This year I started seriously scouting around for heavy bearing red oaks alongside my crew at Breadtree farms and our collaborators at Yellowbud Farm. Linked here is one of the big winners: a 15 year old tree with a 25’ diameter canopy, dropping 100 lbs of acorns and still presenting a large crop for the subsequent year.

I personally found a tree (pictured here in my own photos) that produced 150 lbs with a 30’ diameter canopy while presenting a strong crop for next year. That one is likely a bit older, maybe somewhere between 15 and 20 years old.

Northern Red Oak should be a serious player as a staple crop for my bioregion. The flour is rich and delicious and nutritious, and the nuts store incredibly well post-harvest and pre-processing. It’s held back as a crop because of its masting tendency which I think can be overcome via genetic selection and/or cultivating it alongside other masting crops (white oaks, chestnut, hickory) with different cycles in order to even out farm cash flow. And it’s held back by the perception that we could only use it if we bred out the tannin content from the acorn — I think that would be a waste of time and whittle down valuable genetic diversity far too much. If we move towards community-scale processing, percolation leaching is not complicated and surprisingly fast. I think oaks are closer to game-time than we’ve been led to believe.