If a person looks up black walnuts on the Internet it says they are tasty, nutritious, and plentiful but the shells are hard to crack so the nuts are not much used. There are photos and videos on the Internet of many creative nut crackers which are helpful but slow or costly or both. One of the costly ones, the Patriot 600, will crack 100 pounds of husked and dried black walnuts in 10 minutes yielding 15-30 pounds of edible nut meat depending on the walnuts. ECSONG conducted a feasibility analysis of black walnut processing using a high speed machine like the Patriot using black walnut measurements collected by members. The findings were that it would take a large volume of nuts to keep the machine busy and that it would be marginally economical. Other studies may differ. The following description of the findings is based on 100 pounds of nuts to be cracked. All dollar amounts are in Canadian currency.
To get 100 pounds of husked, clean, dry, nuts one has to gather about 3,600 nuts which weigh about 555 lb in their husks and fill 33 5gal buckets or one cubic yard. It takes an experienced worker one 8 hour day to gather that many nuts according to Larry Harper, a nut farmer in Missouri. It would take 6 hours to husk and clean the nuts in a cement mixer. (A 4 cu ft electric cement mixer costing $200 takes half an hour to husk and clean 300 black walnuts.) The nuts then have to be stored to dry for 3 weeks. As noted it takes 10 min to crack the nuts with the high speed electric nut cracker. The cracked nuts should be sorted in screens to make it easier to separate the edible part from the shells. Then the separating is done by hand. That's it unless a person wants to sell the nuts in which case they have to be packaged and sold perhaps with advertising and transportation costs and time.
In 2020 black walnut pieces sell online for $17.25 to $31 per pound plus shipping. Walmart Canada advertises black walnut nuts for $15.15 per pound. Is it worthwhile to process your own? Suppose it takes 8 hr to gather the nuts, 6 hours to hull and wash with a cement mixer, 2 hours to hang up to dry, 1 hour to crack, and 4 hours to sort and separate. That's 20 hours for 15-30, say 20 pounds average of edible nut pieces, or one hour of labour per pound. If your labour is worth $13 per hour minimum wage then the labour cost is $13 per pound. Add to that the $200 cost of the cement mixer, the $20,000 nut cracker, and the land if a person grows the nuts. It looks more economical to buy black walnut pieces online!
The $20,000 cost of the Patriot 600 nut cracker is the cracker in US dollars, shipping from the US, exchange on the Canadian dollar, and sales tax.
In 2002 ECSONG member John Sankey did an economic analysis of nut farming which included planting and growing the nut trees in which he concluded it could not pay minimum wage.
Larry Harper says there is on average 20 days a year for collecting black walnuts in Missouri which limits a person's collecting potential.
The husks are 70% of the weight so it's a good idea to leave them in the field and avoid transporting in large quantity.
The Patriot 600 cracks all sizes of black walnut together which avoids sorting the nuts by size and adjusting the cracker for different sizes which has to be done with some high speed crackers.
A breakdown of black walnuts by weight is 70% husk, 12% water lost in drying, 15% shell waste from cracking with the Patriot 600, and 3% edible pieces. This can vary according to size and variety of walnut. Some varieties yield up to 5% edible pieces.
William Watt, 2020
Provided by SONG. Feel free to copy with a credit.