Chestnut Chat- Meadowview Research Farms: On a Mission Through the Seasons

Restoring the American chestnut tree requires breeding, growing, and evaluating the performance of numerous generations of trees before planting the best ones in the forest. Using thousands of trees each year, The American Chestnut Foundation’s staff and volunteers work to preserve remnant American chestnut genetics from across the native range, breed together trees that show promise of delivering disease resistance and ecological function, and intentionally expose trees to the chestnut blight to test their performance. Since the late 1980s, Meadowview Research Farms has been The American Chestnut Foundation’s central research, tree breeding, and testing site. Join us to learn about the cyclical nature of breeding, planting, and testing thousands of trees every year.

You will see the work behind the scenes at Meadowview that never stops. Each season brings a wide variety of projects in the orchards, the seedling nursery, and the laboratory — all linked to the life cycles of the American chestnut tree and the chestnut blight fungus.

TACF’s Meadowview staff: Dr. Vasiliy Lakoba (Director of Research), Eric Jenkins (Tree Breeding Coordinator), Ciera Wilbur (Nursery Manager), Lauren Kerwien (Laboratory Manager), Dan Mckinnon (Director of Land Management), and Jim Tolton (Maintenance Technician) will share the science and art of their work in the field, nursery, and laboratory, as well as some current research highlights.