What is the NBC?

We are five guys passionate about the idea of growing perennial foods in the form of fruits and nuts for the betterment of the world. Some people look at us in disbelief when we say we are planting nut trees that may take as long as 20 years to come into fruition. Understandably, it is not the norm of our present culture to look that far down the road. The NBC sees things not through the lens of our culture, but that of trees, and trees take their time, grow slowly and deliberately, and contribute to the world unlike any other creature on Earth.

The Nutty Buddy Collective Mission

To establish and maintain long-term plantings of native and well-adapted nuts, fruits, and other marketable crops, with a particular focus on hickory, black walnut, chestnut, hazelnut, pawpaw, aronia berry, elderberry, and cider apples and perry pears
To partner with landowners who have underutilized land in areas surrounding Asheville to develop long-term lease agreements
To collect, cultivate, and breed improved varieties of the aforementioned crops
To explore and develop models of resilient ecological agriculture, agricultural training, and long-term land access based on community, trusting relationships, and mutually met needs – that is, models of doing business and cultivating food that care for people and the land

Our Model

As a collective, we are trying to emulate the forest model we so admire. Productive, generous, regenerative, interdependent, stable, low-input, non-exploitative. We share work, investment, and profit, and each of us fills a niche in the ecosystem of our organization.

Our primary service is the conversion of underutilized land to agricultural production of marketable nut and fruit crops. In exchange for long-term land leases, we provide benefits to landowners such as:

an agreed-upon share of the harvest
improved value, beauty, and sustainability of the landscape through growing forests and orchards of high-quality food crops
meeting agricultural tax status requirements

After multiple meetings with the landowner(s) and making an assessment of the land and surrounding ecology, NBC proposes a planting and management scheme appropriate to the site and needs and desires of the people involved. This can mean a wide variety of things, from converting existing open spaces to orchard production, to overlaying a sparsely-planted nut grove in a hay or livestock pasture, to enhancing existing native woodlands, to whatever the land and our creative collaboration can come up with.

The parties work together to generate a lease that indicates the rights, responsibilities, and agreements for how we’ll proceed and work together. NBC then plants and manages the land using low-impact, low-cost, chemical-free practices. Though every situation is different, a succession of yields is likely a part of any plan. Nut trees and some fruit trees take a dozen years of more to come into production. Meanwhile, an understory is cultivated with faster-yielding annual and perennial crops.