Stockton, Missouri, is the Black Walnut Capital of the World
The story of the Hammons Products Company
By Tony Rehagen
The old folks always told us kids that there was money on the ground. In late summer, as the trees began to show their autumn colors, treasure rained down from the sky. The black walnuts that littered our fields, yards, and sidewalks were speckled, scuffed, and dingy green, but we knew that the nuts deep inside were gold, and we gathered them up in buckets, plastic bags, and boxes, or we just chucked them like baseballs into the bed of the family pickup truck.
After delivering a truckload of black walnuts to the nearest hulling station, a child would come home with what, in hindsight, was a mere pittance. Pennies, maybe dollars, but enough to offset the cost of a new bike, catcher’s mitt, or video game. The real reward was the respect of their peers when they showed up at school the next morning with hands stained brown and black, a testament to a day’s work and their first independent business enterprise.
That’s what I remember about black walnut season.
Generations of Midwesterners, from eastern Ohio to western Kansas and southern Minnesota down into Arkansas, have harvested black walnuts in September, October, and early November.
Some keep their haul, stuffing the nuts into gunny sacks and running them over with their farm trucks to get to the nut inside the green hull, which they’ll still have to clean, cure, crack, and pick. Most people just haul them to a hulling station and walk away with cash. And most of these nuts go to one place.
Stockton is a county seat of 1,800 people in the southwest corner of Missouri. On the north edge of town sits the sixty-five-acre compound of processing plants, warehouses, and silos that makes up the largest black walnut supplier in the world, the Hammons Products Company. Since 1946, four generations have grown Hammons from a side hustle for Ralph Hammons’s grocery store to a network that includes 230 hulling stations across the black walnut heartland, from Tennessee and Arkansas north to Michigan and Wisconsin. Each year, those stations send twenty-five million pounds of nuts back to Stockton.
Even the worldwide leader in black walnuts treads a narrow and treacherous path. Black walnuts are a tricky business. There’s no way around that. Thin-shelled nuts like pecans yield about 45-60% usable nutmeat by weight. Only about 7% of a black walnut is edible. Hammons has been working with scientists to develop thinner-shelled black walnuts with larger nutmeats, but for now, corn and soy make a lot more sense for farmers who are trying to maximize the value of their acreage. Hammons gets about 20-40,000 pounds of its annual harvest from deliberately planted orchards. That’s less than .1%.
The rest comes from a network of 100,000 independent pickers who forage enough wild-harvested nuts to fill the grain bins, storage facilities, coolers, and caves that supply its customers year-round. (Yes, Hammons really does squirrel stock away in the caverns beneath nearby Springfield.) To accomplish that, the company have to pinpoint the sweet-spot price that will entice foragers while leaving enough of a margin to make it all worthwhile. (Right now, that’s about $15 to $16 per 100 pounds.) Hammons take all comers. Each hulling operation has its own motley crew of dedicated regulars, from families that bring in truckloads of 20-30,000 pounds each year to the kids that dump one five-gallon bucket at a time. The average picker, they say, delivers about 400 to 450 pounds per year, netting somewhere between $60 and $75.
If this sounds like a precarious business model, it is. Back in the 1940 and 1950s, when Hammons opened for business, there were other companies like it across the Midwest. Over the years, decreasing profits and a lack of family successors have shuttered most competitors. Hammons stands more or less alone.
Despite that, they can’t afford to be complacent. In addition to being an exceptionally inefficient foodstuff, the less-than-ten-percent of the black walnut that is actually edible has somewhat limited uses.
Since the nutmeat tends to come out in small-to-medium-sized pieces, it doesn’t have the snacking appeal of other nuts. Traditionally, its rich and robust flavor has found its fullest expression in cookies, cakes, breads, ice cream, and dessert toppings. Hammons has taken to the lab to expand that menu, exploring everything from nut butters to syrups to black walnut cooking oil. Their neighbors at Bucyrus, Missouri’s Piney River Brewing company use Hammons nuts in their dark, earthy, and uniquely Midwestern Black Walnut Wheat.
Then there’s the waste. “When you buy a black walnut, and only 7% of that is going to be nutmeat, you’re left with about 60% shell, and the rest is moisture and hull debris,” says Brian Hammons, Ralph’s grandson and the current president and CEO. “What do you do with that?”
Hammons has come up with some mind-boggling answers over the years. The soft hull can be used as a fertilizer or in making dyes. They’ve sold tons of tough shells to manufacturers who use them to clean jet engines and other precision metal parts. Ground shell can also be used as filler in sticks of dynamite, and by oil companies as a lost circulation material. Brian Hammons estimates that about 20% of the company’s annual revenue now comes from walnut shell.
All of it, of course, relies upon the devotion of the foragers who continue to bend their backs and strain to pick for mere pennies on the pound. Traditions die hard in the rural and small-town Midwest. Entire families still talk of the legendary crop of 1964 as they fan out through field and forest to fill their buckets, gathering enough to pay back taxes on their land. Golfers and groundskeepers still beg neighbors to clear their fairways of debris and obstacles for the lawnmower. And enterprising kids still go out to pick up a little bit of pocket change and the dark stains of hard work.
Tony Rehagen is a St. Louis-based writer and beer enthusiast (which is redundant). His work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Politico, The Washington Post, and Jack and Jill.