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Lessons from Building a 600 Acre Chestnut Business with Russell Wallack
241 Plays1 month ago
Russell Wallack and team at Breadtree Farms are some of our favorite kind of people - the kind who not only imagine a different future for our communities and our planet, but put in the work to turn that vision into reality.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Russell walks us through the history of the chestnut tree in North America, which once made up over a quarter of all trees in the eastern US, and how they are harnessing its potential as a keystone crop for regenerative farmers once more.
In this episode, we cover:
- The story of Breadtree Farms and its unique position in US agriculture
- The story of the chestnut fungal blight and why chestnut trees basically disappeared in the eastern US
- Re-building the organic chestnut market and the potential for domestic hickory oil
- What goes into transitioning conventional annual crops to chestnut and hickory trees
- Russell’s advice of getting into farming and agroforestry
- The future of funding agroforestry projects in the US
- Why you should reach out to your regenerative heroes
- And much more...
Learn more about Breadtree Farms.
Follow them on Instagram.
More about Russell:
Russell is Breadtree’s founding farmer, but he is just one of 6 full time members of the Breadtree team, and of over 200 people who have helped this young business to plant over 15,000 chestnut and hickory trees across over 220+ acres in New York. After working in utility-scale energy efficiency, Russell made the jump to food systems work and agroforestry in 2014. He believes chestnut trees — an ancient staple food across the temperate world — play an integral role in recreating an agriculture of place; he has dedicated the past 8 years to creating a viable business centered on the growth of a regional industry for this tree crop. He has consulted internationally with multi-billion dollar food supply systems, advised the European Commission on regenerative agriculture policy, and worked with leading regenerative agriculture organizations to impact thousands of acres.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song.
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
There is so much potential in the living world that we just ignore on a daily basis. And I think fundamentally when we're talking about tree crops and agroforestry and diversifying what plants live in our agricultural landscapes, we have to lean more into what is possible than what is here today. There is more that can happen in every landscape that we work with than we acknowledge with our current systems.
00:00:35
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
00:01:04
Speaker
Well, Russell, welcome to Agrarian Futures. I'm flying solo here today without Emma, but I'm very happy to to have you on here, Russell. We've talked a bit in the past, our paths have crossed, but it's great to have you on the podcast to be able to get into some depth about what you do, your business, your mission, and then be able to share that with more people. So welcome on here. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Thanks for the invitation. I'm excited to get to chat again.
00:01:31
Speaker
Very good. So Russell, can you start us out with an introduction to yourself? Maybe start out with what is the work that you do and how did you get here? Sure. Yeah. So I am the CEO or founder, farmer, co-owner of Breadtree Farms. We today manage about 600 acres in the upper Hudson Valley of New York. So everything is north of the capital region in Albany.
00:01:57
Speaker
Most of that acreage is focused on chestnut and a little bit of hybrid hickory silvopasture systems. and um So converting corn, soy, and hay fields into hybrid chestnut and hybrid hickory, producing integrations with grazing animals and tree crops. So chestnuts as a flower crop and hickory as an oil crop is is the thought there.
00:02:21
Speaker
and I do that with a six-person team. So I'm one of six full-time people. and yeah Do you want me to just jump into a little bit about how we got to where we are? Absolutely. this is I don't think there's a whole lot of companies like yours in the country. Would that be correct? I think that's true. It's not a whole lot of companies, especially of this size, having six full-time staff, 600 acres, and being both on the chestnuts and on the hickories. I really like that.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, let's let's give a little bit of history because that's it must not have happened just overnight. so Telling the full story, i mean I'm a first-generation farmer. Everyone on our team is a first-generation farmer. We're all from the Northeast US, but none of us are from where we're farming.
00:03:06
Speaker
I grew up in the connecticut river valley in massachusetts which is a very agricultural valley but really didn't think i was gonna get into farming until almost the end of college when i started just asking a bunch of questions about wire food system is the way it is and really specifically for me the thing that got me interested i was like. Is it possible to grocery shop and not produce trash like even if you don't have food waste you still have a bunch of trash and why is that the case.
00:03:31
Speaker
That got me down a whole rabbit hole on like, why are we commodifying foods and why are we taking all the value out of foods and then needing to add it back in in the form of packaging and branding? And what does that say about our agriculture of today? And I basically had too much student debt to farm. I went to a very expensive college, one that I'm happy to have gone to. but I took on a bunch of student debt and just couldn't figure out a way to farm straight out of college so I went and worked in clean tech and worked at like grid level energy efficiency like helping utilities be more energy efficient and kind of did a bunch of self teaching and like.
00:04:10
Speaker
Planting seeds on my deck and starting to think about how to grow trees and finding little things on the side and eventually actually heard about a group apple seed permaculture planting trees in the northeast for landowners and emailed them and I was like, what do I have to do to plant trees with you guys?
00:04:28
Speaker
So I paid off my student loans, jumped ship from a very like comfortable job that wasn't the future I wanted, and started planting trees and interning with these folks, and learned a ton from Ethan and Diami and Connor there. That kind of got me started on tree crops and wanting to understand like how can we... Are there trees we can grow that produce staple crops? like Instead of wheat, can we have chestnuts? Instead of soybean oil, can we have hickory oil? and Those kinds of questions. and I'll say this, I don't think we'll ever replace annual crops fully and I don't think that should be the goal. like Corn is a beautiful plant, wheat is a beautiful plant, soy is a beautiful plant. 10 years ago, I would have told you that the goal is to replace all annual crops with trees.
00:05:13
Speaker
I definitely don't think that's the goal anymore. And I think it would be a sad outcome. Like I think those plants are just as beautiful as just the trees are. We just in some contexts are misusing their beauty, I guess is what I would say. And how bread tree got started was basically I planted trees for other people for a while and was kind of disappointed in what happens when someone doesn't have the skills to manage trees or those trees aren't their priority and you plant trees for them and walk away and Yeah, I think there are people who are doing that really well. I think from what I know you're doing that really well. I just didn't think it was the work I wanted to be doing in terms of like setting up the systems to be co creating with those people over many years. I kind of started seeing myself more in the role of being a farmer who's working a specific piece of land, growing specific trees, building a food business that is selling the product from those trees.
00:06:08
Speaker
And that just became really compelling to me as a way to show that this form of agriculture is viable. And so that for me was kind of the decision point. I was also at the time consulting with food businesses and a little underwhelmed on like, you know, there are plenty of food businesses taking certain approaches to investing in a variety of what they're describing as regenerative agriculture.
00:06:30
Speaker
And even those businesses like to tell them to go to market with a product for a crop that's produced on four thousand acres in the whole us which is the current context of chestnuts is like a pretty hard way to create or to drastically grow an agricultural industry is to say like. General mills are for someone like that why don't you go to market with a chestnut flower cracker.
00:06:52
Speaker
For an agricultural industry that for all intents and purposes is a very like small scale agricultural industry in the US and so my work I would say is building on and standing on the shoulders of people who've been doing amazing work in the US on chestnuts for approaching a hundred years in this like post-blight context.
00:07:11
Speaker
And as important and great as the work that has been done is, roughly, I think we're at like 4,000 to 5,000 acres depending on what data you're looking at of production in the whole US. And like less than 1% of that's organic certified. Wow. So we're talking about like 50 acres of organic chestnuts in the whole US today, roughly speaking, right? so That piece to me of like how do we grow that and who's going to build the businesses that show us how to grow that is the thing that made Breadtree start. I love it. Now, can you give us a little bit of history and context because you mentioned that we're in a post-Blight era, post-Blight context.
00:07:51
Speaker
So what's the blight that you're referring to? What did chestnut culture look like before that? And what does it look like maybe in other places in the world? And what do you see us moving towards? Yeah, sure. Blight specifically, that's in reference to a fungal blight that was introduced to North America from trees brought in from East Asia that were well adapted to the that blight.
00:08:16
Speaker
So the Native American populations of chestnut trees, which are a different species, multiple different species, were not well adapted to that fungus, and that wiped out most of the chestnut trees in North America.
00:08:30
Speaker
There's kind of a little bit of debate about the exact specifics, but something like many millions to billions of chestnut trees in the eastern U.S., generally in like kind of uplands and Appalachia from Maine to Georgia. That doesn't mean a contiguous forest of chestnuts, that whole stretch, but there were native ranges within all of the states, basically, from Maine to Georgia.
00:08:52
Speaker
So, kind of pre-Columbian context is that was a major food source both for humans and many forms of wildlife that humans hunted and ate. Pre-1500 here in the US, some of that context changed drastically with colonization and genocide.
00:09:09
Speaker
you know, between 1500 and 1900. And there was still kind of a traditional ecological knowledge relationship to chestnuts, as well as European communities and Asian communities moving here, who then kind of adopted a culture around the American chestnut trees.
00:09:28
Speaker
And then there was by 1900, I know the largest farm I'm aware of was an 800 acre operation, actually fairly close to U Austin in Eastern Pennsylvania, the sober chestnut tree farm. And they had 800 acres of pretty much all grafted European chestnuts. So European chestnuts grafted onto Americans. Yeah. The Paragon cultivar actually was their major crop. And that was until like 1900, 1910.
00:09:56
Speaker
But to give you a select, that was an eight maker single orchard. Yeah. I would have imagined that the US s production back in the day was simply wild harvest from American chestnuts. and I had no idea that there was orchards growing it. There were, I mean, it wasn't like 2 million acres, like what we have of almonds today, but there was a orchard.
00:10:17
Speaker
production system and then this fungal bite was introduced those trees wouldn't have been resistant to the blade so they were wiped out. And then for those people who are listening who are familiar with the american chestnut the trees themselves actually are still in our forests in a lot of cases.
00:10:35
Speaker
The root system stays alive because this fungal pathogen doesn't live below the soil surface. And so often for folks walking in Appalachian Mountains or here in the Northeast, in the town I live in, the hike I go for every day, hundreds, thousands of chestnut trees, they just don't grow above 15, 20, 30 feet. And most of them don't get, ah those stems don't get mature enough to produce fruit.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah. So when we sing about chestnuts roasting over an open fire, that song originates probably before the chestnut blight. And because presumably for a long time between when the chestnut blight hit in the early 1900s. And now there was almost no one eating chestnuts over an open fire, but that was a very traditional thing for a long time.
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, and what you see today in the US is the communities that are still most in touch with chestnuts as like a part of their food culture are generally like first and second generation immigrant communities from, roughly speaking, like the whole Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe and then Korea, China, Japan, and there's even some chestnut culture in Southeast Asia.
00:11:48
Speaker
and like I believe in like Thailand and Cambodia and Vietnam. so but you know In Chinatown and New York, you still walk by chestnut roasting carts. A lot of Italian grocery stores, especially in the fall, will have chestnut products. But in the US, we today import 90% of what we consume is the number I have. It's about 7 million pounds of imports.
00:12:09
Speaker
So part of our theory as a business is that even if we just start with offsetting the import market and also providing a diversified product, that's organic, but also silver pasture and kind of diversified tree plantings to increase carbon sequestration that we're going above and beyond with a very whatever marketing term you want to use, but like climate friendly product that can be made attractive to a larger audience than just agroforestry geeks like us.
00:12:38
Speaker
Give me a sense here for where the industry is at. You had mentioned there's about 4,000 acres of production of chestnuts nationally, but it takes a long time for chestnut orchards once planted to come online and start producing. Do you have a sense for how many acres are already in the ground but not producing yet? And how many acres might it take to offset, let's say, all of the chestnuts that's imported for fresh eating, fresh consumption? So it's a little hard. I don't know how much you've studied like the Ag Census data, but the numbers don't always feel that reliable. yeah
00:13:20
Speaker
So we had a new ag census come out this year from the USDA. People listening probably don't know, but like every farmer gets a mailer every five years from the USDA. And it's like, what are you growing? Are you irrigating? Is it organic?
00:13:35
Speaker
how old are the people working on your farm? How old are you as a farm owner? How much are your assets worth? It's basically like this big survey of what's happening on every piece of farmland in the country. And that all gets aggregated. Depending on how trustworthy you think that data is, we're probably somewhere between five and 10,000 acres planted in the US. That's a big range.
00:13:55
Speaker
Yeah. And depending on what nursery you're buying from and what astronomical yield number they're giving you, 10,000 acres could produce 10 million pounds or could produce 6 million pounds. yeah But realistically, like I think in the next 10 years, we will probably overproduce to replace the fresh import market. Based on the information I have, i mean there's also organizations like Agroforestry Partners in the Midwest making like very large commitments on acreage planted. There's some other folks in New York planting more trees, long future farm, canopy farm management in the Midwest also is planting a lot more chestnuts. I just wouldn't be that surprised if we could satiate the entire import market with domestic production
00:14:40
Speaker
it definitely within my lifetime it seems like one thing that's interesting about chestnuts though is let's say best-case scenario we've got ten thousand acres planted in the next five years you know fifteen thousand acres of production in fifteen years and we're totally filling that market the US today consumes about a twentieth of a pound per capita Korean people today consume four pounds per capita. The average European consumes one pound per capita. The average Chinese person I think consumes one and a half pounds per capita per year. So obviously I'm not suggesting we're going to have this like mass cultural shift, but it's totally reasonable to imagine a version of the United States where we're consuming 20 to 80 times as many chestnuts per person per year.
00:15:29
Speaker
Even if you just go from 0.05 pounds to 0.5 pounds, now we're talking maybe we need 100,000 acres of chestnuts instead of 10,000. Yeah, totally. Just to be clear, like I'm not suggesting my business and everything we're doing is based on an assumption that we're going to 20X all chestnut consumption in the United States.
00:15:51
Speaker
There is so much potential in the living world that we just ignore on a daily basis. And I think fundamentally when we're talking about tree crops and agroforestry and diversifying what plants live in our agricultural landscapes, because that's like broadly the conversation we're having right now.
00:16:09
Speaker
we have to lean more into what is possible than what is here today. And that's not to say like, so everyone should jump ship and plant chestnut trees right now. I'm not a super like doomer or collapses or anything. It's more just like there is more that can happen in every landscape that we work with than we acknowledge with our current systems.
00:16:32
Speaker
I think that's a fantastic insight. And when you're working with perennial tree crops that have this long-term, it's a long-term commitment, right? You are investing in something that's going to be there past your lifetime, regardless of where the market goes, those trees are going to be there. So I'm sure that you're committed too, to finding ways that you can sell those profitably.
00:16:57
Speaker
and regardless of where the market happens to be at any one given point because you can't fully control the market. Yeah, I mean, because this stuff is just like, it's real and it's in front of our face, but we just don't talk about it. It's like, today in any given year, there's 60 to 90 million acres of soy planted in the United States. That number was effectively zero in 1940. In the 50s, if you were planting soy, you were like the weird cousin that no one understood what you were doing, right? so like We talk about these systems as if they are unchanged for millennia. And really, we just don't have any evidence of a post-Columbian agriculture that works yet in the North America. We have evidence of a pre-Columbian agriculture that worked. We're still trying to figure out what actually works in this place, in this current economic and social context. Anyone who says that we figured it out is just like not paying attention to science or history.
00:17:55
Speaker
And so I would just rather take a view of like what is possible here and what are the systems that we think might be possible here that are worth investing. And like, whether that's leaf fodder or additions of honey locust, a pasture to enhance overall feed and productivity of a system. Or like I said, we're starting to invest in hickory oil and we're planting out selected bitternut and hybrid hickory trees. So across the shag bark and bitternut tree.
00:18:23
Speaker
and working with partners like Yellow Bud Farms and thinking about like what would it look like to make a more efficient system for sorting hickory nuts because it's a pressable in-shell crop that can be turned into a ah pressed oil without having to shell it. So like if we can figure out harvesting and sorting nuts, we don't even have to worry about shelling. We can just be pressing and we're producing a high-quality culinary oil from forests.
00:18:49
Speaker
So you're planting all these trees on 600 acres, both chestnuts and hickories. And what happens with the product once you harvest it? Yep. To start, we'll be a fresh chestnut business, meaning we're selling whole chestnuts that we'll go to market with right now all direct to customer. So meaning individual human beings are buying food directly from us versus us selling to a grocery store and different people going to that grocery store and buying our food so one of the benefits of being in a business where our crop is gonna slowly come online is we can be slowly building our sales and marketing approach.
00:19:30
Speaker
right So if you and I started a veg operation and planted out 200 acres of vegetables this year, our business pretty much fails if we don't sell 200 acres of vegetables this year, at least in the common thinking of annual crops. You're going to plant them so you can sell them this year.
00:19:47
Speaker
In chestnuts, I started planting chestnuts five years ago almost exactly five years ago. We'll probably have our first crop this year, but also we've structured our business to have enough cash on hand that even if our crop failed this year, it wasn't going to be big enough to be like the crutch that our business was dependent on. right so It's totally what made it harder to get started and like we had to fundraise and take on investors, but it also means that we kind of have this ramp up period where we can say okay could we sell two thousand pounds direct to customer the next year could we sell five to ten thousand pounds direct to customer the next year could we do twenty thousand.
00:20:27
Speaker
And over that period, like as we start getting to 100 and 200,000, we'll get a sense of, are we bringing in new people to this conversation? Are we kind of maxing out? you know We've got 5,000 really loyal customers and they all buy 10 pounds a year, but we really don't think we're going to get much more than that. Then we have a 50,000 pound direct to customer business and we need to start selling to restaurants or grocery stores or start making a value added product.
00:20:56
Speaker
Again, that's all like TBD, but there's some leeway in how things are coming online that allows us to kind of figure it out as we go to some extent. That said, we're like trying to be ahead of the curve on all of it, like build a brand that can sell 10,000 pounds of chestnuts when you only need to sell 2000 pounds and you can still sell pre-orders on next year's harvest. People have been able to buy pre-orders on our website for a year.
00:21:21
Speaker
I think we're approaching 200 pounds of chestnuts sold to like nine different States. And that's without us doing like any marketing. That's just people mostly Googling, where do I buy chestnuts and landing on our website? And that's in five pound increments. Those orders will be fulfilled, say this fall. Yep. So we double check with them and make sure that was intentional because sometimes people click, click through things quickly. But yeah, like things like that, we're trying to be strategic about marketing of like,
00:21:50
Speaker
There's no law that says you can't pre-sell every agricultural product, right? Or like we're selling the rights to name a tree because all of our trees are genetically unique and seedlings. And so like any one of our trees could become like the upstate New York, like champion testnet tree. So who wants to adopt a tree and name it? And like one of my friends named three trees in his mother's honor when she passed last year. like what cooler way to memorialize your parent right i mean there are lots of cool ways but you're biased but i get it i agree so yeah even just thinking about like what are the creative ways we can be engaging people before we have a crop and building this conversation and building a community and we've had roughly a hundred fifty people plant trees with us.
00:22:36
Speaker
All of those people now like have the feeling in their heart of how powerful it is to plant a tree that could produce food for generations. So like last week I spoke at a local church near our farm, 70 people came out. We had over an hour of Q and&A because people are just like fired up about how cool this is and want to know more about chestnuts. right So we're figuring out ways like that to just be building the conversation even before we can be feeding everyone. And yeah, that's kind of where we're at as a business right now is like shifting from tree planting company to food selling company. And yeah, we're hopeful that the first like eight acres we planted will be like 100 to 200 pounds an acre this year. And I think that's the worst acre we'll ever plant.
00:23:21
Speaker
We made a lot of mistakes. I'm right there with you. We did our first syllable pasture plantings four years ago now, and it's only up from there because we made a lot of mistakes in the first couple of years and we have our systems down now.
00:23:34
Speaker
I think one of the really cool things about building a business and building an agricultural business is like figuring out how to like fail or get things wrong in a structured way so that you're actually setting yourself up to learn. The thing we haven't done well is we've messed up a lot, but what we've done well is like mess up in ways that we can learn from or even like take the opportunity to say, okay, like the outcome here wasn't what we wanted. What is our sense of why the outcome wasn't what we wanted? like What was in our control that we could have done differently that likely would have led to a different outcome?
00:24:08
Speaker
And I think, again, that's like kind of the benefit of working in a system where you're really building a business over seven to 10 years rather than like jumping in and having to have a business that pays for itself in year one. Totally a position of privilege to like not have been dependent on the income from that farm for the first five years. I'm now in full-time.
00:24:30
Speaker
But i think that approach to agroforestry and tree crops specifically is so important because this is such a long term thing that like. If you're not learning every year you're doing it you're probably leaving a lot of value on the table in terms of how you could be better managing that system.
00:24:47
Speaker
And what I tell folks too if is if they're interested in tree crops for human consumption, plant them in such a way that there are backup options for you. If you plant chestnuts and 15 years from now, there's no one who's really interested in harvesting the chestnuts or there's no market in your area because there's no processing center right there.
00:25:08
Speaker
Plant them in such a way that it's not going to break the bank. It's not going to sink your farm because we've had funding to reduce the cost to put them in the ground. And maybe we have we have hogs or there's something else that can make use of those justice, even if they aren't going to go to their highest use that they could be going towards. So building in that resiliency into our systems, because these are long-term systems and there's so little relatively that we know starting into it.
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. So I heard that you guys recently were awarded a pretty significant grant. Can you tell me a little bit about what that's for and how that looks to have an effect on the but chestnut industry as a whole in your region?
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah. So first thing is it's awesome news. And I feel like the news sounds better in a way than it's for our business. So I just want to like not overstate this. Like, like, so it's technically a $2.8 million dollars project from the USDA, which is a big number and it's awesome. And $800,000 of that is match, which means it's like our time going into it or our cash going into it or someone else's time. Right.
00:26:21
Speaker
And then the two million dollars is actually ah it's all reimbursement. So we have had people contacting us who are like, oh, you just got this big check in your bank account. Like, how can that help me?
00:26:32
Speaker
And I just want to be clear, like this is like specifically only allocated to reimburse us for work done to create this processing facility. That said, I think this project is going to be a huge lift for the industry. And I like truly mean that this is not really about our business. So this is going to be, depending on the exact equipment we go with and the exact architectural design, something like a one to two million pound throughput facility.
00:27:01
Speaker
My understanding, as far as I can tell, no one in the US is processing more than one to two hundred thousand pounds a year. So this is about ten times bigger than anything that exists in the US. It will be organic certified. As I said earlier, almost none of what is produced in the US is organic.
00:27:20
Speaker
And it explicitly is about being in service to the region. So even just this specific grant, which this project is much bigger than this grant, it'll probably be a five to $6 million dollars project realistically. But there's free technical support and opportunities for free site visits for producers interested in organic production or already inorganic production, trying to understand how they could sell into this facility.
00:27:46
Speaker
we're gonna do some international site visits as well as domestic site visits to other processing facilities and collate that all into a synthesis document where we're gonna talk about what we've seen at all these facilities what we learn from those visits.
00:28:01
Speaker
what equipment we're recommending for this scale, because what we're talking about in the US is something like 10 to 15 million pound increase in annual production in a country that today has no facility that produces, processes a million pounds. So if we do this right,
00:28:20
Speaker
we're building like one of the next twenty facilities and we're not trying to be in the facility building business it's just like we knew we needed it we want to build it if we're building it for ourselves it might as well be big enough for the region. And if we're building it big enough for the region we might as well share the learnings about what worked for the upper hudson valley and july broadly the northeast.
00:28:40
Speaker
so that there can be one in Pennsylvania and one in Virginia and one in North Carolina and Tennessee and Ohio. It seems like that's like where the industry is going, but as far as I know, no one right now is building that infrastructure. So we see like all of the research and planning we're doing broadly as just like this whole resource that can sit there, be publicly disseminated by Savannah Institute, be totally available, totally transparent,
00:29:07
Speaker
and really a resource that can help the whole industry. The only reason I started this business is to make this form of agriculture work. so like If everything we're doing isn't in service to growing this work and making it accessible for more people, then I think we're like we're failing as much as if we're failing to sell our chestnut.
00:29:26
Speaker
So that's the intent. That's what we've committed to with this project. There's a huge lift by our team to like, we're probably going to need to apply for more grants. We're probably going to need to find some private financing, ideally more concessionary financing, not like market rate debt financing, but that's kind of where we are right now is like planning out the implementation of this grant, but also starting to think about the grant as just a part of, you know, a project that's three times bigger than the grant.
00:29:54
Speaker
But if people are interested, you know, if there are producers listening to this or new or beginning producers, they don't even have to have trees planted. There's a bread tree farms backslash OMDG. The program was the organic market development grant is a working URL where you can go subscribe to the distribution list for that program. And so like, whether that's for a site visit or free webinars, we'll be hosting or to receive updates on the project. That's the best place to go.
00:30:24
Speaker
But like I said, like this, I can't say it enough. This is like, it's not about bread tree getting a big win. This is like truly designed to be a big win for anyone who wants to grow chestnuts or eat chestnuts or smell chestnut.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah. And to clarify about your business model and the way that you're interacting with the community, am I correct to say that you own some of your acres and then you lease some of the acres and then there's other collaborations where if someone has their own independent farm that they run, that they could make use of these processing facilities down the road as well?
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah. So in terms of Chestnut production, most of the land is owned land that we're planting and managing. There's a bit of acreage that we lease. So we plant, manage, harvest, sell, and the owners get a percentage of the revenue that comes from the Chestnut sales. So no lease payment aside from the revenue share. It's entirely shared skin in the game on Chestnut production.
00:31:24
Speaker
And then we're also working with folks who wanna work with us in service arrangements, so non-farming landowners who want us to plant orchards on their land and manage them. And the major thing there is we just mandate a five-year term so that we're raising those trees to production.
00:31:43
Speaker
We don't want to plant trees and walk away and not know what the outcome was. So if someone wants us to plant trees as a service to them, they hire us for five years. And then when those trees are producing at year five, they are totally welcome to keep us around as a management team, will harvest the nuts and then give them basically like a fixed offtake rate for everything that comes off their land. Or if they want to take it over and become a chestnut farmer themselves, they have every right to do so at year five.
00:32:12
Speaker
and then in terms of the processing facility business model the most honest answer is we don't know yet but i will also say like i am saying this openly and this is our full intent is like we want it to work so it's gonna be processing our chestnuts we imagine there will be many participants in the region who basically want the bare minimum level of effort like.
00:32:32
Speaker
a veg farmer who's got fifty chestnut trees and it's like if i harvest my nuts and get a minute into fifty bushel totes and i drop a toad off at your back door for every hundred pounds i sell can i get some fixed rate right and for them it's just like they don't need to go to market they don't need processing infrastructure they just harvest get into us.
00:32:53
Speaker
We will figure out what that price is like we just don't know enough about how this facility is going to work to know that price but like we will have that fixed rate. So yeah, so I just don't want to make promises but we also think there will be some kind of situation where it's more like they drop them off at the back door that we move them through the processing line and they basically get ready to sell products.
00:33:15
Speaker
Like, say I'm a CSA in Northern Pennsylvania and no one around me is selling chestnuts. It's pretty valuable for me to actually have my own fresh chestnuts when everyone's coming to do their pickup for Thanksgiving and they want to they can buy two pounds at like a premium organic rate.
00:33:32
Speaker
that csa is missing out on a lot of margin if they just drop them at our back door so i'd like to have a system where it's moving through our processing line and then they're actually getting their weight back and so they're just basically paying us like whatever that number ends up being a dollar a pound to move it through the system.
00:33:48
Speaker
We don't know exactly again what that will look like but those are the two options that i think without a doubt we want to have available a third option that's way harder to pull off because it's pretty interruptive to operations is like contracting at the facility where like someone rents our whole line for a day and does as much work with it as they want to do.
00:34:09
Speaker
That gets really complicated. that's like We don't really want to be losing access to our own equipment. If something breaks, who's liable for that? We can't really afford for someone to misuse our equipment and then like we need to still run it for another two weeks, but stuff's broken. so I kind of have a hard time knowing what that version looks like, but the point is like coming up with multiple models that are less about the margin we're getting on it and more about making this infrastructure available to the region.
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah. So let's shift gears here a little bit. And I'm curious to talk about the transition from a non-farm background for people who grew up off of the farm. And that includes me. It sounds like that includes your whole team. If I go through the faces on my team, I think we, all of us had either suburban backgrounds or at least non-farm backgrounds.
00:35:05
Speaker
None of the folks on my team currently either come from a farm background themselves. I see a whole lot of people in this space who are young, who want to get into farming, want to get into agroforestry in particular because that's the waters that I swim in. And it's pretty challenging to get into agroforestry, especially as a farmer.
00:35:27
Speaker
I'd say a typical pathway for people to get into farming has been to get into produce, so growing vegetables because you can do it on a half an acre and you can make decent money at it and you get your returns almost right away in terms of compared to agroforestry, a three month return from the time that you put seeds in the ground so that you have a harvest is amazing.
00:35:51
Speaker
And in agroforestry, we tend to need larger spaces of land. Even if you're not doing 600 acres, you need a couple dozen acres for most enterprises and it takes a long time for these things to come to fruition. So yeah, I'm curious to hear you share about what this process has been like for you and your team as a means to get into agroforestry and maybe some words of advice for others who are saying, I would love to get into this. This seems like a fitting agricultural, a way of doing agriculture, but how do I get into it? Yeah. So I think with agriculture generally, and I think this all applies to agroforestry, I think there's a risk of thinking like the only way to do it is to have your job title be farmer. I would encourage people, especially people who
00:36:43
Speaker
are not of significant means or like trying to figure out how to get in but also like need to have their day job whatever that is that isn't agriculture agriculture is like what are the things that if i practice them would likely make me more successful in farming or like.
00:36:59
Speaker
What are the things I don't know about the version of farming I want to do that I could start to learn even before my job title was you know assistant farm manager or assistant vegetable producer, whatever the job is. like For me, I got not like Goldman Sachs good at spreadsheets, but like I got very comfortable in spreadsheets and like structuring spreadsheets so that they could answer questions for me.
00:37:22
Speaker
and Right so it's like i have like complex spreadsheets that aren't what anyone would learn getting an MBA but like they have like broken puzzles into digestible chunks for me right and like i spent probably almost five years before i actually had a lease.
00:37:39
Speaker
making financial projections of what chestnut businesses could look like and like going and looking at, you know, slide decks from 10 years ago from like university of Missouri and seeing how much are they saying people are spending on mowing and how much are they saying a tree costs and how much are they saying tree tube costs? And then like, what if I make my own welded wire cages? How much does that make my tree protection drop in price? Turns out that doesn't work that well. Stick to planter tubes.
00:38:05
Speaker
breaking it into a bunch of digestible questions rather than this amorphous how to be farmer. I at one point was like, we need to raise $10 million dollars and plan all these just entries. I was like, oh wait, I could learn a ton on an eight acre lease.
00:38:20
Speaker
like I don't need to own land. I did this for four years without getting paid a cent. I started on credit cards and like my time and my wife's time and my parents' time, and that was before I had a kid. It becomes a lot harder once you have a kid. I recommend becoming a farmer before the kid.
00:38:37
Speaker
But i think there's breaking it into all of the things you can do that are valuable learning opportunities that aren't starting a business. starting Any business is really hard period and so i planted trees and pots on my deck in boston when i live in boston and like work in office job and started chestnut trees from seed and. And the second year, I harvested a bunch of chestnuts from an orchard. I was doing like time trials on harvesting trees. like How can I make this more efficient? right like That became a meaningful input in my spreadsheet. I also found out that if you leave the door open on a shed, squirrels can steal 100 pounds of chestnuts in like three hours. but like I'd rather learn that when I'm not a farmer,
00:39:21
Speaker
dependent on learning that lesson than when I am. So I learned a lot before I was a farmer in quotes, and I would just like really encourage people to do that. I think one of the benefits to me about the version of Agriforestry we're doing is that it could be a weekend gig. you know Every season I'm disappointed in the amount of time I spent in the orchard, meaning like I don't spend enough.
00:39:44
Speaker
We spend a lot more now that we have a full-time team, some of whom are full-time in the field. But early on, I had eight acres of chestnuts planted that sometimes I was visiting like once a month at most. you know like Again, I don't say that because I was excited about that, but like it worked. I mean, that's like about tolerance of work. Not everyone wants to work seven hours a week and take out credit card debt.
00:40:09
Speaker
you know Work really hard not a everyone wants to do that but if you're a farmer you probably should be willing to work long hours and put in a lot of work knowing that you it's not going to be for a while that you earn your money back that's just the way it is with agroforestry in particular.
00:40:26
Speaker
I like your recommendations. I think there's good wisdom to it of start small, start now. That's kind of my mantra of start small with your plantings, learn your things on a small scale, make your mistakes on a small scale, but start right now. You can lease a half of an acre. You can manage someone else's chestnut orchard, or even you can manage someone else's chestnut tree in their front yard and the figure out how that works.
00:40:56
Speaker
figure out that if you leave the nets unprocessed there for a long time, that they don't necessarily turn out very well. There's all kinds of things that you can learn on a very small scale while you start up. And in Agroforestry, probably the best thing is to start while you have another gig, don't quit your day job and start investing in these tree systems so that over time, five years, 10 years in the future, those can actually make a ah meaningful impact on your your finances and you might be able to transition fully. at that point. Yeah. I mean, the only reason I am a full time agro forester is because we took on investors who own a portion of our business. Like our chestnuts would not pay me a salary probably for another four years in terms of like the way we've invested in building out the business. So like,
00:41:43
Speaker
I tell people like we do a lot of just calls where we spend an hour with someone who's interested in this and kind of hold their hand thinking about what it looks like to start this business and i've said that a lot of people frankly but like you're not gonna have a salary from this business for twelve years.
00:42:00
Speaker
Because even if it becomes a profitable investment, that profitable investment doesn't necessarily pay you a salary because that system might not need enough of your time that it justifies the salary. And that's not to say, don't so don't do it, but it's like, how do you structure your life? Or how do you have five farm partners so you're actually all like absorbing that risk together? And then maybe it never needs to be anyone's livelihood, but it's a damn good investment.
00:42:25
Speaker
And like I think there's room to be creative about all this. like I don't think anyone's goal should be to say like everyone who leaves ag school should start an agroforestry business. like it That's not a practical suggestion today.
00:42:37
Speaker
I do have one thing I want to say. I'd love to talk with you more about this idea. It's something we've been playing with of like just starting to say it to as many people who work with money as possible. I think what Young Agro Forester is like you and I five years ago need is like a genuine mission oriented revolving loan fund.
00:42:59
Speaker
I think there's just like a really like obvious case here for like ideally a 30-year fund, really probably more like a 20-year fund, where we just say, like here's the return targets for a Chestnut business, and every debt I have ever thought about taking on runs the risk of liquidating my business.
00:43:17
Speaker
so like I don't care what level of impact you think you're having, you're still fundamentally telling the person who has put their entire livelihood and well-being on the line for this business that they might lose it. This is a little idealistic of me, but like there are enough people throwing millions of dollars at agroforestry right now that for us not to have a pool of funding that's like this buys land,
00:43:39
Speaker
This pays capex on tree planting this maybe doesn't pay a salary but pays like an hourly wage to get your system going and we believe that these systems are kickass enough that by the time we're at twenty years it will have paid for itself at maybe like.
00:43:54
Speaker
a lower than market rate interest, but like a meaningful interest for some set of family foundations. But there are enough people in this country who are, quote unquote, committed to catalyzing regenerative agriculture and have money that they are obligated to spend down over the next few decades.
00:44:11
Speaker
I'm not saying this is like some VC pitch or like even to a bank. This is just like there are people who say they want this to happen. And what I have seen in this space is it's like there's a lot of funding of everything but helping farmers farm. Like what does it look like to take a hundred young people who have worked in orchards who want to manage tree crops or a hundred grazers who want to plant trees in their pastures and just don't have the resources to and say over the next 30 years,
00:44:40
Speaker
whatever the number is, $100 million dollars is going to lose 3%, but we're going to make whatever, 5,000 acres of agroforestry happen for 500 farmers. That would be so damn cool. and It's just something like we're internally at our company, we're just starting to say like we're getting the people. like We're giving young people who are working in farming opportunities to plant trees in working systems,
00:45:06
Speaker
And all we can tell them is like, yeah, sorry, land's expensive. And like, this won't pay your bills for the next seven years, but you should go give it a try. And we have had a lot of free resources in terms of our time and advice and help searching for land. But like at the end of the day, if there isn't a pool of capital that wants to take the risk with all of these younger folks,
00:45:26
Speaker
I think it's like a completely unrealistic expectation to basically just say like you can only do agroforestry if you are inheriting generational wealth or farmland or both and otherwise like figure it out on your own. Not everyone is gonna like I took on probably $20,000 of credit card debt that I had an 18-month timeline to pay off, right? Because it's a 0% intro award bonus, right? And I paid it off. And like I did the numbers to know I could do that based on my other income. But like if that's the hurdle you have to cross to be an agroforestor, if you don't inherit money or land, that's shit. That's not a game plan. So I think there's things like that that as an industry or as like a conversation, we have to start talking about otherwise. like There's no amount of tips I can give on a podcast that's going to
00:46:13
Speaker
make more people plant chestnut trees. I have a sense in my field that it will be a couple years yet until there's enough farmers who feel confident enough in agroforestry, and for silvopasture in particular, that silvopasture is going to make a significant enough difference reliably that they can invest in this themselves that they can take on a loan. Most of our projects have been grant funded up until today, but I do see that loans just make so much sense in the future so that you don't have to be tied to a grant cycle, a grant fund, whatever requirements that the funder has. And as people see
00:46:57
Speaker
plantings work and see cows in the shade and see that the farm is actually making more money because the livestock are healthier and less heat stress and they see honey locust pods dropping and they see chestnuts being harvested and sold. I think the confidence that this wacky idea of agroforestry will actually work, that kind of confidence will come and with the confidence I think will come.
00:47:20
Speaker
the willingness of people to say i'll put my own money on this even if i have to take out a loan but because cash flow it is just so hard to do. I wanna see this happen and i'll just get whatever funding is available to do in agroforestry specific funds makes a lot of sense because it is so specific the rules of the game are just different when you have this long term investment.
00:47:43
Speaker
Yeah, i think I think you're totally right. like There's enough planting that's been occurring over the past five to 10 years that like to me, I think similarly, ah a year I think of a lot is like 2030. I think the way a lot of these landscapes have transformed by 2030 if we're all doing our job. right It's unfortunate, but I definitely have experience that there's a lot more people interested in jumping on a bandwagon that's cruising downhill than the one that's being dragged uphill. Yeah.
00:48:13
Speaker
Well, Russell, this has been a fantastic conversation. I could keep going on this for a while. There's a whole bunch of little rabbit holes that we could go into. I think I need to buy you a drink next time I'm up in New York and and we can sit down and and have the continuation of this. But in keeping the time in mind,
00:48:32
Speaker
Is there anything else that you would like to wrap us up with here? Any final thoughts that you'd like to leave with folks? And then also, where can people find you and what do you want people to engage with? Yeah, thanks for asking. So I guess one thing I would just leave folks with is to the point of how many opportunities there are to learn is if there's something you want to learn or someone you want to learn from, I would just encourage anyone new to this space to reach out to folks.
00:49:02
Speaker
Like if you see someone posting on instagram or something like i think you will be surprised at how many people are accessible via a dm or the email on a website and. Even if you don't hear from folks for like a few weeks at a time like people are busy and people take different amounts of time like send them a bump email honestly like.
00:49:20
Speaker
Things fall in my inbox enough that like if someone doesn't send me a bump and that someone i've never met or had an intro to it like often won't get replied to but if someone sends me a bump i see it as like a sign of. They really want this and they want to talk about it so i would just encourage people to reach out to folks they want to learn from um in terms of our business where fredtree farms dot com.
00:49:43
Speaker
As I said earlier, we are selling pre-orders for organic chestnuts, which are available in our shop on our website. You'll also notice on our website, we first off just have like a lot of resources on what we're doing and chestnuts and why chestnuts, but we also have an events page and we have a number of public events coming up this spring. We have a community planting day in May. We've got a big blossom picnic.
00:50:07
Speaker
in June when the chestnuts will be in flower. We'll probably have some harvest events this fall. So checking in there is always a good place to engage if you want to be meeting folks in person. And then we're increasingly posting on Instagram at Fredtree Farms just to share more about our work and what we're learning in the field we're up to. So I think following along there is always a good move.
00:50:29
Speaker
Yeah, I just look forward to meeting more new and beginning agroforestors in the next few years here. It seems like there's a lot of resources to make this happen and folks like Austin and Emma and Alex you know making more informational podcasts on the topic and just really excited for the future.
00:50:47
Speaker
ah good Thank you so much, Russell. This has been a real pleasure. I see a lot of interest and maybe some hype out there about tree crops, but I love hearing a very very thoughtful strategic approach to how to go about building this industry, building a business the way that you've done it, bringing a lot of people in and engaging a lot of people in this. and I wish you all the best of luck and I look forward to continuing our conversation in the future. Thanks, Austin. Thanks for the opportunity.
00:51:18
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod dot.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.