 Hello and welcome to North Central Sare Regions episode of Farming Matters. We're really grateful that you zoomed in with us today because we are in for a treat. I'm excited to be here with you all today. We have a really great project that we are here to feature and celebrate. I'm with Amy Miller of Route 9 Cooperative and Michela Jamien with Rural Action. Michela, they both wear many different hats and they will share a little bit about their role with this, with their Ceregram project, which is titled Value Adding Culinary Chestnut Seconds to the Development of a Marketable Fine Flower. Well, I'll start out by saying that this was a really exciting project and we hope to be doing more together with Route 9. The idea of this project was a collaboration partnership between the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative, which is part of Rural Action's sustainable agriculture program. And we knew from Amy that there were 20,000 pounds of grade B chestnuts that didn't get sold for very much money. And we thought they could be. Let's see if we can make a good flower from them and even other things. So in some cases we did look at some other products like how could chunks of chestnuts from the grade B be used. And Amy, maybe you could speak to, maybe we could advance the slides and you could describe the difference between grade A and grade B chestnuts, et cetera. We couldn't have done it without the support of Cere and I personally have had other projects with Cere as farmer rancher projects. And I know Rural Action has been connected to Cere on a number of levels. I can't name them all, but it's a great program. It's the part of the USDA I love. So the idea of staple foods collaborative is grains, beans, and nuts. And particularly happy about nuts being a real project of ours because they're perennial plants and climate emergency begs us to figure out how to stop eating so much stuff that requires annual plantings, et cetera. Yeah, I'll introduce Route 9 Cooperative. We are a group of chestnut farmers. We are specifically called Route 9 Cooperative and not Route 9 Chestnut Cooperative because, you know, we want to leave our options open to integrate other types of food products as well. Other types of fruits and nuts or staple foods as Michelle pointed out. So at the moment, though, we are primarily focused on chestnuts. We have six grower members throughout, mostly throughout Ohio and in other parts of Appalachia as well. So we've started in Ohio, but we are kind of, you know, work with chestnut growers throughout the eastern U.S. to be honest. The U.S. market for chestnuts is like 90% unmet by chestnut growers in the U.S. or something like there's a lot of room for people to. Quite ridiculous like that. Yeah, yeah, the supply, the U.S. chestnut supply is so much less than the current demand for both the fresh market and the in the dried value added products. So yeah, there's a lot of room for more chestnut growers and more chestnuts in this game. We grow, we have about, well, we have over 200 acres of chestnuts in eastern Ohio. And the vast majority of the chestnuts that we grow and sell, we sell direct to a customer through online retail or direct retail. And, you know, our cooperative moves about 100,000 pounds of chestnuts a year. The vast majority of those are sold fresh in shell. But as we are harvesting and processing and grading the fresh chestnuts, there are a certain percentage of those variable percentage, you know, year to year, which cannot be sold fresh in shell to the fresh market. Because of various lunges and perissues. So those are the grade B chestnuts and anything that can't be sold for the fresh market. We dry and we peel and we regrade them anything that with with kernel quality that's acceptable for dry product use we make into flower or dried kernels different value added products. And so this project in particular has been looking at what are some different avenues for these these dried chestnuts, particularly the flower but not just the flower. And so how can we use these grade B chestnuts to, you know, maybe a higher purpose and a more delicious purpose than perhaps, you know, food for gear or a lifestyle. So we harvest all the chestnuts by hand. And the picture you see there of all the buckets and the people this was an annual harvest party that we have every year where friends and old friends and new friends come and camp out in the orchard and we harvest lots of chestnuts and hang out around the fire and eat delicious food and have just a merry weekend. So our process from field to flower. And this is this is kind of the broad overview and then we'll get into some more details later on. We size them we sell them by small medium large and extra large. We give them a hot water bath, which kind of cleans the shells and also kills any chestnut weevil RV, which might be inside the nuts chestnut weevils are the biggest pest of chestnuts. So we have to kind of look out for those at all stages along the way. And then we grade the chestnuts. So that's where we're picking out anything that's not grade A that can't be sold fresh in shell for the fresh market. The grade B chestnuts as we grade them out throughout the season, those are put into an ambient temperature air dryer. And those these are kind of like forced air drying bins that sit in our warehouse. And like I said, as we're grading the chestnuts, we sort of keep adding to the pile. And then after our fresh chestnut season is over, then we dry and peel those grade B chestnuts that have been drying throughout the season. They dry for two to three months, usually October to December. And then once they're ready to peel and we know they're ready to peel when they when that the kernel shrinks in from the shell. And we can we can squeeze and feel or rattle and hear that air gap between the kernel inside in the shell outside. We have a mechanical impact peeler that we use to to to basically separate the shells from the nuts. This is quite a contraption my father Greg Miller actually invented it. So this impact peeler is is there's a large suction fan and sort of a big tube and and like a bangboard and basically the suction fan moves here really quickly. The chestnuts feed in via vibratory feeder. They shoot down that long tube kind of like a like a rifle. They hit against the bangboard. The shells the shells fall apart and are sucked out and blown outside. And those kernels that were inside fall down onto a roller table that we can use to further inspect the chestnuts and then again separate out the ones that are of good enough quality to use for dry products versus the ones that that aren't good enough quality. After they're separated we separate the the whole kernels flower nuts and calls. We we finish drying them the chestnuts need to be completely dry for the longest shelf life. We dry them in a in a convection oven which is the technology we have available at the moment. Before making them into flour we roast them and roasting times and temperatures can kind of vary you can do a lot with flavor and flavor nuance by playing around with roasting times and temperatures. After we feel they're sufficiently roasted for flour. We hold them either at 35 degrees Celsius to kind of finish drying or stay dry or if we're going to store them for a long time before we actually mill them we will keep them in the freezer to maintain highest quality. Again before we we actually mill especially if they've been in storage for a while we will regrade inspect and regrade the nuts. And then finally we mill them pack them and sell them. And we sell chestnut flour to various there's some wholesale buyers who buy it and repackage it. We sell some direct to customers. We've got some new restaurants interests and people who are bakeries and people who want to use our flower thanks to this project. So our sales are kind of everything from, you know, wholesale for people who are going to resell to restaurants to consumers who are just going to use them directly in their homes. That grade A there those are the grade A whole kernels that we can sell as dried whole kernels and then be there those are the flour nuts that we can grind into flour. You'll see some of the nuts have a little bit of that skin left on them that's called the pellicle. That is that doesn't affect the quality when it comes to making flour and in fact a little bit of pellicle helps the flower because it acts as an anti kicking agent. And this is some, you know, just some pictures and examples of what we come up with that photo in the middle. That is a 25 pound bag of freshly ground chestnut flour. And that was actually produced by our milling partner Monroe students men of students men farms. And this was a partnership that we developed thanks to this grant program. He Monroe has the capacity to mill to mill more flour at a time than we do in our small mill on the left hand picture there is our small mill we used to do everything on that, that little cutting mill. And basically it just is, it's a small scale operation. If we wanted to scale up and produce more flour and sell more flour a partnership with students men farms has has allowed that to happen. Students men have also partnered with us to make chestnut pancake mix. You can see there on the right. Those are some some photos of chestnut pancakes being made for the chestnut pancake mix. We use half chestnut flour from us, and then half organic golden white spelt flour that students men grows and processes that his place. And so he's able to make that pancake mix for us. So that's a fun new product that's a family favorite that we can offer now. Thanks to this new partnership. And yeah so the challenges with the dry products. This is what we've been exploring throughout the process and you know we we knew there were some challenges going into it because we've been kind of, you know playing around with this on a small commercial scale was a hobby level. So we knew if we wanted to scale up to make this more commercial we'd have some of these challenges. Drying the chestnuts and keeping them dry is a big issue. The chestnut kernels do not dry uniformly. We harvest chestnuts from seedling trees that means each tree is a unique individual and the seeds, you know each so then each chestnut the chestnuts from each tree have their own different characteristics. And so one of the differences among chestnuts is non uniform drying. Some of them no matter how long we dry them they never seem to get dry. And so they're kind of gummy when they go through the peeler even after we think we've got them dry enough when we go through the mill if they're not dry enough they get kind of gummy in the mill which can cause big problems. Nutritionally chestnuts are very similar to grains but one big way that they differ from grains is that they're very hygroscopic that means they will take in moisture from the air really easily. You know grains sort of the grass seeds and these annual seeds that in their biology they're sort of meant to dry down and stay dry and they and they will grow from a dried seed that's just kind of like what they do. Whereas chestnuts and other a lot of other nuts. You know that they're non viable when they get dry so so so built into their biology is this like idea to stay hydrated and stay moist because that's how they survived the best. Keeping them dry and keeping them dry is a big challenge. One of the things we explored with this project was the market for chestnut flour. We wanted to explore market opportunities and also you know kind of in the in the vein of the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative was looking at chestnut as a staple food not just the novelty. There are plenty of people who will buy chestnut flour and you know just to try it like oh this is kind of a fun interesting thing but it's not necessarily a thing that they would normally eat or part of sort of like a normal a normal diet. Folks in Appalachia used to use chestnuts quite a lot more than they do now back when chestnut trees grew wild in the forests and were more abundant. So this is kind of like regaining some cultural heritage by relearning how to use chestnuts. One of the biggest challenges that it's ongoing is product availability. Basically we wanted to develop these value added products and figure out how to utilize dried chestnuts. But there still are not a lot of chestnuts available on the market. I mean we sell out of fresh product fresh chestnuts immediately. And we you know and we we will dry and peel any of those grade B ones we can't sell fresh. But you know some years we have a lot of those some years we don't have as many of those. So you know on one hand you know we can get people excited about chestnut flour but if we don't have a lot of chestnut flour available then how excited do you want them to be because then you're disappointing people. So yeah so this kind of like chicken and egg scenario with product development and market development and product availability. We're playing that dance. And I can tell you right now you know this year we had a very very good quality crop of the fresh chestnut market which is very nice for our business and for our customers who like to fresh chestnuts. But this means that this year we actually don't have as much product available for dry products chestnut flour. It does have a shorter shelf life in ambient temperature than other sort of wheat flowers or grain flowers. Chestnuts are high in carbohydrate and low in fat compared to other nuts. Which means they're not going to the chestnut flowers not going to go rancid as quickly as say you know other types of nut flowers or other types of nut kernels. But chestnuts are a bit higher in fat compared to other grains. So there are there can potentially be issues with rancidity if the chestnut flour is stored at room temperature for long periods of time. So however if you can store the chestnut flour in the fridge or in the freezer it can last a really long time. We're in southern Ohio. So once you run into that season where it's hot and humid the chestnuts are even though they were dried down to 13% which is about what you would want corn to dry down to. They became they they found the moisture in the air. So we concluded that let's do the milling in the winter you know and let's stay away from milling in the summer months and the spring months when there's a lot of brain and moisture. We had flour milled and then we gave flour to a number of bakeries in our area to try out and actually we sent flour to other places. And I'll talk about that second. So Athens Bread Company, the village bakery were the primary bakeries in Athens that took that took the flour and even chestnut chunks and made these wonderful products you know sourdough products, pretzel buns of crust pizza crust. One of our big findings where we were kind of trying to hone in on the best milling practices and some of these things we've we've mentioned before moisture level was one of our biggest challenges kind of consistently been a challenge. But now we know a lot more about it we know kind of what to do what not to do so that's so that's been a useful part of this experiment. And so we something we've we've looked at our different size chestnut pieces so one of the challenges going into it was if you have a whole chestnut kernel, making that taking that directly to a fine flour is really difficult with a lot of the milling technology that's available. And so what we discovered is that we, it works best if we're able to break the chestnuts into chunks maybe like corn kernel size pieces to then further mill into the fine flour. So we're actually working with our milling partner to procure a hammer mill, so that he can easily take our whole chestnuts and make them into chunks, and then put them in his stone mill to grind them into fine flour. So we kind of played around with the product sizes from the mill, and that kind of segues into types of mills. He has several different types of mills we we visited three different mills and you know tested their equipment and tested chestnuts on their equipment. And so we've kind of honed in on what what mills are working best for the products that we want to make and the chestnuts we have available. And so, you know, and then matching that equipment with production and market capacity that sort of ties into what we said earlier about being able to scale things up by, you know, using using a milling partner like Stutzman, as opposed to trying to do everything on our own little single mill. So this is some equipment that we were able to purchase and or try to use while in the process of figuring out the best equipment on the right is the pencil dryer. So this is a grain drying normally found in grain drying mills that this big dryer can be kind of plunged into a super sack of grain and sort of draws air in through the grain and dries really quickly. We thought we might be able to use this for the mill chestnuts to make to make sure they get to that final low moisture. It didn't work out quite as well as we thought for the already peeled chestnuts but we found that it works very well for the chestnuts in the shell before we peel them. So basically we are using this this pencil dryer now to to dry the chestnuts in the shell before we peel them. And that's actually helping to speed up our drying time from the fresh chestnuts in the shell to the point where we can start to peel them. On the left you see there's a little sifter we tried this out at at Brant's Mill. Was it Walnut Creek? Is that what they're called? Yeah. Yeah. So this is a sifter that was kind of nice one before we started working with Stutzman and we had a flower that had been through our mill. We had sort of different particle sizes all within the same flower. And so we learned about the sifter and this was very handy to actually separate out the different particle sizes so that we could separate the fine flower from the polenta or grit size pieces and then further utilize those. I think that those were kind of the highlights and we wanted to provide our contact information for anyone who wants to get in touch with us to learn more. And so feel free to reach out. It's a multi-generational project. So my grandfather actually planted a lot of the trees that we're still harvesting from today. And my father is the one who really started the commercial business of chestnuts that we have and then helped form the cooperative just a little over 10 years ago. So this has been a multi-generational process to even get to the point where we have an abundance of dried chestnuts to try to figure out how to make flower out of them. So we want to do this now but we can't take all the credit ourselves. If you were to offer some advice to other growers or millers or even bakers out there who want to connect with a local farm and getting some local grains and nuts into our product line, what advice would you have for them? I would say definitely look for local farms. I think I mentioned earlier there are a lot of new chestnut farms that are being planted and young trees that are starting to come into production. So I think that over the course of the next 10 years, we're going to see a lot more sort of small to large kind of all sizes of chestnut farms popping up in various parts of the Eastern U.S. Amy, are there places on the web that you would recommend? Nothing that's particularly organized specifically for people who want to buy chestnuts like for the culinary use. There are lists of chestnut nurseries or places where people can buy fruit where all these new growers are getting their information. But I will put a plug in for the Northern Nut Growers Association. That is a group that's been around for more than 100 years. It's a collection of nut tree enthusiasts ranges from hobbyists to academic researchers to commercial growers. That's kind of the space where everybody can come together with a shared interest in nut trees. And there's a lot of information housed within the NNGA about nut trees and chestnuts specifically, but any kind of nut really. And I think also I would add that chestnuts offer a great opportunity for landowners, particularly in Appalachia and other places where the top soil is thin and more on the acidic side because that is exactly what chestnuts want. Agriculture, especially commodity agriculture, you know, people sort of keep everything to themselves and not share, but in specialty crop agriculture, you know, a lot of times we realize that if we do work together, we all benefits, and we're not necessarily competing directly with each other. You know, we can all be successful in our own ways in our own areas if we share information. So it's a very collaborative environment in the kind of specialty crop nut growing world that's different than a lot of larger like industrial agriculture. Yeah, nobody's gone out of business because somebody else got some info. And so what I like about SARE is I feel like SARE shares that value of let's figure out how to fund and help support people working together in our region. And it's certainly been my experience that it's a big success to partner with SARE, even on early projects that I did through the farmer rancher grant, where that partnership with different farms growing the crops together and comparing what came out of it. It's a really good, it's an important value and I'm glad SARE really holds it up. It's very tricky to just agree briefly that how do we really support the idea of localizing these very important nutritional foods, you know, because we can't live on kale, right. I mean, we could, but that would take a lot of kale, whereas it doesn't take as much nuts or, or heirloom corn or, you know, good quality wheat to get the calories and nutrition we need. And so how do we do that locally? I mean, that the closer we can get people to their food and where their food comes from, then, you know, that's where this all really shines. You know, we can all flourish if, you know, people are seeing where their food is coming from. They are valuing food that can be produced in their area. You know, they have access to something fresh and something local. And then as a producer, you're not having to try to sort of like package and ship all over the country or, you know, hold something for very long periods of time, longer than it should be. So, you know, kind of putting these, you know, the production and consumption in closer space and closer time can make a big difference, you know, sort of on a landscape scale.