Midwest Farms Are Going Nuts

This story is one in a series about the confluence of capitalism, conservation and cultural identity in the Mississippi River Basin. It is part of Waterline and is sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation.

Every summer, a pond at Rusted Plowshare farm used to fill with algae blooms. Orderly rows of corn and soybeans stretched out across the central Missouri landscape, but native grasses and wildflowers were few and far between. Josh Payne, who worked on the farm with his grandfather until he took over the running of it in 2020, says there hadn’t been a quail sighting in 40 years.

But that was before the chestnut trees.

In 2017 Payne planted 20 acres of chestnut saplings, growing commodity crops in wide rows between the trees. A few years later, the farm stopped growing corn and soy entirely, instead switching to raising sheep around what has become 200 acres of chestnut trees today. The pond now stays clear.

“There’s just a lot more diverse life here,” says Payne. “A lot of the things that don’t really have a place in the corn and soy scenario are coming back.”

“The fundamental problem is that annual monocultures are always going to be leaky systems,” says Jacob Grace from the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit that promotes the integration of trees, crops and livestock — also known as agroforestry — in the Midwest to support ecological resilience. “They’re not going to be able to function like healthy ecosystems, which is what we’re ultimately hoping to see.”

Across the Midwest, about 127 million acres of land is in agriculture, and about three-quarters of that is devoted to corn and soy. Yet, these dominant commodity crops pose challenges for both producers and the environment. 

Farmers, at the whims of the global market, are financially squeezed by low commodity prices. Monoculture crops are planted new each year, requiring expensive inputs and leaving fields bare and vulnerable to erosion for months. Fertilizer used on corn and soybeans is a major contributor to the estimated 1.6 million metric tons of nutrients that wash down the Mississippi River and its tributaries into the Gulf of Mexico each year, feeding the dead zone. Monoculture also takes a hit on biodiversity, contributing to the decline of pollinating insects.

Before agriculture became dominant across the Upper Midwest, according to Grace, savannas stretched across the region, with scattered trees punctuating grasslands. Nut trees were part of that native landscape: Pecans flourished in riverside wetlands from the South to as far north as Illinois and Indiana. Black walnuts, native throughout the eastern United States, produced a smaller, more flavor-dense nut than their widely cultivated cousin.

Incorporating trees and shrubs into today’s working agricultural landscape can help farmland function more like an ecosystem, explains Grace. Tree roots make the ground spongier and better able to hold onto water, also minimizing erosion of farm soils. The dense root systems reduce nutrient runoff, and the mix of vegetation supports biodiversity.

Unlike many conservation practices that require farmers to take at least some land out of production — like converting part of a field into a wetland — agroforestry allows farmers to continue to harvest a crop, Grace says. “It’s kind of a ‘yes-and’ situation.”

Planting crops like nut trees can provide a type of multi-generational resilience because they can generate income for decades — a consideration for many family-owned farms at a time when the agricultural workforce is aging and about 70 percent of U.S. farmland is expected to change hands in the next two decades. While some farmers may change over to perennial crops completely, farms can see benefits by planting, for example, a pecan orchard on a few flood-prone acres, alongside their row crop or livestock operation.

Diversifying into nut crops can be an economic boon for farmers, explains Ron Revord, director of the University of Missouri’s Center for Agroforestry. Farmers are embracing commercial cultivars of native pecans and black walnuts, as well as new varieties of nuts native to other parts of the world — particularly chestnuts and hazelnuts.

In contrast to commodity crops, which require farming large areas to make a good profit, mature nut trees can flourish on relatively small plots of land. An acre of chestnuts can net $10,000 or more, according to Revord. “Those revenues can provide a really nice lifestyle option for small farmers where options are pretty limited.”

Dan Shepherd has been growing pecan trees since his father first planted an orchard in Clifton Hill in central Missouri around 1970. After Shepherd took over the farm in the late 1970s, he expanded the pecan orchard to about 300 acres, planting each with a nut in the ground marked by a white flag.

For about a decade in the 1980s, while the trees were still small, he farmed corn and soy between the pecans. As the trees got larger, he switched his focus to bison and grew hay in the alleys. Shepherd’s farm totals about 4,000 acres — 3,000 of which he leases to another farmer who grows row crops. Since he got out of bison in 2012, he has focused mostly on his 300 acres of pecans. In contrast to livestock and annual crops, pecans tend to be stable, he explains. 

But it has its challenges. In his agricultural area, Shepherd could find multiple places to sell a truckload of soybeans within a few miles of his farm. That, he says, is not true for specialty crops like pecans. Shepherd has a processing facility and handles distribution himself through wholesalers. But for pecans — and nuts in general — processing and distributing mechanisms are limited and highly localized across the Midwest.

In Wolf Lake, an unincorporated farming community in southern Illinois just across the Mississippi River from Missouri, Jenny Reiman is trying to kickstart a local pecan industry and is in the early stages of building a processing facility. Reiman grew up gathering nuts from old pecan trees.

As commodity crops have become a less reliable source of income, more farms have been looking to diversify, she says. She sees pecans, a flood-tolerant species native to the region, as an option that can help farms be both financially and environmentally resilient into the future. Farms can see some of the benefits of conservation, while still producing a crop. 

“I truly believe farmers are good stewards of the land,” she says, “especially because they’re still farming in such a multi-generation, legacy-focused way.”

Spearheaded by the Nature Conservancy, Missouri River Relief and the Center for Agroforestry, the Missouri River Center last year planted 30 acres of pecans and black walnuts, and will also feature a riparian strip — a border of vegetation along the riverbank — with a mélange of pollinator-friendly species, timber trees and native edibles like pawpaws and elderberries.

More than 93 percent of Missouri’s land area is privately owned. Zack Miller, preserve engagement manager at the Nature Conservancy Missouri, sees demonstrating the feasibility of agroforestry as an important strategy to improving the health of the environment. “While conservation is a separate field from agriculture, there’s a heck of a lot of overlap,” he says.

Staying power is a challenge for conservation in working lands, according to the Center for Agroforestry’s Revord. Projects that take farmland out of production may disappear when a contract agreement ends, or when land is sold. But, he says, “there might be a greater longevity, or even permanence, keeping it in that tree nut orchard, because there’s an annual crop.”

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For farmers, the timeline can be a challenge for tree crops: Many farmers lease their land, and year-long rental agreements don’t work for long-term crops. It also takes a while to see a return. Chestnut trees take four or more years before they produce their first nuts. 

Agroforestry also has a different set of logistical challenges compared to monoculture crops. Shepherd, who alley cropped between his pecan trees in the 1980s, says he wouldn’t get into it now: At the time, he used the same chemicals for corn, soy and his trees. But these days, the new chemicals for row crops would damage the pecans.

The market is a risk, too. Right now, these young sectors are seeing a lot of growth in the Midwest, explains Revord, but it’s hard to know what the market will look like in a decade.

Scrolling photos courtesy of Rusted Plowshare, Dan Shepherd and the Center for Agroforestry.