce that human element and thinking of these landscapes as a place that can produce human food to our management strategy for our public lands.
00:28:57
Speaker
And allow the same way we allow hunting, we allow fishing. you have to have a license. There's rules about it. I would reintroduce that concept. both the care and those gathering practices to those spaces.
00:29:10
Speaker
I think the biggest bang for our buck would be changing the way that our subsidies work in the Midwest, because the vast majority of that corn and soy money that we're pouring into those crops is happening in sort of that breadbasket region. And the native ecosystem of that region was oak savanna. So an area where there were a lot of oaks, a lot of hazelnuts.
00:29:34
Speaker
And there are some farms there that are showing really successfully what reintroducing those species in a managed, intentional way can do And whether or not we're going to immediately get Americans eating huge bowls of acorn porridge or, you know, mashed chestnuts or whatever it is, that might be tricky. But what I think would be really easy again, and what we could do really quickly is to bring back that pork system where pigs are eating a lot of acorns and chestnuts, because that is what pigs like to eat. When we eat pigs that eat that, the meat is better for us.
00:30:11
Speaker
And managing those ecosystems is actually a lot easier over the long term than planting those annual crops every year. It would save us a lot of money, a lot of labor and produce better food. So those are kind of the two places where I would start.
00:30:28
Speaker
Now you're speaking my language. I've read the book Tree Crops more than more than most people probably should. And i I love the line in there where he says, these but foods for human consumption are great and they deserve a lot of work, but they're unstable. Their price is going to start really, really high. And then once you produce a few freight cars worth of it, the price is going to go down, down, down, down. down And whether that's hazelnuts or chestnuts or...
00:30:58
Speaker
ah Heart nuts. I love each one of those and I have each one of those on my property. But are we going to expect for people in the United States to go from eating like 0.1 pound of chestnuts to eating 10 pounds of chestnuts? Are we expecting people to 100 fold increase the amount of chestnuts in their diet?
00:31:16
Speaker
Maybe. I'd love to see it. Probably not. But like you said, pigs will love it. Yeah. Cows will will love chestnuts. And switching our livestock feeding systems. Yeah.
00:31:27
Speaker
from completely based on annuals to much more of the perennial systems is that I mean, that's, that's where my life work is going towards. So I fully agree with you on that.
00:31:39
Speaker
It's a no brainer. And I mean, if you look at the corn numbers, first of all, they're really interesting, because if you can just do basic math, you very quickly see that less than 1% of the corn that we grow is actually grown to feed human bodies. Like that's when we say, oh, we have to plant, we have to farm this way, so to feed the world, like,
00:31:59
Speaker
That's actually just the biggest lie ever because that's not what this crop is doing. You know, like 40% of it is to ethanol. I think another 45% is for animal feed.
00:32:11
Speaker
So even if you just looked at that number right there, that 45% and converted that percentage of the corn acreage and ethanol could We could get into that too, but even even if you're just looking at the animal feed component, that's 45% of the corn acreage that we could put into these perennial systems that are also producing other food crops. you know These animals can browse on the understory and on pasture that's planted with trees, and so you're already seeing a huge increase in production, right? that The animals can live on the same land where...
00:32:48
Speaker
the crop that they're eating is being grown. So that's already a consolidation. And you're getting other crops off of the land. The way that we do it right now, we we talk about efficiency and we talk about cost savings, but it is the most expensive, least efficient way that we could possibly be growing food
Critiquing U.S. Agricultural Priorities
00:33:08
Speaker
for animals. It makes no economic sense, no ecological sense. It only works because we're subsidizing it.
00:33:15
Speaker
There is no other reason that it's working. We're subsidizing it and we don't have we don't have the alternative, like the perennial alternative. If we had an intact perennial system in place producing loads of chestnuts and acorns and honey locusts and mulberries and persimmons and apples and all of those things annually,
00:33:36
Speaker
this would actually make sense. Like it, we wouldn't, we wouldn't produce near as much corn and soybeans as we would for livestock consumption because we would have these existing free resources at hand. And we just, we don't have those. Like we have, we have open pasture because if we, we think about how we went from the woods and when then we we came in, We cleared the woods because we didn't think that there was anything really valuable in there anyway.
00:34:01
Speaker
Cleared it, turned it into farmland and to pastures. And now we have pastures and those are great spots for ruminants for cattle, sheep and goats. But there's there's nothing left really for for pigs, for poultry. And if we had those intact ecosystems or we rebuild those intact ecosystems, all of a sudden it doesn't make near as much sense to really only focus on producing annual crops for those.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yeah, the math shifts really quickly if you make that transition. Is this going to be your next book? Because I would love for that to be your next book. Maybe it should be.
00:34:37
Speaker
I don't know. i'm i'm People ask that. I'm like, I'm not quite ready for a next book yet. I understand. Taking a moment. Five years working on a book seems like ah ah you need a little bit of a break from it.
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah. I will say, though, i don't I don't talk about them in the book, but anytime someone mentions mulberries, I get very excited because on the fruit side of things, I think those are ah they're just amazing trees and they produce so much. And people don't talk about them. They're really overlooked often.
00:35:08
Speaker
I talk about them a lot because I'm probably the largest mulberry grower in the country right now. Really? Oh, yeah. we have I did not know that. Our goal with the business Trees for Grazers is to shift a lot of these animal production systems towards perennial like perennialized animal production systems.
00:35:28
Speaker
And we can do that with with honey locusts and persimmons and apples and all kinds of other things. Mulberries really are the – you get the best return on your investment for pigs and poultry in particular. Yeah.
00:35:39
Speaker
Right now, even though most, almost every single like beef cow starts its life on pasture and spends the majority of his life on pasture, because that's just the cheapest, lowest input system. The opposite is true for for pigs and for poultry. Most all of those are raised in such a way that they never even see the light of day, right? And that is it's all predicated on you're harvesting corn and soybeans, you're mixing that, you're bringing it to the animals.
00:36:08
Speaker
And we don't have these intact ecosystems. And so even if people raising pigs on pasture, they're still having to feed annuals, they're still having to feed grains, as much or more than folks are raising them in a barn, because they're out outside and they're getting exercise and all that stuff.
00:36:23
Speaker
So if we can redevelop these systems where we have acres and acres of mulberries for the summer, because there's nothing really else dropping during the summer months. And then in the fall, you have just a plethora of chestnuts and acorns and apples and all of those other things to work with. And what we want to do is we want to make this available like at scale at the price that farmers can afford. so that's why we've we've delved really deep into producing a lot of mulberries in the coming years, persimmons and all kinds of other things.
00:36:53
Speaker
I love it. It's reminding me a bit when you're talking about that of I spent some time in Switzerland researching the book. And that's one of the places I think because of the terrain in Europe that has really retained this really intact tree crop culture. So chestnuts were brought there by the Romans is sort of the story. And the pollen record seems to support it. So several thousand years ago, there's sort of a mix of really tended, grafted chestnut trees and also sort of wild genotype trees.
00:37:24
Speaker
There's also walnuts, there's hazelnuts. And all because they're in the Alps and they're on this incredibly steep slopes, you can really only grow grains or have pasture in some of the lower areas.
00:37:38
Speaker
And then these mountainous areas have been home to goats, these sort of wild, there's there's a wild chamois. There's also deer and pheasants and some other game animals. And those as meat sources are really integrated into the local economy. Like you can sell a deer there in a way that you can't here.
00:38:00
Speaker
And if you go to a restaurant, the venison is on the menu. I had like a venison carpaccio, which was amazing. Venison tartare. It's integrated into the cuisine and it's all part of this wooded ecosystem that is really carefully managed for food production and food.
00:38:19
Speaker
firewood production. The municipality from these nut forests, also everyone has like an allotment of firewood that they just get because they live in the town and the town manages.
Switzerland's Sustainable Tree Crop Model
00:38:30
Speaker
Oh, really? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So they have a really dialed in woodland management system, both for food, fuel and animal feed.
00:38:41
Speaker
I think, again, just sort of a testament to the terrain and the fact that that shift that came to a lot of places couldn't really happen there. And it's really cool to go there and to taste some of what they're making with chestnuts. You know, they're making chestnut ravioli, chestnut gnocchi, chestnut pasta, chestnut breads, and all of the animals are eating chestnuts. And It's definitely not food that anyone would turn down. Like they have a cuisine centered on these nuts and it's delicious.
00:39:13
Speaker
That's amazing. It makes me very hungry also. Yes. Back to that point that you mentioned earlier about like game lands and managing public resources, public lands. I love this idea of like having, instead of, in my area, we have a lot of game lands, but they're they're just they're woods and they're mostly, they have they have maples, they have beaches, oaks, all kinds of different things, but they're not producing all that much mast or tree crops. But I would love the idea of a
00:39:44
Speaker
more of a hunting preserve savanna type, you're cultivating these trees, whether it's chestnuts, acorns, honey locusts, all of these variety of native species that can at the same point be used for wildlife and the wildlife would have actually have more feed, more food available to them. And it would also be food that anyone could use.
00:40:08
Speaker
Yeah, if you look at the history of this continent, and especially the eastern part, since that's where we're both situated, for 9,000 years until pretty recently, the predominant forest type throughout a lot of eastern North America was this oak hickory, and originally would have also been chestnut mix.
00:40:28
Speaker
All of those species are fire adapted. And these really open, high mass producing woodland ecosystems were created and maintained through prescribed fire.
00:40:40
Speaker
And indigenous groups all over the eastern U.S. s and obviously also in the Midwest and West were very experienced with fire and have accumulated a lot of knowledge about because fire. So I got into prescribed fire through the book and through learning about some of this history.
00:40:59
Speaker
And it's super nuanced. Like, again, it's a lot easier to lose the knowledge of how to put fire on the land to produce what you want than it is to relearn that knowledge.
00:41:13
Speaker
But I also think it's really important work because when we're talking about, you know, like some of the foresters I've talked with are managing 100,000 acres. you're not going to go out and weed and plant 100,000 acres. That's ridiculous.
00:41:27
Speaker
You're going to need to use some tools that work on a broader level. And prescribed fire is a tool that can do a lot of jobs and can really, i think, change the way we relate to those landscapes.
00:41:40
Speaker
I love it. I
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:41:42
Speaker
love it. Elspeth, I know that your your daughter is coming home soon. And so we need to wrap up the conversation here. We could go a lot longer, but I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation. I love it.
00:41:53
Speaker
Love, again, the book. If anyone interested in this kind of information, I would highly recommend the book. We've only just scratched the surface on all of the wonderful anecdotes and stories that you share in the book that really flesh us out so much more.
00:42:08
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you so much. it was so fun talking. Let's do it again. All right Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song.
00:42:18
Speaker
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