Assessing the Market Potential for Chestnuts

Welcome to the blog here at Lola’s Nursery. In it, we plan to cover a wide array of topics and all things chestnut. Most posts will likely be short, focused updates (e.g. how to keep those damn Japanese Beatles at bay, how to plant your trees, what to look for in soil, etc.). I’m an economist, specializing in the teaching of macroeconomics. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that I’d want to answer a straight-forward question from the outset: “Just how big can ‘the market’ get?”

This question is pretty tough to answer if we just look to the Chestnut. If you’ve read our website, you already know that growing Chestnuts is profitable. You already know that the nutritional profile of the nut is attractive to a health-conscious consumer market. You already know that the Chestnut is drought-resistant and requires far less water than its Almond and even Hazelnut counterparts. On the merits alone, the Chestnut seems well positioned for growth in the coming decades. But, what is a reasonable forecast for growth?

Thankfully, the good people at the United States Department of Agriculture have kept some great historical data on market value and acres in cultivation.