"being an operations person forced to make budget projections" is a very niche circle of hell

it's not a "tehe math is hard" problem

so much as a "you've made enough sausage to know exactly how made-up the whole concept of a 'budget' is but you still have to treat the farce of making one like a sacred rite anyway" problem

you know you're getting somewhere when you pull up a demo budget for what you're doing & go "well I know that ain't right"

update: this spreadsheet is a work of complete fiction and yet,, has yielded some useful information

Further update: the budgets I was doing yesterday were for agroforestry stuff.

Yesterday was for pecan groves (for which we have pretty solid data on costs & yields), and hazelnuts in the eastern US.

We don't have great data on hazelnuts in the eastern US.

It's a long story & lots of plant breeder inside baseball

but basically it's only now becoming possible to grow hazelnuts in the US outside of one valley in Oregon.

We have all these brand-new disease resistant cultivars that you CAN plant out here! It's exciting!

But they're only 5-10 years old, and hazelnut trees live 40+ years.

That means we don't know what they're like as they mature. How high-maintenance are middle-aged hazelnuts in the eastern US? WE HAVE NO IDEA

but write a budget for it anyway lmao

And that brings us to today's project:

Budgeting for chestnuts.

This is a species we can only now start to replant, thanks to careful breeding for disease resistance, after being functionally extinct for nearly a century.

This should be a happy occasion!

me budgeting:

Chestnuts were a foundation species for American forests, and for the US food system. Word is a single big chestnut tree could feed a family of 4 for a year.

Then a disease arrived in 1906ish.

By 1940, American chestnuts were wiped out.

About four billion trees died.

Although a few isolated trees hung on, chestnuts were functionally extinct.

Its demise might have a lot to do with Appalachian poverty. Their timber is straight, strong, resistant to rot, but is soft enough to work readily with hand tools: ideal for DIY furniture & housing.

With a main source of food & shelter just gone, a lot of people got pushed into desperation work like coal mining, or exodus into cities looking for work.

https://ecosystems.psu.edu/research/chestnut/information/conference-2004/conference/davis

Since then, plant breeders have been crossing remnant American trees with sibling species that are resistant to the disease.

Several generations later we now have trees that are over 90% American chestnut and grow & fruit like it, but don't fall prey to chestnut blight.

But these new crosses, like east-friendly hazelnut, are still pretty young.

Every tree species has a lot of variation in it. That's why normally we like to get to know new tree cultivars for 10-30 years or so before making the long-term commitment of planting them somewhere.

But we also don't, like, really have 30 years to just wait around before reforesting to unfuck our climate & worn-out croplands?

And anyway if we're ever going to find out how they roll long-term, somebody needs to commit & just plant some already.

That's why I get to spend today making spreadsheets about the long-term yield & maintenance needs of a species of which we know nearly nothing because it's been functionally extinct for nearly a century

There are just so many assumptions to make here. We don't even know for sure how far apart to plant them bc we don't know how fat their canopies get at maturity hahahaha end me now

agroforestry dreams: hands in dirt, play with fire, eat nut, pick shroom

agroforestry reality: making 30-year projected P&L spreadsheets for a gd LAZARUS TAXON

tl;dr if anyone has a deity that handles spreadsheets pls let me know what they like

I better light some candles to *somebody* over here

update: getting a lot of "ooh I want chestnut seedlings, where do I get them?" replies & like

idk mate it depends on where you are, let the Google be your guide

found a list of nurseries that have chestnut seedlings

http://www.centerforagroforestry.org/faq.php#buy1