The 2026 chestnut harvest at Steve Lucas's Chandler-area farm began Sept. 5, bringing in the crop from an operation built over 18 years on difficult Lincoln County soil. KFOR reports that Lucas's trees do not ripen all at once, so harvest requires repeated checks as burrs open and nuts fall. The timing offers a useful snapshot of a small but expanding U.S. specialty-crop market—and of how much of the farm's success remains specific to Lucas's experience rather than a proven template for Oklahoma.
A long experiment in heavy clay
Lucas began commercial chestnut plantings in 2010 and 2011, but an initial trial of 1,000 trees left only 63 survivors by August 2012, according to the Lincoln County News. The account attributes the losses in part to heavy clay that held too much water. Lucas later tested about 200 varieties and researched cultivation in China, Taiwan and Italy while looking for trees suited to Oklahoma's soil and weather.
The property had previously been used for cattle and, farther back, as a terraced cotton farm, the Lincoln County News reported. Lucas first tried other fruit trees before settling on chestnuts. His first harvest, in 2015, totaled less than 30 pounds; he found an early retail customer by taking that load to an Oklahoma City Asian grocery store.
What the 2026 crop shows—and does not show
KFOR describes Lucas as the only commercial chestnut grower and nursery in roughly an eight-state area, while the Lincoln County News reported that his business operates about 3,000 trees across orchards in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama. KFOR counted about 2,000 trees at the Chandler planting. Those differing counts may reflect different definitions of the local operation, so they should not be treated as a single audited total.
The same reports say Lucas sells nuts and seedlings, that production has grown into the five-figure-pound range, and that customers buy out the crop each year. Those are reported characteristics of his business, not independent measurements of national demand. Lucas's claim that demand exceeds all U.S. production likewise remains a farmer's estimate in the available reporting.
The broader market is small but growing. A study published in AgriEngineering, using 2022 Census of Agriculture data, reported 2,845 U.S. farms managing 10,049 chestnut-orchard acres—an average of about 3.5 acres per farm. The Center for Agroforestry reported that the number of U.S. chestnut farms rose 79% from 2017 to 2022 as more than 1,500 new orchards reached bearing age.
The Agricultural Marketing Resource Center says U.S. production represented less than 1% of the global chestnut market and that the country imported 3,200 metric tons in 2017. Those figures help explain why a small orchard can find buyers, but they do not establish that every new planting will succeed in Oklahoma's clay soils or that imports and domestic production remain at the same levels today.
Commercial chestnuts are not restored native forests
Chestnut production also carries a historical distinction that matters. The U.S. Forest Service says the American chestnut once occupied more than 200 million acres, from Maine to Georgia and west to the Mississippi River, before exotic pests including chestnut blight decimated the species about a century ago.
The American Chestnut Foundation notes that Chinese chestnuts are common in the United States because they tolerate chestnut blight and have been widely introduced. That background helps explain the commercial appeal of blight-tolerant chestnut varieties, but an orchard producing marketable nuts is not the same thing as restoration of the native American chestnut. The available reports also do not independently document the varietal mix of every tree at Lucas's farm.
A niche operation in a pecan state
Oklahoma's better-known nut crop is the pecan, making a chestnut orchard an agricultural outlier. Lucas's results show that a grower can develop a market by combining variety selection, drainage management, irrigation and years of trial and error. They do not by themselves establish that chestnuts are a broadly viable replacement for cattle, hay or other Oklahoma crops.
For now, the clearest evidence is local: after a failed first planting and a harvest that once fit in a small load, Lucas is bringing in another crop on Sept. 5 and continuing to sell both chestnuts and trees. The national data show room for specialty orchards to expand; they do not resolve how many Oklahoma farms could reproduce this particular outcome.
