Diary: Noah Simon, A Chestnut Civilization
Eight chestnut farmers in New York visit centuries-old chestnut trees along the “Olive Road”
Breadtree Farm visitors with the Piantone di Nardo, a chestnut tree estimated to be seven hundred years old (”plus or minus three hundred”), believed to be the oldest living chestnut on the Italian mainland. Visiting with a family who care for chestnut orchards in Vivaio, a settlement near Le Piastre in the Pistoia mountains, where chestnut flour is still prepared in the traditional way.
In November 2024, with the support of the USDA, we flew to Italy to study its chestnut industry. We’d just wrapped up our sixth season as Breadtree Farms, founded in 2019 in the Upper Hudson Valley, New York, to help rebuild the chestnut industry in the Northeastern US. Our research was intended to inform the design of the chestnut processing facility we are building at our home farm in Salem New York, and the publication of a technical study to guide the future development of other mid-scale chestnut processing facilities across the country. The traveling group was a revolving cast of our eight-person farm and business team, agroforestry colleagues, partners, and friends.
We took a train down to Naples and drove south to north through the Appenine Mountains that run up and down the country’s west coast—from Irpinia to Viterbo to Pistoia to Piemonte. In that certain altitude all around the Mediterranean, a green band of ancient chestnut orchards and forests have offered staple sustenance and food security to hundreds of generations of people.
