The Keystone Tree Crops Cooperative (KTCC) is introducing a model for generating right livelihood and economic equitability for those who work with bioregional tree crops in Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic. Tree crops present many opportunities. They not only feed people - they strengthen biodiversity, sequester carbon to stabilize the climate and build soil, address issues in food security and land justice, and offer local economies a resilient, anti-fragile framework founded in bioregional sovereignty and geopolitical independence. Yet opportunities often go hand-in-hand with challenge, and one of the challenges currently facing those of us who work with nut trees in our bioregion is finding a way to process tree crops, get them to market, and earn a living in mutual benefit with trees.

That’s why we’re building the Keystone Tree Crops Cooperative. We envision our supply chain as a tree with five branches, or a hand with five fingers. These are represented by the classes of Producer, Gatherer, Processor, Distributor, and Enjoyer.

The Producer branch represents the trees themselves which create supply of nuts, fruits, or other crops. These may range from wild trees on public land to privately-owned and cultivated trees in managed groves. The skilled-labor of the Gatherer branch is needed to pick up, sort, and grade the harvest. The central branch is the Processor, who takes the raw harvest and turns it into value-added product. This can be straightforward or complicated, depending on the crop, and can include several steps such as husking, cracking, separating, expelling, milling, pulping, and more. Processing may require engineering, or just old-fashioned elbow grease. Suitable machinery may already exist, but might be cost-prohibitive for a small operation. That is why a processing hub capable of receiving raw tree crop produce from dispersed Gatherers is essential. The Processors then send the value-added product off to Distributors, who do the work of branding, marketing, and sales. Ultimately, the product arrives to the Enjoyers, all the way at the other end of the value-chain, where it is happily eaten as food.

Each of these five elements exist independently, but without a connective structure to unite them in an economically viable system, the potential for a bioregional tree crops industry remains unrealized. To unite the branches together, we have settled on a cooperative business model which equips us with the right framework we need for both economic and cultural success. By putting real-world values to the trees in terms of economics, embodied cultural experience, and ecology, our aim is to translate this value into the planting of more tree crops in our bioregion. Just as trees function as keystone species in eastern North America, so a tree crop cooperative can function like a keystone for bioregional economies. The cooperative, which is designed to be scalable and replicable, forms the trunk of the tree. Each of the five branches are held up in mutually supportive ways by the cooperative so that all individual workers achieve right economic livelihood, translated as a living wage.

Our values are bioregionalism, individual empowerment, equitability, and education. We value right livelihood in economics as well as in ecological relationship. Each of the values we recognize here as pillars upholding social, cultural, and environmental justice.

By their very nature, tree crops encourage an attitude of interdependence and cooperation. Not only can they live for several times the lifespan of a human, making necessary a multi-generational culture of stewardship, but their existing frequency and abundance in the landscape encourages the creation of connections and cooperation with the harvest. We don’t have a shortage of trees, we have a shortage of workers, limiting the labor we can achieve. Many hands make light work, and the steady, symbiotic nature of the work will reveal the path forward.