The Role of Native Tree Crops in Sustainable Agriculture with Zach Elfers

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Zach Elfers, a forager, botanist, wildlands steward and researcher. His engagement with the landscape and agricultural systems around him reflect more of a time forgotten than the way we try to pigeonhole ourselves as specialists today. Zach’s involved with the Northern Nut Growers Association (NNGA), the North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX), and several seed projects. You can check out his work and his nursery at Future Forest Farms and the Keystone Crops Cooperative, which processes native nuts into cooking oils.

Andy:

Zach, thanks so much for coming on. I'm pretty excited to talk to you because we've chatted a bunch online, and now we get to talk face-to-face. That's exciting for me because you're one of the only people that I can post anything about some historical agricultural figure, and you're like, “Oh, let me tell you about this, about them,” and that's pretty cool, it doesn’t happen to me very often. So tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up getting into the work that you do and what we're going to talk about.

Zach:

Sure, it was sort of a meandering journey. I've got a horticultural background going on about 10 or 12 years now, and I didn't study this in school. I'm actually, admittedly, a college dropout, but I was fortunate to meet some really good mentors in my life at a fairly young age, like my early 20s. And so I started working for a friend in his native plant and permaculture nursery, and he was into all kinds of stuff, like, you know, food forests and pawpaw trees and, you know, all the typical perennial permaculture plants. But his background before that was that he had built up a big native plant nursery.

At the time, I was getting into foraging and organic farming and gardening, and I had heard the dreaded p-word before permaculture, and so I sort of set out down that path, or I was interested rather, and you know. So when I met this, this guy, it really came together, and I just found I had a knack for it, and, yeah, the rest is history. I've since met other mentors and had other experiences, and I started my own nursery about five or six years ago, not really with any idea of having a business in mind. I just was growing so many plants and trees that it felt like the right thing to do.

I guess my first love was the spring ephemerals. I really got into the, just like the trilliums and the bluebells and the spring beauty and the water leaf and just all of our native plants in the eastern temperate forests here, and I was focused on edible and medicinal things in particular. I've always been fascinated by the interface between the human world and the so-called wild or natural world. Of course, we're always a part of that, so the boundaries are very permeable. But anyway, it was some years later, I guess about 2016, that I was introduced to the John Hershey Orchard through some mutual friends, which included Max Paschal, Dale Hendricks, and then Buzz Ferver.

I don't think he was there at the first meeting there. He came in a little bit later in the picture. But my friend Max, I guess, had read the article in Permaculture Activist about the John Hershey Orchard, and somebody, I can't remember his name, had basically uncovered some research, and he went to the Quaker Meeting House there and found that there were still some trees there. So we met up at the Quaker Meeting House there and found that there were still some trees there.

So we met up at the Quaker Meeting House in 2016. And, sure enough, there were these beautiful persimmons and bur oaks and honey locusts and hybrid oaks and all kinds of stuff. But as we continued to explore, there was this map of the Hershey orchard from J Russell Smith's tree crops book, and we're looking at the map, and we're like this doesn't match up, we're not at the right spot, and so, using satellite imagery, we were able to see where the roads in the map corresponded with a development that's four miles north of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, and that's how we found John Hershey's farm, and so that really opened my eyes to the world of tree crops, just being able to experience these incredible trees that were pushing 90 to 100 years old, some of them with no care, no maintenance, just basically being left thankfully by the developers.

Andy:

Any development means clear-cutting, so the fact that anything survived is just wonderful. I think it must have been amazing for you, the idea that I am witnessing a piece of history that has been in front of us this whole time, and nobody knew.

Zach:

Yeah, it's pretty amazing, you know. I do want to acknowledge that I'm really fortunate in my position to have been able to have these experiences because I'm from the same place. You know, I'm from, like, the southeastern Pennsylvania area, and all this stuff is sort of localized around there. So, yeah, it was just sort of being in the right place at the right time to meet these trees and get integrated into this history.

Andy:

Yeah, I think that history has been really buried, and, as you know, J Russell Smith is a name, I think a lot of people in whatever you want to call permie, alternative agriculture, whatever space, tree crop space. Everyone knows. But there are a number of figures like John Hershey who've been around and have done really amazing work, and hopefully, there's still more to be discovered and explored in these spaces. Just people need to know about it and find the local history that exists because the idea of tree crops has been a part of the early 20th century in North America or America.

It existed across the entire country, and we dismissed it after World War II, basically. However, the remnants of it still exist, and once people realize what's around them, there's so much work for them to do.

Zach:

Oh, absolutely. There are old tree crops and orchards all over the eastern United States. I'm sure they're definitely out west, too, like Luther Burbank and Gelatly (nut farm) and all that stuff, but you know, I'm more familiar with the eastern things. But yeah, I mean, these old nut trees are still on the landscape, many of them, and so the work of doing fruit and nut exploration is really fun. That's something I've been involved with.

Andy:

Now that I've whetted everyone's appetites for tree crops and like this really, you know, I think for our generation—and I'm going to step back a little bit—I think that we grew up in a time where everything is so hyper-specialized that the idea of being able to discover something new feels really out of reach, right? Like the world has been explored.

Like, if you want to explore space, like you don't have the technology or resources if you want to get into science, anything that, like, somebody in the backyard could do, feels like it's been basically done except for this kind of space. So the idea that, like, you can do some research and maybe discover something that no one else has figured out that is important for our history and our future is really exciting. So I hope people do kind of explore a little bit more in that direction. Now, in terms of your work, I want to talk a little bit about how, where you are in terms of, like, the John Hershey forest and your interest in tree crops, how that's kind of bled together to into some of the work that you're doing now.

Zach:

Sure. Well, earlier on I had mentioned the P word, the permaculture word, which I don't really use anymore for a number of reasons that we don't have to go into here. But I'm just a big believer and proponent of native plants and our native bioregional ecosystems. I'm not exclusionary about it. I think there's always room for exotics within reason, but my focus is on the native stuff. So, like I said, my first love was the spring ephemerals, and a lot of those are geophytic root foods. Well, they can be foods. Not all of them are edible, but with our eastern temperate forests, because we lose our leaf coverage in the winter, there's a narrow time in early spring when the leaves aren't on the trees yet, but the temperatures are warm enough for plant life.

And so there's all these often very showy and colorful beautiful spring wildflowers that emerge in the forest floor and just put on such a show for a few weeks before the leaves come out, and then they go dormant. And because they go dormant, they have to have a storage organ underground, which is what they call a geophyte, which just basically means eating the earth in Latin or whatever. And so, what is a storage organ? It's a bulb, it's a tuber, it's a corm, but, speaking generally, it's a starchy storage organ that can be.

I mean, this is what potatoes are, this is what sweet potatoes are, this is what root crops are in general, and so there's a lot of native root crops that are out there and they integrate well into forest ecosystems. So when I learned the tree crops piece, it really just brought everything together. I just realized, wow, there's a whole total system here. You know, you've got just spring ephemerals in the woodland understory, and then you've got some summer wildflowers, and then, of course, you've got all the tree crops, the higher canopy trees like the chestnut and the oak, the persimmon, the hickory, got some sub-canopy trees, we put pawpaw in that category. You've got a lot of shrub and thicket types like wild plum and hazelnut, things like that. Long story short.

To summarize, my goal with the work that I do is that when I'm working with an ecosystem, I want to eventually come out in the spring and see nothing but wildflowers. I want to come out in the fall and see nothing but nuts and fruits. Yeah, that's sort of my working goal here.

So I have a little bit of land here down on the Susquehanna River in southern New York County, Pennsylvania, there's about eight acres of woodland that was logged five or six years ago, and so there's all these canopy gaps and really gnarly looking trees that were left behind, and then there's a little bit of open area too, about an acre. Doing a lot of things here, trying to integrate the human subsistence gardening realm, picture your vegetable garden for home use with ecological restoration, and just bring back native wildflower diversity, native tree crops, just all that good stuff, just bringing as much diversity and beauty to the land as possible. And so, yeah, that's what I do, that's what I try to play around with as much as possible, while also having to work and, you know, do all the things I need to do to keep everything afloat.

Andy:

Yeah, you are also involved with the Keystone Tree Crops Cooperative. You recently bought a nut press, and you have been experimenting with how to utilize some of these tree crops, so that's something I think is really interesting. I'd really be interested in your thoughts on what it means to try to create a product like that, especially given its historical context and the context of where you guys are right now.

Zach:

We've got some really great people and some good opportunities we're working with here and with the cooperative. We're basically based out of Pennsylvania, but we have some members in Maryland, and we have some people who are associated in like New Jersey and New York and things like that. So it's basically for this broadly mid-Atlantic region, and first, I'll go into the name the Keystone Tree Crops Cooperative. It's sort of a double entendre. So Pennsylvania is the Keystone State, but nut trees and tree crops act as keystone species in our ecosystems, and so that keystone word is sort of hitting on both aspects and so we made this cooperative in the hopes of creating a keystone for the tree crops economy. What we're really trying to offer is a right livelihood working with these tree crops and sort of a cottage industry revitalization, and so that can look like a number of different things, some things we have pretty dialed in, and some things we're still experimenting with.

But we're working with chestnuts, both raw chestnuts, seed chestnuts as well as chestnut flour. We're working with hickory oil, mostly from the butternut hickory or the yellowbud hickory, which is when you expel the oil, it results in a very delicious, high-quality, high-smokepoint oil that's got a similar nutritional profile to olive oil, so it's got like oleic and linoleic acid in it and whatnot. We're also working with hazelnuts, and if we have a good acorn last year, we'll probably do a lot with them.

The idea behind the cooperative is sort of, well, we're trying to do many things at once, which is why a cooperative is so necessary. I think tree crops, in particular, really encourage us to rethink ways to run businesses. It doesn't really work with a traditional capitalist model, which we wouldn't want to recreate anyway, but there are so many wildnut trees out there already. There are acorns and black walnuts and hickories and even Chinese chestnuts all over the place, and it's just largely an underutilized, underappreciated, unacknowledged resource. So partnering landowners and public spaces with gatherers, processors, marketers, and distributors, all of that is what we're doing.

Andy:

I've always had this idea, and I'll probably never do it, but I really want to do the same model, but for maple syrup. Tapping trees around here, getting a handful of folks together, buying some equipment and basically leasing out trees in people's front yards, and the red and sugar maples are pretty ubiquitous here. So it seems like there's plenty of resources, and people would pay a premium or always pay enough that we could have decent margins on, like, a tree crop product that's native and local. You guys are doing it on a different end because here, at least, other than acorns, there's not a whole lot of tree crops available because of the repeated clear-cutting that's happened here in the last 400 years.

It's really cool to see that you guys are trying to leverage what's already in front of you, as opposed to, and there's nothing wrong with it, the idea of a silvopasture or a food forest in something that might be like someone's backyard that was clear-cut a dozen times, like that. That's important and necessary work, but like. The reality is that chances are in your lifetime, you'll never see the fruit of that labor, or at least you'll see some of it, but not to the capacity of what's available to you right now, where you've got these trees that are 100 plus years old that can produce, you know, a very large quantity of calories.

Basically, there is very little effort now in terms of the actual work in progress, so to speak. You know you're harvesting these, you know, nuts, and then processing them. There's a long history of doing this right, and somewhere along the way, we lost how to do a lot of this stuff efficiently. So I'm really interested, given the technology that we have available, the resources like primarily I'm thinking like how we can leverage things like 3D printing to make doing these types of things much more effective. And I don't want to necessarily say scalable, but more how do we do it in a way that you can actually produce these products in a way that people can afford them?

Zach:

Our goal is to make the products not only affordable but also the workers fairly compensated. I mean, there's a lot of picking jobs. There are a lot of apple orchards out in Adams County, Pennsylvania, and they often rely on a lot of migrant labor. The folks that come and pick the orchards work really, really hard, and I'm not sure what they're paid, but I bet that it's very underpaid for the service that they are offering, and so we're not trying to end up with recreating that model.

We really want to find ways to establish, like I said, locally oriented tree crops and cottage industries, and you mentioned the maple syrup production, and there's a lot of overlap. Like you know, if you've got a good kitchen space set up for processing things, you can process maple syrup, you can process nut products and nut oils and all of that. So one of the things we're looking at, too, is diversification, which is often a response to issues with scalability. A response to issues with scalability. The scalability issue is definitely a real issue with nut trees because nut trees, in particular, don't really hit their stride until they're like 100 years old. The production of a 100-year-old chestnut is just so unfathomably great, so much unfathomably greater than a 20-year-old chestnut.

A lot of what we're doing is working with the wild tree crop resources that are already out there. For that reason, it's really the low-hanging fruit. At the same time, we're encouraging others to plant nut trees, to start orchards, we're doing a lot of agroforestry projects and it's all really exciting. But scalability really depends on, one, having a market, two, having a supply. And right now, we sort of have a supply in terms of the wild resources, but we don't have a market yet, and so we're focused on starting small and building up the interest and really producing quality and building the market and interest, which I'm not worried about in the least because anybody who tastes anything from these trees is basically immediately a fan. But to get everything affordable, yeah, this is a question to answer down the road as we get our standard operating procedures, you know, our best practices.

Andy:

The first is risk-taking, which means trying something and it might not work. You might and you might butt heads with somebody about something, but you have to try it, figure it out, and learn from those mistakes. And we tend to just, especially on the business side we tend to be very risk-averse or just not go into it at all. I mean, how many cooperatives have you heard about that never did anything? I can name a lot of folks who had good intentions but could never get anything off the ground.

The second one is that the idea of building good business practices is somehow against our ethics or something like that and that creating efficient processes is somehow against our beliefs, even though it's better for everyone. It makes more efficient work for people means they're going to anti our beliefs, even though it's better for everyone. It makes more efficient work for people. It means they're going to get paid better. It means you can produce things at a lower cost. These are not bad things for anyone. So addressing those and kind of confronting them head-on is really important, and I think that it's really great that you guys are trying to do that.

Now you've mentioned that the quality of the products you're making is really good. I'm assuming you're primarily talking about the oil. I know there's been a lot of research on oil, including non-academic research like Sam Thayer's work with acorns and acorn oil.

Zach:

He was the one who taught us.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, he's definitely a resource. I'm still waiting for his new book to come out. I think I pre-ordered it about six months ago. So you know, there are people doing really cool work.

And again, going back to what I mentioned like 15 minutes ago, this idea that, like this is one of those unique areas where people can still kind of do the citizen science thing and discover new things and learn new practices, and they're not necessarily new Historically speaking humans, probably we're basically going back to the Stone Age in terms of how to work with these crops and relearning what people had known for thousands of years, and there's going to be bumps in the road, but that doesn't mean between the technologies and the resources we have today, just the internet, the fact that I'm talking to you, you know, a thousand miles away or whatever is 800 miles away, about tree crops, and we can share information about our experiences and how that can help drive what we're doing is an invaluable resource that didn't exist before, and we can do really cool things.

And we can accelerate that process of relearning by sharing and learning from one another in a way that was never possible in the past. When you press the oil, what are you guys doing with the remains, the press cake?

Zach:

Well, we're playing around with it. It seems really good for use as a smoking substrate, so, like, if you're going to smoke meat or whatever with hickory wood chips, you can use the hickory press cake from that, and that seems to be working pretty well. Really, I think a really good purpose for it would be some kind of bioplastic. If you could somehow like reheat it and then press it into like a form because the oil pressing process is quite efficient, but there's always residual oil in there, and basically you've got a mix of a lot of proteins and kind of fibrous structures that don't make it into the oil and then you have a little bit of oil all around that. So if you reheated it and pressed it into a form, it basically that that material would polymerize; as I understand it, I'm not a chemist, but that's basically how you make plastic or bioplastic, so you could make building materials out of it. You could make objects out of it.

It could also possibly be used as an animal feed because, as I said, there's a lot of protein and fiber in there, but there's also a lot of tannic acid in the case of the butternut hickory. If you're pressing other material, that's not an issue With the butternut hickory the press cake has. It's just very, very bitter, but it could be diluted. For example, you could mix a half percentage of hickory press cake into some other animal feed, and it would be quite good actually for, like, uh, livestock, like cattle, for example, like having some tannic acid in their diet. It is important. It kind of tonifies GI tissues.

Andy:

I was thinking of it as somewhat of an analog for any other meal that we press, you know, the cake, like soy or whatever, because of the high protein content with that added benefit.

While a lot of people might think that tannic acid is bad, like you said, it does offer some really great benefits that could help supplement a lot of diets. I know it also has some really good effects on things like, you know, parasites, you know, load and things like that. So you know, if you spent a lot of time with livestock, you know you can tell when they are having a parasite issue because of their interest in tannic foods. It's usually a pretty good giveaway that something's up, that they might need some help. So I think like trying to integrate it into a more diverse diet. The ramifications of that if you can scale up something that can produce oil at the percentage of corn while also providing a byproduct that is maybe not equally valuable but not significantly below, while also having all the ecosystem services of a tree crop, it seems like a win-win-win. The problem is dialing it in, and that's the part we need to figure out.

Zach:

On that note, a technological innovation we'd like to make at some point, probably years down the road, is the acquisition of a condenser mill. So I mentioned, with the bitternut, hickory. Because of the tannic acid content, the press cake is really bitter. But if you're pressing a different material, like, let's say, hazelnut, you can press hazelnut oil, and then the press cake that's coming out of the machine is going to be, you know, a lot of protein, a lot of minerals and some bits of shell. So then the problem is, how do you separate the shell from the good stuff?

So if you run that through a condenser mill, through some kind of technological wizardry, it's able to separate those materials. Then you have a fine powder made just from the shells and a fine powder made just from the meal. Basically, you have two products: hazelnut oil and hazelnut flour. It would be ideal to remove the oil from the flour anyway.

Andy:

That's a really cool tool, though I didn't know that was possible. To be completely honest, you know that's been one of the biggest challenges is, like a lot of us that are in this kind of space, we're all trying to DIY all the same thing at the same time and, like, in some ways, it's pretty cool because you have this like a community of people that are all going through the same experience of, like you know, I've got these trees, they produce XYZ. I'm trying to figure out a way to do this efficiently. Some people have figured some things out that work pretty well. Other people have found other things and you can kind of scale that to what you're interested in doing.

But the end goal should really be: How can we make this scalable to the point where it is affordable?

The goal isn't that everyone has to go homestead or forage their diet like there's nothing wrong with those things inherently. But the goal is to synergize our diet and our capacity for scale and infrastructure so that people can live better quality lives with better quality food, with a better quality ecosystem, so that we can do the things we wanna do and not force people to have to go, you know, forage nuts and then press their own nuts and you know all these different things, and this is something that's repeated across.

All these cottage industries—and I'm using the word industry wrong here—are like the cottage, permacultural homestead type of space, right, where everyone's all kind of doing the same thing. Why does every beekeeper need the same equipment that they use once a year instead of just sharing and utilizing the capacity for scale and reducing the need for us to all buy expensive equipment? Right? Why are we not centralizing these things? Because that's what we've done historically.

Zach:

Yeah, exactly, I mean, in my view, I don't think it's possible unless we work with a lot of instructors. I mean running, running a homestead myself. I could tell you, like it's not possible, like you know, you can't. You can't do everything alone. We can do a lot of things by ourselves if we want, but those things that we can do are limited, and if we try to remove the limits, then we become the limit. So, yeah, and it just leads to burnout. And with the tree crops, for example, there are so many diverse aspects of the value chain economy, whatever you want to call it. You've got people who need to tend the trees and take care of the orchards, and people who pick the nuts, and people who know how to score and process the nuts, and people who know how to market and distribute the nuts and package the nuts medicine it's like none of us can wear all these hats at once.

So, yeah, as far as sustainability goes, it really needs to be helpful. It's a helpful problem.

Andy:

We need to start to value net that brings again, okay, move towards a multi-faceted school yeah, and, like you know, I think, for example, one thing I don't think people realize is, like in the, a lot of people are like into canning now but like historically, canning was like a very communal thing that people did. There were places you would go and do all of your canning and, like you think about it, like the amount of equipment that has to go into it.

It's not so bad today because of our capacity for scale and complexity in terms of making cheap, affordable stuff, but historically, it was usually done communally because of the fact that you needed certain resources available to do that wasn't easily accessible. You know, when I think about like trying to, how do we, how do we balance this like self-determination with like communal support, with the fact that for a lot of people that are probably listening to this podcast, like their community doesn't reflect what they wish it did? So how do you plug into that and that?

That's a really complicated and nuanced conversation, but it is one that I think is really worth having, especially as we start to think about what it means to create ecosystems that are around our communities. Because you can't do that alone, you can't create an ecosystem that can support a community without the entire community's input. We can do what we can on the landscapes we have access to, but in the scheme of things, that's just a very small drop in what it means to have a healthy ecosystem around us, and this is something that we see repeatedly.

You know you can do whatever you want to your landscape, make it as healthy as you want, but if the people upstream don't, then it doesn't really. You're still going to have to live with those consequences upstream. That means if you want to do this type of work, you need to find a way to find some common ground, not necessarily with 100% of the people around you, but at least a good amount of them, and that can be a lot harder than the actual creating the tree crop food system itself.

Zach:

We live in such a complex and multifaceted world. Live in such a complex and multifaceted world and, because of all the connections, yeah, like these issues are cultural issues. So with our cooperative, when we're working with people, we're really trying to build bridges with people from all walks of life, and sometimes, you know, we're speaking to farmers, for example, and getting farmers to plant out tree crops in their farms and actually, believe it or not, the Amish community is starting to take the tree crops idea forward, and so let me back up a little bit and talk about the economics of the cooperative. We are a for-profit cooperative, but internally, we have some internal socialist models to ensure equitable distribution of profits among the members.

Okay. So let me back up a little bit and just talk about the economics. So we're running the cooperative as a for-profit cooperative, but internally, we're running it with some sort of socialist models so that we can redistribute profits among the various branches of the member categories to accommodate for any inequities of, basically, wealth distribution, like, for example, in traditional capitalist economics. Marketers and distributors tend to have the highest profit margins, even though the real embodied labor that's happening is much further down the supply chain. It's like the gatherers and the processors and things like that who are really creating the value.

So we want to be able to redistribute amongst ourselves. But we chose the for-profit cooperative for a reason: there's a language there. If tree crops can be a revenue generator, if they can be demonstrated to be a profitable business, if we can come to farmers and say, hey, if you plant your back 40 with tree crops, here are the profits that you can expect, here's the revenue that you can expect, here's the revenue that you can expect.

You start to open doors with people, people who may not have prioritized nut trees before. I mean, you're always going to have the hippies and the conservationists and the native plant enthusiasts and the foragers. They're always going to be on board with this because they just inherently see the value in these beings, and they want to see more of them on the landscape. But to really build those broad connections, you have to learn to play the game a little bit, and you know, it's a fine line because, like I said, we're not trying to create or recreate, you know, a capitalist business.

We're really focused on stimulating a local cottage industry that's decentralized and equitable. Our solution to scalability, instead of getting bigger and bigger and bigger, is decentralization. So, for example, we have a Nut Depot hub in one city or area, and if we need more processing power, we just create another hub.

Andy:

Yeah, I would say there are a couple of things going on there. First, there is some scalability, but it's contextualized, right? When it's contextualized, based on the community and its capacity for consuming the product, You're not outsizing the scalability so that you have to enter new markets or anything like that. You know, stepping on theoretically if there was another similar business going in another town. You're not stepping on their proverbial toes like that. That's obviously important because scalability is the fundamental piece of ecological sustainability. How do you scale within a context where you can maximize efficiency and, ideally, you know, make things affordable while paying people well, without over-scaling, that is— receiving diminishing returns at the cost of human connection? That's a really tough line to walk.

The other part that I think is really fundamental and important to the fact that you're a for-profit cooperative is that, like, we can show and utilize the fact that the marketplace isn't necessarily inherently capitalist. You know, I do think a lot of people kind of fall into this rabbit hole of if it's not the exact thing I want in the world, it's not better and that's not the case. We can, if that's what the community demands, then like you, can provide a service that makes the world exponentially better, both for the ecosystem and for the people that inhabit it. From a number of different perspectives, from higher quality food, higher standard of living, higher, you know, ecosystem benefits, health benefits, all these different things that go into creating a more equitable system. And it can be very radicalizing to kind of cleave apart capitalism from the marketplace in terms of getting people to be more open to different ideas and concepts.

Zach:

Yeah, for sure, and what we're trying to create isn't unprecedented. If you go to some parts of old world Europe like France or Italy, for example, they have or I should say they had a lot of localized cottage industries based around tree crops, like chestnuts in Corsica and like Carpathian walnut oil in France. My friend Elodie works with a lot of tree crops too, and she's in the Hudson Valley of New York, but she's French, and when she goes back to France, she's like studying these systems that are still in place there, and it's really cool.

Andy:

We do get really bogged down in the American centric understanding of like we're recreating these things when, like you said, they do exist in some capacity or at least in recent living memory. So, like my grandfather, before he moved to the United States, he had a couple of acres of grape vineyards and olive orchards, and all of that was processed through cooperatives. That was just how it was done there, and that's how it's been done since the early 20th century, and I'm not sure if it's still that way. Actually, I think it is from talking to family.

But the idea of cooperative models to be able to scale processing, to make things more profitable, is just like it's a common sense thing that's existed basically since civilization. You know whether it was grain milling and you know any other type of processing for winter crops, that you know the basis of our diets, wherever you happen to be from, a lot of that was done on a communal scale. Today we just call that cooperative, you know, and you know, this money is a transitory piece, but like, historically, that's just how humans have survived.

Zach:

Yeah, absolutely. And, of course, the Native Americans, the First Nations of our continent, were very intimately working with all of the trees that I've mentioned thus far. You know William Bartram, when he was traveling through the Southeast, he talked about how almost I think what I recall is that every family had just bushels of hickory nuts stored away, and it was just part of their subsistence. He documented how shellbark hickory and shagbark hickory were planted out basically in forest garden orchards. And we know that the native folks even made a product much like hickory oil. They did it a different way. They didn't have an industrial oil press, but there were many ways to skin the cat, so they say.

Andy:

There's a point that's really important to be made on the same subject if the resources today were available back then, they would use them. And I think we do tend to view things through a lens of nostalgia, like back to how things were, without acknowledging really great things that are available for us; I can't even think about the number of labor hours that would have to go oil production without modern technology, it's a wildly efficient and helpful tool that we can use to make things better and like that's not a bad thing. I might be kind of a Luddite, but that doesn't that doesn't mean we shun any type of technology that can make our lives better.

Zach:

I'm a Luddite by sympathy, but I'm pretty pragmatist by nature. So, yeah, I mean, we've got all these amazing tools, and we can't move backward. We can only move forward. We definitely need to keep the past always in our mirror or always in front of us, depending on how we look at it. We need to learn from the past as much as possible. I would say it's imperative. It's an issue of survival, but obviously time continues to unfold, change continues to happen, and that's the adaptability piece is learning how to find balance among all the changes.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think that's especially important. If we all agreed we wanted to go back to the past, we can't because of climate change. What worked on a landscape 600 years ago isn't necessarily going to be applicable today.

You know, 100 years from now, and you know, when we're talking about tree crops like you said, the trees we're planting today won't really be in full production for 100 years; that's three or four generations from now.

You know, the tree that you plant today will only be really felt by your great-grandkids, your friend's great-grandkids, or your nieces or nephews' great-grandkids, right? So there's this idea of contextualizing the work we're doing and a lot of, and you know, it's important that you guys are doing this great work trying to figure out how do we efficiently utilize this resource that's on the landscape, but also understanding the context of we don't necessarily need to figure it all out.

We just need to make sure those resources are available for people in the future and give them 100 years to figure it out. And maybe we're just one small step in terms of, hey, this is a viable crop; it tastes good. We have some very fundamental understandings of how we can use it and we can plant trees. So you guys can figure it out later, and I think there's something really powerful in understanding that context.

Zach:

Yeah, the other thing I love about working with tree crops is it's encouraging us and it's showing us a path out of a lot of the private property nonsense that we see. I mean, if you really want to work with tree crops in a serious way, you really need land trusts or at least some kind of long-term agroecology easement because it's a long-term crop easement because you need it. It's a long-term crop, you know, like farmland, you can lease for, you know, whatever, 100 or 200 bucks a year per acre on an annual, annual renewal basis. But with tree crops, I mean, you're looking at at least 100 years and, if not, indefinite, and uh, it just doesn't.

It doesn't work with our private property system, yeah, and that's another reason why I think the tree crops economy, like with the tree crops cooperative, can be such a powerful leverage point for really bringing about that cultural change. Because they call them like NTs, the non-timber forest products, if you can start to put real-world financial figures to the non-timber forest products, such as maple syrup, such as hickory nuts, such as acorns, such as chestnuts, such as hazelnuts, persimmons, all of that value of these, not only as delicious boutique foods or novelty foods but as truly economically viable crops that they can be growing in the landscape. The next logical step is well, how do we ensure the sustainability of this? So, for example, let's say you're a family farmer or whatever, and you're planting tree crops.

You don't know what your kids are going to do, and you hope that they'll take on the work that you started. But we know how that goes. It doesn't often go very well. You just can't expect that, and so you might want to create some assurances that the work that you've invested in today is going to be, is going to be continued to the stewardship, is going to continue onward into the future, which may be your family and may not be your family, but the important part is that there's some kind of legal protection or structure, like an easement or a trust, to ensure that yeah, this idea of talking about crops you know from trees that they really only start producing at 100 years.

Andy:

I think that concept itself kind of moves the Overton window a bit about land ownership and land stewardship and our relationship with that landscape. When we talk about what this landscape looked like 600 years ago, I think people don't fully wrap their heads around how young our forests, our mature forests today are, historically speaking. We talk about these old-growth forests today as if they're old, and many of them are not. Oftentimes, those trees are middle-aged; they're not old, and when we start talking about especially these nut crops that we're talking about, those are usually the ones that are the longest-lived.

When we start to understand the landscape in that kind of capacity, I think it forces us to rethink the futility of this idea of I own this landscape; let's just say this is a very generous 50 years. Historically speaking, that's nothing. And the idea that I can do all this work and plant these very important and valuable trees for myself, my family, my neighbors, the landscape itself, and the best case scenario, or the best case scenario, that I live for 50 years on this land that I bought at 20 and lived to 70 or 30, 80, that suddenly those trees that haven't even hit a good production yet can be cut down because the person who happened to buy it next didn't want to deal with black walnuts in their backyard, or whatever it might be. It speaks to the fundamental futility of the way we're living, with private property as a way that can actually restore these landscapes.

Zach:

What we've lost is incomprehensible. I mean, if we could time travel back, even 200 years, I mean 300 years, 400 years, sure, but even 200 years, we would be floored. I mean, first of all, there were white oak trees growing with diameters at breast height of like 10, 12 feet, and this was from the Southern Appalachians, the Central Appalachians, all the way up to Lake Ontario. There were trees documented like this in Southern Ontario, Canada, in the Carolinian forest regions. I mean that that's incomprehensible.

And those were all logged out as soon as we had the logging technology big enough to take down a tree that size. But just beyond this, the impressiveness of size and height and girth of the native folks truly had worked with the native hickory, walnut, persimmon to the point where I would consider them domesticated. It's just that. So, for example, there was an old president of the Northern Nut Growers Association. He was the first president, Robert T Morris, and he talks in one of those early NNGA archives about being raised as a boy in Louisiana in the 1860s; he said at that time, there were black walnut trees that had shells so thin, you could crack them with your hands and he said that they were legendary trees, but nobody knew how to propagate them at that time through grafting or whatever, and because of private property and things get cut down and whatnot, they're gone.

They're gone from the landscape. And if you get into the lore behind the Northern Nut Growers Association and you understand where our cultivars come from, for example, like Granger Shagbark hickory comes from Granger County, Tennessee. Almost all of these are, in my opinion, old Native American selections, for lack of a better word.

They're part of the Native cultural landscape that was left on the land here. Now, I'm not suggesting that Native folks were line-breeding or anything like that. It's just when you live in a multi-generational culture of stewardship with your bioregional ecosystem for generation after generation after generation. For example, you might cut down the hickory trees that don't have nuts that are very accessible. They might have thick-shelled nuts, they might be small, they might not taste great. You cut those trees down, and you make bows out of them, and then the trees that are the best are obviously getting left on the landscape.

Those nuts are being planted in old swidden fields, sort of like the Mesoamerican milpa system that was all over the eastern United States, too, where advanced agroforestry, for lack of a better word, was being practiced by native folks. And so they were certainly choosing the best genetics to plant, and they were certainly calling some of the weakest or, you know, least desirable genetics.

And so, at the time of early colonization, just understanding what was on the landscape and what was lost is heartbreaking. Like I live a half hour from Lancaster City, and before Lancaster was known as Lancaster, the first European settlers, when they arrived at what's now the downtown square, found a grove of hickory trees, a spring and a wigwam, and so that place became known as Hickory Town town with the E at the end, the old-timey, and then it later became Lancaster. And then the rest is history. And apparently, they cut down a lot of those hickory trees to build the roads. But even in the early NNGA days, the Northern Nut Growers Association, some of the better selections were coming out of Lancaster County, just because it was such a fertile area with such a rich indigenous history.

Have you heard of the founder effect? They talk about it in evolutionary genetics. For example, like Darwin's finches, for example, you get this population of finches, and they go, and they colonize a new island, and there's a certain subset of that population that is best adapted to the island, just because of natural variability, and so that subset tends to become the founder population.

So then all the birds that are growing up around this new island resemble the subset of the original population, which over time can lead to pretty big differences in how the populations look, to the point where you can immediately distinguish them just by looking at them. The same thing happened with our native tree crops. So two, three, 400 years ago, most, maybe not most that could be generous, but many of the nut trees on our landscape were the results of intentional selection over many, many generations. Jays drop, and those grow up.

That's a subset of genetics, basically for fast growth, and nut qualities are not a consideration. So, in the process of cutting down the forests, we inadvertently created a founder effect, basically selecting nut trees that are just a lot less accessible. Yeah, but those genetics are still there, they're latent, and so the work of continuing the breeding and selection that native folks started is of the utmost importance.

Andy:

Yeah, it's absolutely just unbelievable when you start, if you start going through the archives of old nurseries, especially the teens, the 20s, the 30s, in particular of the selections that were available, from native plums to tree nuts, to nut crops for trees, the selections, they're unbelievable. Now it's like if you're looking for an American plum, there might be I don't know't know 15, 20 varieties that you can find. Historically, there were hundreds, and that kind of diversity is just shocking that we've just let it go, but many of those trees are still out there.

Zach:

We just need to find them, yeah, that's, that's what I've been invested in a lot, especially with the hickories. I've really taken it upon myself to try to collect all the best of the best cultivars that I can. I have a mentor down in Kentucky, and I had one in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Parker Coble, who passed, and I hang out with other old nut growers, and you know some of these guys are, well, they're mostly guys, unfortunately, but a lot of them are in their 70s, 80s or even 90s and they just have been doing this quietly for 40 or 50 years just because they thought it was interesting.

But there's a lot of really good genetics that have been preserved through organizations like the Nut Growers Associations and the NAFEX (North American Fruit Explorers) and whatnot, and so I've taken an approach of trying to continue to graft and propagate the good varieties while also growing out as many seedlings as possible, because we're really going to need both.

Andy:

We're going into the new, the new normal, whatever that is climatically. Before we recorded, we were just talking about how this is like the weirdest winter we've ever experienced, and I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to be the new normal, and that means we need to learn to adjust very, very quickly.

So you'd mentioned, like, there's a lot of these older folks that have been working in the space, kind of doing their thing without a podcast or, you know, any like platform to like to make people aware of what they're doing other than if they're in, like NAFEX or whatever it might be, which, if you're interested, I think membership for NAFEX is what 20 bucks, 30 bucks, something like that. It's definitely worth becoming a member, supporting their work, and getting plugged into all the things that they're doing.

It's really important, and this is something you're doing is trying to keep those stories alive, keep that knowledge alive, keep those memories alive of not just what the landscape looked like, but also the iterative process that took place to be where we are today and to keep an understanding of what the future can look like based on the work that people have done. I definitely appreciate you trying to keep those stories alive by just listening, and hopefully, you're writing some of them down because I think they'll be really important in the future. So for folks that are interested in what you guys are doing, what you're doing, where can they find your work? Sure.

Zach:

The cooperative has a website it's keystonetreecrops.com, so you can check us out there. we have an email list, and we are currently in the process of figuring out how to onboard new members in an efficient way, so stay tuned. Cool, as far as what I'm doing goes, I'm on Instagram, and you can also go to my nursery website, futureforestplants.com. I try to keep it updated, but, yeah, you can always reach out to me personally if you need to.

Andy:

What's your Instagram handle?

Zach:

It's @Susq_woodlum, so that's S-U-S-Q, which is short for Susquehanna, and then underscore woodlum. I'm like a hoodlum but in the woods.

Andy:

This has been super interesting. I'm definitely going to have to have you back on to talk more about trees.

Zach:

Yeah, thanks for having me. There's so much to geek out about, and even the history of the TVA and all of the things that happened before and around World War II is fascinating.

Andy:

Yeah, and we're going to be talking extensively about that this upcoming winter. So quick plug: If you want to read some of it, the episodes will be kind of sprung out of it. A lot of it's on Substack, and you can also get it on Patreon.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #171 of the Poor Proles Almanac.