Tour of Black Squirrel Farms
On Saturday the 17th the NY Nut Grower’s Association held a meeting with talks, presentations, and workshops in Penn Yan. The fall leaves were at their peak in the beautiful Fingers Lakes region and the air was crisp. Towards the end of a full and inspiring day, a group of people gathered at Black Squirrel Farms, run by Sara Tyler and her dad Wally Gordon.
Black Squirrel Farms is building distributed black walnut collection and processing capability. Black walnuts are mostly water and so the idea is to structure processing capacity in a manner that will transport water as little as possible. In practice, this would mean that gatherers need hulling and curing capability located nearby and hulling and curing sites would need shelling and sorting capacity located nearby and everyone who lives in areas where black walnuts grow would have a local source of ready-to-eat black walnuts. The idea is that a network of small processing sites could eventually provide the aggregate capability of a large plant. The feasibility of this approach is what they are now testing.
Their first season was last year, 2019, and program members collectively gathered over three tons of raw black walnuts. Those three tons came from wild (seedling) trees. As William Reid noted in 1990, seedling black walnut trees produce nuts that are about 20% kernel. While black walnut kernel yield information is often scarce or cryptic, ranges of 6-10% recovered nutmeat has been reported for commercial shelling operations. Black Squirrel Farms is getting results in the 12-15% range and Sara believes that this is because the shelling approach that they are using involves orienting the nut prior to applying compression for cracking. Most hand-crackers intuitively take this approach so this won't be surprising to home processors.
The appeal of industrialized processing like Hammons does is that it can be scaled up without growing the labor force in equal proportion. A distributed processing model is strongly disadvantaged with respect to economies of scale but requires a much smaller upfront commitment to explore and offers broader innovation and collaboration opportunities. If black walnut processing hasn't been as exposed to the forces of innovation as many other industrial processes, which Sara surmises, there should be a lot of opportunity for improvement and a prudent approach is to keep future options open.
Many people are surprised to learn that Hammons main product is pulverized black walnut shells for the sandpaper market. (Their kernels are just a by-product!) Black Squirrel Farms, too, has found a use for the leftover bits of shell as an additive to home cleaning products but believes there is a much wider range of probable uses for the material. In addition to being a biodegradable material hard enough to be an effective abrasive, black walnut shell fragments are hydrophilic and irregularly shaped which may make them an attractive medium for growing microgreens. Not only do the shell particles hold onto water, they allow lots of aeration within the interstitial spaces between the particles because the irregularly shaped fragments form a very open and complex matrix. Hydration + Aeration = a great recipe for growing! Although black walnut trees are known to hinder the growth of some plants due to the chemical compound juglone which they exude from their roots, the few home-based tests of black walnuts shells as a microgreen growing medium run so far do not seem negatively impacted. Further testing of this concept is an area where Black Squirrel Farms intends to seek future partnership opportunities.
Raw black walnuts, waiting to be processed…
Sara Tyler shows where the raw black walnuts are dehusked. First they are passed through an antique corn sheller to have their husks ripped off, then they go with water and some rocks into the cement mixer where the abrasion of the nuts against one another cleans off any bits of the husk that remain.
Next, the de-husked walnuts are put in a solar dryer to cure. Both shells and kernels lose additional water weight as the nuts cure over the course of a few weeks. The texture and flavor of black walnut kernels change as they cure.
The solar dryer is made from aluminum roofing panels and welded wire fencing. It takes about 2-4 weeks for the walnuts to lose 30-40% of their weight in water.
The final steps are shelling, sorting, and packaging. The Black Squirrel Farms approach on these matters is still under development but they anticipate implementing a process that, while not fast, will only require a couple of people to safely operate. Seeing as how the supply of raw mid-Atlantic black walnuts is practically unlimited, Black Squirrel Farms believes that the bottleneck to much broader utilization of the "hidden" renewable resource of black walnuts is distributed processing capability.
While Black Squirrel Farms shares their shelled black walnut kernels among participating members and affiliates, much like the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, they are not set up to sell retail black walnut kernels generally at this time. They expect this to change once their processing building is constructed and operational. Construction is kicking off in the first quarter of 2021 with the hope that they will be able to offer black walnut kernels for general sale in Fall 2021. If you want to follow their progress, email sara@tylerseneca.com and ask her to add you to the Black Squirrel Farms newsletter distribution list.
Special thank you to Sara Tyler for all the knowledge sharing, inspiration, and constructive feedback on this article as well as other matters.
