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120 years ago, a blight decimated American Chestnut trees. By the mid-20th century, an estimated 4 billion trees had died from the blight. Not only was this one of the worst forest ecological disasters in history, but it also had major economic impacts as many rural communities relied on the chestnut trees for both large quantities of nutrient-rich nuts and timber.

Fast forward a couple generations and most Americans have never eaten a chestnut. Nor could they find a store that sells them. When the trees died, so did chestnuts as a part of the American diet.

Decades of breeding by both individuals and universities have resulted in blight-resistant trees, but those trees have yet to be propagated at a scale large enough for commercial production. Consumer demand for chestnuts has also grown, slowly and organically. The combination of immigrants to the U.S. seeking a taste of home (chestnuts remain popular in Europe and several parts of Asia) and consumers wanting to know where their food is grown has led to chestnut U-pick and mail order farms selling out within a couple weeks of harvest.

Today, the chestnut is poised for rapid expansion thanks to three main reasons:

Non-profit & for-profit organizations making major investments in chestnut farming.

Two such organizations are the Savanna Institute and Agroforestry Partners, both of whom are planting 1,000’s of acres of chestnuts in the Midwest and Appalachia. Groups like these, plus the hundreds of smaller family-owned farms planting chestnuts, will dramatically increase the volume of American-grown chestnuts in the coming years.

Improved plant propagation and nursery stock availability.

Unlike most other tree crops, chestnuts have historically not been propagated via tissue culture. Tissue culture propagation is the main way that most other tree crops’ root stocks, or self-rooted plants have been produced for decades. However, since there wasn’t large demand from farmers for tissue cultured chestnuts, none of the major tree nurseries had incentive to make the years of investment required to begin a tissue culture program for the trees.

Then, a couple of years ago, West Coast Chestnut successfully propagated the ‘Colossal’ cultivar and began selling them to nurseries and growers across the U.S. The family-owned nursery now has a couple cultivars in production. They are also working on a dozen additional cultivars, including several that have proven to be blight resistant. As more cultivars become available, more growers will be able to plant chestnuts in more parts of the U.S., further increasing supply.

Unmet domestic demand is being met by low-quality imports.

Even though chestnuts are not a part of a typical American diet, U.S. consumers purchase more nuts each year than U.S. growers produce. The U.S. imports millions of pounds of chestnuts each year, mostly from China and Italy, to fill the gap in what consumers want but we don’t produce. The imported nuts are highly packaged and frequently frozen or otherwise preserved resulting in an underwhelming culinary experience. It would take 5-10 years and thousands of acres of new plantings for American growers to produce enough chestnuts just to remove the need for these imports.

The stage is set for American growers to scale up chestnut production to meet the demand currently met through imports. And to do so with fresh, known-cultivar chestnuts that delight consumers’ as we re-introduce them to the historic American nut.