For Thelen, Money Grows on Trees
Published: Friday, October 2, 2020
When Paul Thelen planted his first chestnut orchard in 1996, he did so with the intention of diversifying his crops with something that didn't require a lot of effort or money.
Today, those 24-year-old trees growing at Hillside Chestnut Orchards in Berrien Springs, Mich. are tall and bursting with prickly, bright green burrs that will all but harvest themselves right on time for the traditional autumn collection.
There's a peace of mind associated with knowing that each one of the rich, brown chestnuts Thelen's workers gather up from the black tarps laid down between the rows of trees is already bought and paid for at a premium price.
Because demand is high, supply is low and volume is nowhere near the saturation point, chestnut farmers don't have to fret over market volatility. Thelen grows the Colossal cultivar, a large, European-Japanese hybrid.
"There's quite a bit of value," Thelen said during a driving tour last week Wednesday through the fruit groves on his seventh-generation family farm. "It's probably a better cash cow than some of the other stuff. If you're growing Honey Crisp (apples), you've got a cash cow. If you have Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, you may not even break even.
"We never have to worry about moving chestnuts."
Thelen then echoed a sentiment expressed in a quote by Roger Blackwell, the current president of Chestnut Growers Inc. (CGI), the co-op formed by Thelen and other Michigan growers, with assistance from Michigan State University, in 2001.
"We could sell a million pounds—easy."
Thelen's chestnuts grow on 2,500 trees at various stages of maturity—from saplings to productive adults that could reach 40-50 feet in height—at the certified sustainable farm established in 1836 by the forebearers of his wife and business partner, the former Sarah Feather.
Chestnuts are an unknown commodity only to the uninitiated, Thelen explained, and there's a lot more to them than being featured in the opening line of a beloved Christmas song.
Of course, fresh chestnuts are especially popular during the holidays for roasting over an open fire or in an oven, and can be heated in a microwave for a quick, nutty snack. Many chefs and home cooks make turkey stuffing, seasonal soups and stews with them, but frozen or dried chestnuts are available year-round.
Chestnuts have also long been used to make candy, spreadable purees and even gelato, and usage continues to expand.
Chestnut flour is a gluten-free alternative for baking, particularly for pastries, and chestnuts can be made into a hummus-style dip. Brewmasters make craft beer out of dried chestnut chips, and Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford Museum in suburban Detroit prominently features roasted chestnuts during its annual month-long "Holiday Nights" experience.
According to the CGI website, chestnuts are actually a fruit but Thelen likens them to a vegetable, such as a potato, because of their 50-percent water and high-starch content. They have the lowest fat profile of any of the mainstream edible nuts and are easy to digest because of their substantial complex carbohydrates.
A decade or so before Thelen got into chestnuts, a smattering of Michigan fruit growers were having only spotty success with Chinese chestnut trees grown from seedlings (today's nursery stock is developed from root slicings that come from productive trees). They sought help from the late Dennis Fulbright, an MSU professor who became well-versed in chestnuts while working toward his doctorate at the University of California Riverside.
Fulbright, who died from acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 67 last November, is considered the father of the Michigan chestnut industry.
With a $7.7 million investment by 35 full-time chestnut growers, Michigan leads the nation in chestnut production and Hillside is one of the state's largest producers. Thelen hardly needs the marketing push provided by CGI's enthusiastic and informative website.
Throughout the growing season, the Thelens sell their sweet cherries, peaches, apricots, nectarines, apples and other products primarily at three farmers markets in Chicago and occasionally in South Bend.
However, customers are already clamoring for chestnuts, which are just starting to naturally pop out of the burrs and drop to the ground, and appeared on the Thelens' sales counter for the first time last Saturday.
The harvest—Thelen's workers use a gadget called a Nut Wizard to gather the chestnuts but commercial vacuum sweepers are also available—will reach its peak later in the next week or so and be complete by mid-October. Thelen sells about 10 percent of his crop on a retail basis and the rest go to the co-op, which processes them at a facility in Clarksville, Mich.
The co-op sorts, grades, cleans and packages chestnuts, which range from 75 cents to $2.50 per pound wholesale and $2 to $5 per pound retail, according to a 2018 USDA report, but one website has them listed for $39 a pound, including shipping. Imports primarily from Europe and Asia make up for demand American farmers can't meet, but theirs get to domestic markets sooner, Thelen boasted.
"We (CGI) had 250,000 pounds a couple years ago and were all out by sometime in December," said Thelen.
Thelen could barely have anticipated the potential of chestnuts when he first came up with the idea of planting them "as an alternative crop," he said. "I was looking at them and I didn't see a lot of spray because they don't get fire blight and they don't get a lot of insects like other fruit, so I started with a small amount and just kept adding to it."
The American chestnut was a predominant native tree in the Appalachian region—the southern part of Michigan was on the edge of its range—and a primary food source for settlers. They began to decline in large numbers in the early 1900s from Maine to Georgia due to chestnut blight, which was probably imported on Asian chestnuts.
The American chestnut was declared extinct in the 1950s, although a small, mature stand is maintained for research, preservation and cultural purposes by MSU in the northwest Lower Peninsula, according to Erin Lizotte, statewide senior MSU senior Extension educator based in Wexford County.
Since those American chestnuts weren't contiguous to the natural range, and therefore not killed off, they were "probably planted by somebody over 100 years ago," Lizotte said.
There is no reason, from a commercial standpoint, to re-introduce the American chestnut, since it is considerably smaller than modern varieties, Lizotte said.
On a global scale, Michigan's chestnut industry, with less than 1,000 planted acres, is very small. However, with establishment costs set at $7,800 per acre, production in Michigan is expected to double over the next decade. Consequently, growing chestnuts is making sense to more and more farmers.
"The demand in the U.S. outstrips domestic production," Lizotte said. "It's a relatively new industry when we think about it in the spectrum of horticultural crops like apples or cherries, so there is still a lot of work to be done with bolstering the science to help make this a more profitable and reliable production system.
"One of the problems with chestnuts is we see this boom-bust cycle from year to year, where we have a nice, big crop one year and maybe a 10- or 15-percent crop then next. For growers, and the supply chain, that presents some challenges."
Nevertheless, chestnuts have an alluring upside worthy of increasing interest.
"There's the potential for growth because we aren't even meeting the domestic market, so that's a bright spot in terms of grower return," Lizotte said. "If you can grow them, you can sell them at a nice price, so on a per-acre economic basis, especially if you can get consistent crop load, it's a good option for growers.
"Another reason is, they are not an early spring bloomer. When you think about nectarines, peaches, apples or even cherries, with the erratic spring conditions we've seen over the last 50 years or so, there's a lot of risk. Chestnuts don't bloom until July, so in the spring when we see the buds pop on the maple trees, that chestnut tree is still fast asleep—there's no sap flowing and that sucker is not waking up too early."
Thanks to long-standing cultural connections—"Italy survived World War II on chestnut flour," Thelen said —holiday traditions and marketability as a health food, especially in the booming gluten-free category, there's no end in sight for demand.
Furthermore, there are other ways to profit from chestnuts, with more possibly on the horizon. Healthy trees can produce indefinitely. In Europe, chestnuts are harvested from forest trees that have been growing for as long as 600 years, Thelen said.
Mature trees that do need to be removed, for thinning or other reasons, can be sold for highly desirable lumber, and Thelen may be out in front of another, even more exotic crop, just like he was in '96.
Truffles, the uber-expensive fungi that are famously detected by hogs in France and throughout Europe, like to grow under chestnut trees. Michigan State assistant professor and plant-fungal interaction specialist Gregory Bonito is researching the viability of growing truffles in Michigan's climate and Thelen is awaiting the results of some of the chestnut tree root systems he has inoculated.
"Now, there's three types of truffles—summer, fall and spring," Thelen said. "We wouldn't be able to do winter because we freeze, but the price on those is $300 up to $1,000 a pound. Pick 20 pounds and that isn't a whole heckuva lot of truffles, but price-wise, it'd be pretty good.
"That's what I'm looking at over the years. At some point and time, I may just stay with chestnuts and get out of the other stuff."
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