Contributing Writer | November 14, 2021 | No Comments

There are many cultivated black walnut varieties, including the hay varieties in the picture. Photo by Aaron Grisby

This year, just like every year in western North Carolina, acorns are scattered on lawns and parks and sprinkled on sidewalks; black walnuts fall on cars and roofs; pecans roll on wooded paths and slide to your feet. But some foragers say that there are more nuts this year than in previous years. They speculate that this year may be a bumper year for Appalachian oaks and black walnuts—a year when trees flood the environment with nuts and produce more nuts than carnivores might eat. Animals can fill their stomachs with leftover nuts and grow into new trees.

Although many people may trip and trip over the spread of nuts, a growing community of perennial agronomists encourages others to see food everywhere. Asheville Nuttery is a project of Nutty Buddy Collective in Asheville and is the center of the community. At the Smith Mills factory in West Asheville, North Carolina, nuts have evolved to help develop this perennial food source.

"This will be a very good year of the coniferous oak, maybe the black oak," said Justin Holt, one of the nut friends and the co-owners of the nut factory, with Greg Moser and Bill Whipple. "I hope we can have more acorn oil available, and we haven't. We didn't get any oil oak last year, so yes, I'm very excited about it."

In early October, Holt oversees the preparation of the facility; the nut harvest has just begun. Participants regularly put a pile of nuts in the trash can. Holt records their deposit, and on the other side of the process, they will receive a portion of the finished nut product or cash.

Beverly McBrayer has been introducing nuts for the past 4 years. She came here with two bushels of white oak acorns picked from the yard. It weighs 83 pounds, making her 218 pounds this year. It is her family tradition that she makes black walnut cakes for Christmas, which is why she was first exposed to nuts. She said that her relatives used this forage as a survival food during difficult times.

“Last year, my grandchildren and I drove around and picked up about 500 pounds of black walnuts and brought them here,” she said. "Then we replaced those with black walnuts that we could eat, which was a bargain."

Ricky and Murray Sill followed closely, and they brought a basket of black walnuts from the four big trees in the yard. "Usually I just put them in a trolley and pour them in the bamboo," said Richhill. "We have to load 10 or 12 trolleys every year."

Greg Mosser, co-owner of Nutty Buddy Collective, grabbed a handful of unprocessed cultivated black walnuts. Photograph by Matt Dhillon Black walnut is by far the most common nut that people bring in. "In terms of weight, black walnut may account for 95%," Holt said, considering 2020. "It's like 8,000 pounds of black walnuts, maybe hundreds of pounds of other nuts. It's always been like this."

Greg Mosser, co-owner of Nutty Buddy Collective, grabbed a handful of unprocessed cultivated black walnuts. Photo by Matt Dillon

Holt explained that it was because people were picking black walnuts anyway to take them out of the yard. But in the Nut Factory, what was once rubbish has become a treasure.

One of the main reasons this natural food stays on the ground every year is that these nuts are difficult to handle. Acorns must be leached in water to remove the bitter tannins. Black walnuts have a stubborn shell. As we all know, black walnuts and pecans are difficult to separate from the shell.

These are obstacles that Asheville Nuttery needs to overcome. Just like the grain mills of the old days, the nut factory is a hub where people can bring nuts to a usable state. Holt and his co-owners are developing and adapting processes to more efficiently process various wild nuts. They can sort them, extract them, crush them, grind them into flour, and press them into oil. The locals just need to pick them up and bring them in.

According to co-owner Bill Whipple, the potential of native nuts is far from being realized. He suggested that these neglected nuts can be used as a staple food to replace annual nuts such as wheat and corn. "Acorn can do anything better with corn," he said.

Whipple pointed out that acorns were once an important staple food in the region. In indigenous communities, local forest foods, especially acorns, are essential crops. According to data collected by the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Appalachian Mountains, especially its southern and low-lying areas, is a forest dominated by oak trees, so it seems natural that acorns become a staple food. Not only are they rich, they are easy to store, and they are usually high in carbohydrates and fats. White oak tends to have higher carbohydrate content and is therefore very suitable for grinding into flour, while red oak tends to have higher fat content and is therefore more suitable for pressing into oil.

Whipple has always had bigger dreams and was inspired to expand his work at Asheville Nuttery to pursue a broader, nut-based agriculture. His Acornucopia project aims to continue local nut farming by developing regional nut processing facilities. This may be as simple as a warehouse for collected nuts or something with more processing power, similar to Asheville nuts. The idea is to provide people with tools to harvest this natural abundance.

Whipple warns, however, that anyone who goes out foraging can see the need for some management.

"Go out and stay for half an hour, try to pick up the acorns on the leaves and brush them, and then make a living from them, don't be too weird, man," he said. "The only places you can forage are basically manicured lawns, such as college campuses, churches, cemeteries or parks."

He mentioned the history of Native Americans using controlled burning to clear understory trees, leaving an open space where they could efficiently collect nuts-this method is consistent with the barren agriculture used by many communities, alternating burning And fallow periods to maintain forest land. Nutty Buddy Justin Holt mowed the grass in the collectively managed native orchard. Photograph by Matt Dhillon Forest management is an integral part of Whipple's goals. He believes that perennial agriculture is the path to a healthier planet.

Nutty Buddy Justin Holt mowed the grass in the collectively managed native orchard. Photo by Matt Dillon

"We must stop cutting trees for food, and start planting trees for food," he said. "If we start to supplement our food with tree-based agriculture, the land used to grow corn and soybeans will be reduced, and the earth will suffer a lot of wear and tear-not to mention all the benefits. You plant trees. ."

Whipple argued that if society has a less important reason to value native forests, a reason that involves planting trees rather than cutting them down, it will ultimately encourage communities to improve forest health over time. John Munsell, a professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Protection at Virginia Tech, provided some support for this idea.

Historically, the main forest resource in the United States is wood. For decades, traditional timber harvesting practices have led to a decline in forest health. This is because traditional timber harvesting tends to leave the most vulnerable trees, Munsell explained.

"Generally speaking, high grades have always been a status quo when logging in our mixed woodlands," Munsell said. High grade refers to the practice of harvesting the strongest trees in the forest. Over time, it can effectively select weaker forests.

"We are losing thousands of acres of woodland, and these forests have been completely removed," Munsell said. "But compared to the total area that continues to decline in terms of health and productivity due to high grades, this dwarfs even if the canopy still exists. You might say, oh, there is a forest there. For decades, due to improper logging, The health of the forest has been negatively affected."

However, agroforestry models and other sustainable forest management practices may have the opposite effect, encouraging the protection and preservation of the strongest, healthiest, and most productive trees.

In the view of Whipple and Nutty Buddies, the benefits of agriculture and forestry are obvious and endless. On the one hand, trees can improve the soil, while traditional annual plants can deplete the soil.

"It's like day and night, man," Whipple said. "The reason we have topsoil is because the trees have been building soil. So basically all the corn we grow, we depend on the savings of tens of thousands of years of trees." Greg Mosser looks after the grafted pecan trees . Photo by Matt Dhillon. Trees are not only a crop, but also a part of a healthy ecosystem. They use deep roots to remineralize the soil, prevent erosion, prevent sediment from polluting waterways, and support hundreds of wild animals. The list continues, but one of their most important roles may be to combat climate change.

Greg Mosser looks after the grafted pecan tree. Photo by Matt Dillon

According to extended data from the University of Illinois, the carbon weight of living trees is about 50%. "Nut trees are the best carbon-fixing trees we have because they are dense wood. If a tree produces high-value nuts, it will not be felled," Holt said.

Every year, as a tree grows larger, it produces a larger wood ring and absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere, turning it into wood, roots and leaves, and finally returning to the soil.

"Any invention that humans can think of is no more effective than nature's 400 million-year-old invention in which trees extracted carbon dioxide from the air and put it into the soil-this is ridiculous," Whipple said.

According to Nutty Buddies, the challenge is time. It is difficult for people to invest in things that live longer than them, especially in a culture where profits are measured on an annual time scale.

"We have a culture every year," Holt said. "The one-year biological species is a pioneer species; we have a pioneering spirit in the United States."

Bill Whipple showed his son the inside of black walnut. Photo by Aaron Grisby

Holt argues that annual crops are the norm, because they provide a quick and short-term return on investment. Whipple has a similar view. "Cultivating nut trees to increase efficiency is a multi-generational task," he said.

However, when orchards live longer than orchards, they tend to be eliminated. Whipple encountered orchards time and time again, and these orchards were cultivated and abandoned after 25 to 30 years-these orchards were relatively young in the life cycle of the trees.

"As far as I know, 99% of the orchards have been demolished," Whipple said. "This is what happened."

Through their collective model, Nutty Buddies hope to overcome this fate. Through collective ownership, the value of their projects can also be multi-generational.

"So this is intergenerational food security," Holt said. "If we can really get a lot of people excited about planting these trees, maybe my grandchildren might eat them."

Faced with increasing environmental threats and concerns, Nutty Buddies suggested that perhaps now is the time to need the kind of hope that trees provide: hope and investment in the future.

"There is no problem that a tree can't solve," Whipple said. "An ancient rabbi said, I love it for thousands of years. So they said:'When the end of the world comes, plant a tree.'"

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