“Why bother with Acorns?” - In defense of Acorn, Part II

People have eaten acorn longer than people have been people - more than 750,000 years. They are delicious, nutritious, and perfectly adapted to survive climate change.

So why are we building an acorn factory? Because California’s North Coast - and the world - need the jobs, wealth, and food security in a changing climate that acorn can provide.

Because Our Food Systems Are Failing Fast

As industrial agriculture spread and made mass-produced grains cheap, acorn - and thousands of other crops - were pushed aside - sometimes by force. Whether you believe in climate change or not, the fact is all three of those crops have seen dramatically increased crop failures in recent years, and the rate of failure is accelerating. USDA crop failure insurance payouts are going up 15% a year, and both corn and wheat are seeing production declines because of climate extremes. Rice had a global shortage in 2023 due to climate change causing crop failures across South Asia. Those three crops are more than half the calories eaten by humans.

Without exaggeration, this is an existential threat to human civilization. Acorn is uniquely positioned to fill the gap. Eating acorn isn’t an “if” - it’s a “when.”

Even as the climate changes and droughts intensify, Oak trees continue to produce delicious and nutritious acorns and the nuts can be stored for up to 10 years. They even improve with age!

Because Acorn is the ultimate sustainable biodiverse crop

Oak forests support more than 6,000 other species - more than any other habitat in North America - and sequester around 80 tons of carbon an acre. They require no irrigation, no fertilizer, stabilize soil against erosion, and build deep rich topsoil over time.

But ever since colonization, California’s oak forests have been shrinking as they’ve been cleared away to make room for conventional crops and development.

That’s not unique to California - around 40% of the earth’s surface outside the ice caps is now used for agriculture. With a growing population demanding more food every year, the world’s forests and wild places are in trouble.

By halting the clearing of oaks for agriculture and instead sustainably harvesting and replanting, we can reverse this trend - and save trillions of gallons of water a year. If we succeed the way we hope to, we’ll save California up to 8 trillion gallons a year by 2030 compared to conventional crops. That’s water that doesn’t need to be diverted from rivers into dams that cost taxpayers billions of dollars and destroy fisheries.

For the forests, for fish, and for the sake of our remaining wild places, this is an idea whose time has come.

Because the North Coast needs sustainable jobs

The North Coast of California is one of the state’s most disinvested regions and needs new industries to keep our communities alive.

The Emerald Triangle - Mendocino, Lake, and Humboldt Counties - used to be the illegal marijuana capital of America. Legalization has wiped out that industry. Before marijuana, there was logging and fishing. The salmon fisheries have been wiped out by dams, water diversions, and ecological damage; the big trees have almost all been cut. Tourism is the last industry standing in our region, and it’s hard to raise a family on the revenue from tourism.

Without jobs, rural North Coast communities are dying. We need new industries that pay living wages.

California has the best food-grade acorns in the world, but for more than a century they’ve been inaccessible to most Californians. These problems can solve each other.

Our region is blessed with hundreds of thousands of acres of old growth oak forests and savannas, and thousands more acres that used to be oak forests but were cut.  By sustainably harvesting a small percentage of the acorns and paying landowners for harvest rights, we can remove the incentive to log these forests and create living wage jobs in disinvested rural and Native communities throughout our region. As a worker-owned cooperative, all employees will become owners over time and profits will be redistributed back to our communities. 

Over time, profits will finance the restoration of Indigenous land management practices and reforestation on former oak forests that were cut.

Because we’ve made it Easy

While you can process acorn by hand (we’ve even included step by step instructions on eatacorn.com), it’s time and labor intensive, requiring up to an hour of work for every pound of food produced. That’s why existing acorn flour producers charge so much!

Manzanita Cooperative has developed a new proprietary process for removing tannins from Acorn that reduces the time and labor required by around 80%. This unique process does not use chemical solvents and retains the nutritional value of the acorn processed. Through mechanization, the hard labor of processing can be completed by machines, allowing us to sell fully processed and ready to use acorn flour, starch, oil, and mash at prices people can actually afford to buy.

Because Acorn is Awesome

Acorn is a superfood with a long list of health benefits. As someone with IBS, eating more acorn has made a huge difference in my quality of life in a way that’s hard to quantify. For people with diabetes, transitioning to acorn can help avoid amputations and save their lives. That’s a huge impact for a small nut.

As a bonus, it’s absolutely delicious once processed to remove the tannins - just check out the recipes on EatAcorn.com!

Interested in helping make it happen? Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when we begin pre-sales crowdfunding for our factory launch.