Eastern Iowa producer forages for yellowbud hickory tree nuts to extrude oil for cooking

Yellowbud hickory trees are abundant in Iowa’s forests, yet few make use of the trees’ bitter-tasting nuts.

Levi Geyer, owner of Fancy Twig Farm in Parnell, southwest of Iowa City, is one of a small handful of producers in the country foraging, crushing and extruding oil from the nuts as a sustainable, locally sourced cooking oil option.

Geyer said modern farming is eroding the soil, polluting water, contributing to a lack of biodiversity and is not environmentally sustainable. “But hickory trees can be grown in ways that are compatible with sustainable landscape,” Geyer said. “I’m harvesting these nuts from forests … there’s no inputs, there’s no tillage, so far there’s no fertilizer.”

Making yellowbud hickory oil

Geyer’s process is labor intensive.

From foraging the nuts to putting the caps on the bottles, he estimates 8-10 hours of labor go into each gallon. Plus, Geyer has spent years scouting out good nut-bearing trees and forming relationships with folks who don’t mind the occasional scavenger.

On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, Geyer hosted an open house to thank the area landowners who allow him to forage for nuts on their properties.

One of those landowners, Clarice Faber, said she is amazed that Geyer is “willing to work so hard for a new product.”

As evidence, her husband, Bob Faber, pulled up his phone with a video of Geyer during hickory harvest season, high up in a yellowbud hickory, shaking the tree limbs to encourage the nuts to drop.

Geyer has had some success using a tractor-attached tree shaker, but said it really only works under perfect circumstances where a tree is isolated enough that a tractor can fit in next to the tree.

The same goes for more traditional nut rakes — they don’t really work to gather nuts in a wild, unkempt area, which is mostly where he forages. Geyer’s harvesting tools consist of his hands and a low crouch to gather the felled nuts into buckets and plastic totes.

Once the nuts are gathered and sorted, Geyer runs them through a machine to remove the outer, green husks. Geyer built the husker out of a barrel, rubber fingers from a chicken plucker and some screws in the bottom that crack through the husks.

Then the nuts move into a grain bin to dry out.

This is another innovation by Geyer who said the small group of hickory oil producers across the country share knowledge with one another as they develop the trade. He said others use drying racks for this process, but now a couple of them hope to try out his grain-bin method.

Once the nuts have dried, he crushes them, checks again for any “bad nuts,” and then sends them through the oil press.

  Buy Photo

The bitternuts, as they are often called, are the only hickory variety that Geyer said can “easily be cracked with your teeth.” The thinner shell can also go through the oil press, which saves Geyer the tedious labor of shelling the nuts.

Other native hickory varieties, like shagbark and shellbark, are tasty to eat, but have much thicker shells and don’t carry nearly as much oil.

With his current setup, Geyer said he gets one gallon of oil for every 15 gallons of nuts.

The final step before bottling is a centrifuge process to help remove any impurities in the oil.

“This is the freshest, highest quality oil you’ll ever get,” Geyer said.

He described the hickory oil flavor as “rich and delicate at the same time.”

There is little research on the health benefits of hickory oil, although early settlers believed it could cure rheumatism.

Future plans

Geyer said this is his first “big year.” He gathered and pressed enough nuts to make 76 gallons of oil, which he plans to sell at farmers markets in Iowa City and Kalona.

“As a farmer, I see my role as supplying staple foods to people in urban areas,” Geyer said.

He hopes to grow the business, but not just in terms of what he can bottle. Geyer said he sees hickory oil as a way for consumers to become part of the local food system.

“Another problem we have is people being disconnected from their food,” Geyer said. “The other part of the vision I have is for people to go out, harvest their own nuts and bring them to me and I’ll press them.”

He said this would make the product, currently sold at a premium, more accessible for lower-income families.

“I want hickory oil to be something that people can access and use for their main food source,” Geyer said. “You take your family out and you harvest nuts for a day or two and then that’s all the oil you need for the year.”

Yellowbud hickories are most easily identified by their fancy twigs, tipped with bright yellow buds.

The trees are found in the eastern half of the country, including most of Iowa. The best time to collect is from September through November, when the trees start to drop the nuts.

Geyer said he forages on about 10 different properties and several public land areas where he has scouted for the yellowbuds.

“Anytime I go to a wooded area I find at least a couple,” he said. “They’re very common.”

Geyer has also learned about the nut trade from Kathy Dice and Tom Wahl at Red Fern Farm in Wapello. He has worked at the duo’s u-pick chestnut, persimmon and paw paw farm for several years.

Dice said in his off time Geyer would search for the yellowbuds on neighboring public lands and forage what he could. “We’re so impressed with the work he’s doing,” Dice said.

Geyer wants Fancy Twig to be as sustainable as possible.

His long term goal is to run the operation without any fossil fuels. He’s also in talks with a tannery to see if the byproduct of the pressed nuts, which is full of bitter tasting tannins, could be useful in tanning hides.

Geyer recently received a grant from Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, or SARE, to explore different forest management techniques. Over the next year he plans to thin and clear certain forest areas of non-native brush and overgrowth through grazing, controlled burns and mowing, all of which will benefit the forest and nut production.

He hopes to one day have a farm to plant yellowbud hickories and other species, but he still enjoys what he can produce as a forager.

“For now, I haven’t reached the limits of what I can just find,” Geyer said. “And I’m still developing the processes.”

This article first appeared in the Iowa Capital Dispatch.