How Minnesota Fk’d Up Butternuts

Butternut canker and legality

Another reason you might not see butternuts is because of the disease that affects them. Butternut canker, a sort of fungus that attacks the trees, is bad news, similar to the blight that hit American chestnut trees as far as impact–not a good thing if you’re a butternut tree. Some trees I’ve picked from seemed to have a good resistance though, and if you look closely you can see the scars on the trunk to prove it. Unfortunately, the losses in Minnesota are bad enough that the tree has been listed as “of special concern” since 1996, and is now considered endangered, and, in a nutshell, that’s why it’s illegal.

I couldn’t believe that a food plant so reasonably well known in the wild food community could be illegal myself, so I called the Minnesota DNR and, after a number of calls over the span of a few months, I finally got the answer. Essentially, listing it as an endangered species invokes the full legal the full legal protocol making it completely illegal to harvest or possess the nuts. Don’t gather the nuts, pick them up, move them, eat them, plant them, or, drive around with some in your car, unless they’re in a secret compartment. That’s right, even if you wanted to plant the trees, be the Johnny Appleseed of butternuts, you could technically be facing jailtime, a felony and all the trimmings that go with it, including the loss of your voting rights.

When traveling with butternuts across state lines into Minnesota, try to hide them in a place the Police won’t look. Here I’m using the old school “He’s got nuts” method.

The law here is obviously overkill, but I can understand the intent. Plant gets blight disease that slowly destroys it? Put it on the endangered list–easy as, pecan pie, right? It seems to me like a knee jerk reaction that had unintended consequences. At least to me, there’s a stark contrast to someone possessing the edible fruit of a tree, one that’s harvested in quantity and legal in the surrounding states, to possessing something like a boreal owl, destroying the den of a timber rattlesnake, eating bald eagle egg omelets, or gathering other vascular plants that are endangered for some purpose, as in the case of the ginseng black market.

Not even the state can possess the nuts for propagation

It gets better though, and by better I mean bad. The law is fascinatingly byzantine in the case of butternuts, and I’m quoting the DNR here: “not even the State Nursery can possess the nuts for purposes of propagation”. So, you can’t plant butternuts, I can’t plant butternuts, and neither can the state. So, my question is, how the hell are we supposed to help this tree if no one can touch it? Is there nutting we can do?

Fresh butternuts (left) Dried butternuts (right).

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