Building the Runway: Why United Chestnuts Invested in Chestnut Growers of America’s Future

Before leaving for the Chestnut Growers of America conference — held in conjunction with the Northern Nut Growers Association — Melanie walked into the local Farm Service Agency (FSA) office in Kentucky to ask about a grant application. Before she’d finished explaining why she was there, one of the women behind the counter had already pulled up the United Chestnuts website on her laptop. Then she called in a colleague from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office next door. Three women, strangers to us until that moment, firing questions at Melanie about the website — genuinely excited that something like this existed in our county. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog about this visit and what we learned.

That’s the moment we carried with us to Amherst for the NNGA/CGA conference — and the one we’ve kept coming back to since we got home. As some of you may know, our United Chestnuts team helped rebuild the Chestnut Growers of America (CGA) website to strengthen chestnut grower support nationwide, and you may have been wondering why. We took this on because we’ve been watching a growing pattern of interest from new growers for two years, and this felt like the moment to act on it.

While we were at it, we just finished developing a content strategy for CGA — a plan for how the organization keeps sharing grower knowledge, telling its story, and reaching new growers, consumers, and buyers. We put real time and energy into both projects, the website and the strategy behind it, because we believe an industry-wide resource like CGA is worth that investment. We believe we can help, and this felt like the most useful way to do it.

When Every Grower Tells You Something Different

Chestnut growers hear something different depending on who they ask. One farm swears by a spacing method; another swears by the opposite. A new grower calls three people and gets three answers, each shaped by that grower’s own soil, climate, and years in the ground.

No single farm can settle that, no matter how much it knows about its own trees. We believe the right voice for growers is a collective one, weighing conditions that vary from farm to farm. For example, a committee of growers from Georgia, Missouri, Michigan, and here in Kentucky can say “here’s what we’re seeing across regions” in a way one operation never can.

On our farm lab at EBB Farms in Kentucky, we help plenty of people with personalized farm tours to learn about chestnut farming, create guides to educate those new to the industry, produce the Branching Out: Growing Together podcast, and write blogs on a variety of topics. This work helps our customers, of course, but it also strengthens our regional market.

CGA, on the other hand, is that collective national voice. It’s the place a new grower can ask, “this person told me this, that person told me that — which is actually true?” and get an answer grounded in shared experience gathered from many farms, not one. That’s too big a job for one brand, or one farm — it takes growers showing up from every region to keep that voice honest and current.

Why Support Is Struggling to Keep Up With Growth

The chestnut industry is moving fast. Acreage among CGA’s own surveyed members has roughly quadrupled since 2017, growing from 663 acres to 2,607, according to the 2024 Annual Chestnut Market Survey conducted by the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry and published in CGA’s own newsletter, The Chestnut Grower (Summer 2025). That same survey found 57% of respondents reporting that demand for their chestnuts already exceeds what they can supply. The U.S. still net-imports an estimated 6.6 to 7.5 million pounds of chestnuts a year to cover demand domestic growers are still working to meet. Meanwhile, the market for chestnut flour and other value-added chestnut products is projected to grow at roughly 7.2% annually through 2032, well ahead of the overall flour market’s modest pace. And row-crop economics have gotten hard enough that more first-generation farmers are looking seriously at perennial crops like chestnuts as a real alternative to corn, soybean, and wheat margins that keep collapsing under them.

That’s a lot of new people arriving at once, all wanting real answers. CGA’s infrastructure was built for what growers needed back in 1996, and it’s stretching to keep pace with an industry that’s grown this fast. It’s a good problem for an industry to have, and it’s the exact kind of problem worth building for.

What Happens Next Needs You

Melanie has a phrase she’s used a few times during this project: we spent the last stretch building the landing area for a plane — the runway — and now the plane is ready to take off. Landing that plane isn’t something the runway builders can do alone. That will take committee members willing to answer regional questions in their own area. It takes people willing to write, teach, and disagree with each other in public. And now, with a content strategy in place, it takes people willing to help decide what CGA publishes next and how.

We took this project on because somebody had to build the runway, and we had the tools sitting around to do it. What happens next belongs to the growers who show up to write, teach, and grow CGA together.

CGA membership costs less than a tree or two and gets you a collective answer instead of one farm’s opinion. It’s a journey we will continue to build on. Please share the message. Join or renew your CGA membership here.