Tuesday, March 30, 2010

As I walk the walnuts - 10

As I walk the walnuts I reflect on the progress we have made in the last five years and my hopes for this one. All of the technological components are beginning to come together, albeit at different rates, and in spite of glimpses of future bottlenecks that seem to parallel what our climate throws at us, adding to the challenges of nut production so far north, we have the market waiting for what we can supply, so no fears there.

Useful US studies show that we import about $110 m annually of tree nut products from the US alone (the study was commissioned to find this out). I raise gales of laughter when I tell my collaborators that I’d be happy with 1% of that market, but the truth is that if we could achieve a gross return of $25,000 annually to 40 landowners, we’d be well on the road to a sustainable partial livelihood across the region, which is far preferable to one or two producers making greater gains.

But this still requires effort, and perhaps more than we have brought to the task so far. I shall be egging my collaborators on even more, trying to increase the range of skills we bring to the questions that remain, showing why the biological issues of productivity parallel the technological challenges of bringing a product to market. I am more convinced than ever that BNP was, happily, a viable strategy, and that it is easily replicable on a wider scale. But there is a lot of black walnut currently out there on the landscape, and we need to harness this resource, as well, to add to the B of BNP and to our bottom line.

I see as a challenge now, how to add a focus on shell usage as a biofuel. With one of the highest energy densities in natural by-products, and at about 75% of our physical output, shell can be (should be) part of our market strategy, and while I am aware of its usage as an abrasive, amongst other things, in our climate this energy density cries out for a different end-use. We are in the age of renewable energy. Not exploring this would be like throwing the baby out with the bath-water.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

As I walk the walnuts – 9

As I walk the walnuts I think about the graying of the population and the fact that the mean age of the attendees at past nut society meetings has been greater than my own, and I am on the cusp of retiring! The fundamental challenge is how to interest young people. The answer, I believe, is only through income potential. Remember that question? Can I make more money from that than from what I’m currently doing?


But perhaps there is another way. And that is to build associations in the mind between nuts and play. To that end, behold the Walnut Express, a model railroad layout that snakes around a peripheral shelf in the cracking shed, ferrying nuts from the Walnut Mountain (or Forest!) to the cracking machine. It’s still under construction so I am not sure whether it’s a Mountain or a Forest, and only time will tell. But one thing of which I am certain – the cracking shed will be a boring place for young people without it. Just ask my grandchildren.

Monday, March 1, 2010

As I walk the walnuts - 8

As I walk the walnuts and look at each tree, it is like a snapshot. Snapshots, by definition, are images captured at an instant in time, and tend to reflect something that we were doing at that given moment. Yet an image of a tree is misleading. It is certainly a snapshot of the tree at that given moment, but the tree is the ultimate interpolator, the summer-up of expression over its lifetime, the presenter of the all-gone-before. A tree, then, while in the present, is all of the past, as interpreted by its individual genome in that unique environment.

I say this because a tree is a prisoner of its roadmap for fixing and depositing carbon, and, once started, it cannot deviate from this roadmap. Oh, the roadmap may be altered for it – spring frost effects on bud growth, branch removal by pruning - but a black walnut always looks like a black walnut, no matter its shape, and will always yield nuts, not acorns.

With time I am less involved with the form my trees take. I matched their early growth with my own energy, interfering according to my criteria at the time, but now am content to let the trees fill their space however they will, their response to that interference an acknowledgement of my then-presence on the landscape, an element of biodiversity as ephemeral perhaps as the guarantee that the snow buntings will return every year. Nothing is guaranteed, not even that the energy to interfere goes undiminished, but I prefer to think that I just understand myself better now, and that however the trees fill that space is the way it should be.