The Nuttery

Some crops linger in the corners of the market for various reasons. Pawpaws are scrumptious but too fragile to ship, for instance. Black walnuts are delicious and nutritious, but the time, cost and effort to remove the hull, clean them and shell them keeps walnuts from taking their proper place in the market. The same could be said for other nut crops such as hickories, mockernuts and acorns.

But long-time orchardist Bill Whipple has a solution that he calls, with tongue-in-cheek, the Acornucopia Project, where it states on its website that “The Acornucopia is 10% nuts and 90% crazy people.”

Whipple and his colleagues aim to build the processing infrastructure to make tree nuts more profitable: first in the Southeast, then nationally. They’ve set up 20 sites across the southeast for aggregating those crops from farmers and foragers. Those crops are then carried to what they call the Nuttery in Asheville, North Carolina.

Like the old-time grain mills that wheat farmers depended on, the Nuttery is like a nut mill that returns 60% of the final weight of unsorted nuts and shells. They keep 40% of what you bring in as their fee.

Using second-hand tools, modified equipment and Rube Goldberg devices of their own making, Whipple and friends turn these tree crops into popular value-added products such as oil, butter, cream and flour.

Their “bread and butter,” as Whipple says, are acorns. Mast from white oaks make a choice flour. Acorns from black and red oaks are too bitter for flour, but their 30% oil content — comparable to sunflower seeds — makes them valuable for products no one would expect from oak trees: salad oil and cooking oil.

To learn more, check out their website (www.acornucopiaproject. com) and ask them to make a presentation to your group. That’s what they call their Quercus Circus. You’re guaranteed to learn a lot about some undervalued crops and get a few laughs at no additional charge.