Nutwood Farm is growing nuts!

What kind of nuts?
Hazelnuts, Chinese and American chestnuts, English walnuts, pecans, hickories, butternuts, Japanese heartnuts and Korean stone pines… so far!

Why nuts?
Nuts are highly nutritious foods that can be made into a variety of different products including nut butters, oils, flours, milks, and meals. Yet nuts are nearly absent from our modern regional foodshed (despite once being a significant food source gathered by the Mohican, Pocumtuc, Nipmuc and others for many thousands of years). Nut trees are perennial and once mature will bear nuts each year and live for years, decades, and sometimes centuries! They grow extensive root systems, sequester carbon, prevent erosion, build biomass, and cycle nutrients continuously.  They also do not require extensive fertilizers, irrigation or prime agricultural soils to grow.  The nuts we are growing have been selected over generations to be highly productive, climate-adapted, blight-resistant, and easier to cultivate and harvest. With interest and excitement around  perennial food crops and more diverse local foods on the rise, we see great potential for nut growing success here in the Northeast.

But why nuts?
We believe in creating a new perennial agroecological food system that turns farming back into an complex mutual relationship with the land and its many intertwined inhabitants. Inspired by the principles of agroforestry, permaculture and food justice, we are bringing a different approach to food production that thrives on maximizing the beneficial impacts of human interplay and technologies to build soil, increase diversity, and thrive nutritionally in community on a small scale. By growing nuts in a perennial agroforestry system that integrates full sized trees, diverse edible hedge rows, and medicinal understory plantings, we can produce highly valued crops AND increase the health and fertility of the forest farm so that it can feed and support as many different species (including humans) as possible.

Our Vision




In a nutshell, we do this by:

  4. Developing integrated land management techniques through intensive rotational grazing and silvapasture