Had a great morning/afternoon with my great son Zack this morning picking up Black Walnuts. I love spending time with this guy! We ended up with a full truck load and when husked through the processor the total weight came to 380 pounds of hulled black walnuts. Total amount made by buddy today was $57. Not to bad at all for a good half a day of honest work!! It was great being out in the fresh air with him too!! Great way to spend time with him!! Loved it and he made some money!
There is over 200 processing stations in 14 states surrounding Kentucky/Tennessee and they pay $15 per 100 pounds after going though processing machine.
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Nice score, wow that’s a lot of walnuts! We several BW trees here, I don’t care for them much, but the wife does. I wanted to put the tractor in the barn after I had done some bush-hogging. But, the entrance to the barn was cluttered with fallen walnuts. I got a 5 gal bucket thimking that was big enough and it easily filled it up. I put it in the barn to dry out some, the Mrs was pleased.
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My favorite nut!!!
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That’s awesome!!
Yes Ma’am and Black Walnut ice cream is amazing!!
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How do they crack them? I made my own cleaning station but they are hard to crack without smashing them. I keep on dwelling on a homemade cracker. I am thinking of a screw spiral in a housing like a food mill, but much stronger. Have you ever seen the screw log splitter that bolts onto a truck hub? Something like that with a housing and a hopper should work. They are tuff, and so are the Hickories! They taste so good though. I can get a lot of them too. Although I wouldn’t need to get them at the scale you are getting them. Holy crap, thats a lot of walnuts!
Just FYI, I’m moving this thread out of the lounge, because it seems to be very much on-topic for this forum.
Zack, I, too, would be interested to hear more about the process. Do you dehull the walnuts yourself and then sell the hulled walnuts to someone that cracks them, and the person/business that cracks them pays you 15c/lb? Is that 15c per pound of nut meat or 15c per pound of what goes into the cracker (nut meat and shell together)? And what are these 200 processing stations like? Do they all have means of mechanically cracking nuts and mechanically separating the nut meat from the shells?
John, I might be able to shed some light on your questions, since you seem to be asking about doing things on a much smaller scale. You could certainly make something yourself tough enough to crack black walnuts, but I’d definitely look at the designs that are already being sold for the purpose. I think they’re all more or less backyard metal shop type designs. Most of them use lever action instead of screw force. A screw would certainly work, but I think lever action seems to be generally preferred probably because it’s faster. Here are some examples:
http://www.nutgrowers.org/FAQ/nutcrackers.htm
I’ve used what the above link calls the “Get Crackin’ Nutcracker” for cracking black walnuts for the last several years, and it’s served me well. It’s not quite powerful enough for the thickest shelled black walnuts, but for the nuts of most of the trees that I’ve collected from it does fine. I was just recently (since the last walnut season) given something that looks very much like the “Master Nut Cracker”. I’ve only just experimented with it a little so far, not having had a regular walnut cracking season yet since I got. I like it, too, and it seems like it would definitely be stronger than the one I’ve had (although that hasn’t been a major problem.) I suspect I’m going to like it a little better, but I’m pretty happy with both of them. I would say there are definitely some minor design flaws in both models, but they definitely work.
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@cousinfloyd
Just to answer a few of your questions.
The parent organization of all these 200+ hulling processing stations is called Hammons located in MO. The link below provides more info and a zip code search to find the closest one to you.
Hulling & Buying Locations - Hammons Black Walnuts
- You definitely do not need to de-hull the black walnuts prior to arriving to a de-hulling station, although you could save room in your bags or back of a truck if you did.
- After they are de-hulled at the processing station the nuts are put into the sacks shown in one of my pictures and than weighed and you are paid instantly with cash at $15 per 100 pounds of hulled black walnuts. Our dehulling station was run by an Amish family. The processing station than sells them to Hammons at probably a much higher rate (no idea what that rate is), and they should as they pay for, maintain dehulling station, palletize and truck black walnuts to Hammons. The 200+ processing stations really are the “middle man” it appears in the whole process.
- I believe you asked what the stations are like? The pictures I posted here of the dehulling processor out in someone’s farm area of operations is what I experienced. I am sure that’s how most of the processors are set up. My understanding is yes they are all mechanically run dehullers and the process goes really quick. We had our nuts out and in the processor and run through in just a few minutes. Apparently all the husks make great fertilizer and I noticed they were storing big piles of it after the machine would dehull the nuts.
- They do not separate the meat from the nuts. They have no way to do that at the de-hulling station. The process is done at Black Hammons big distribution plant.
For me it was a great time spending the day with my teenage son and being out in fresh air and also getting him to see and experience this whole unique process and earn a few bucks. 
YouTube video link below about 7 minutes explains process fairly well and gets deeper into process. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IW9rs18NMxI
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If you didn’t use a nut roller, you guys should get a couple.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_nkw=nut+gatherer&_frs=1
Dax
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Definitely Dax! I must for next season.
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If the limbs are high enough off the ground and you had a bunch of trees I bet you could run a hay rake under the trees to pile the nuts in a piles. Pick them up with a scoop shovel.
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That would work. I simply have fun using nut gatherers. It’s fun to hang out with a buddy or my Mom and pick up nuts whether for cracking or for yard cleanup. My Mom has two gigantic black walnuts at a rental and she/we roll them up and take them over to a wooded hillside where animals she feeds daily can get use of them.
Dax
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In case anyone has no clue what I’m talking about with the hay rake this video should demonstrate what I had in mind https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sHx6YKIsjQ. I’ve had a rake for years and they are very handy. By the way you can hook them to a pickup truck if yours is wheel driven like mine if anyone wants to know. I’m not saying this is their designed purpose but let’s face it I’ve raked up plenty of small pieces of wood and rocks that were walnut sized before. My hay rake was $1200.00 years ago. If you had 100 walnut trees the time saved would be incredible. You could rake and load them in a few hours. My family is from nut growing country and they use hand rakes. My idea would not work there because all the land is straight up and down. Only a skilled madman with a wide front end tractor would try their hills! That’s how people wind up with tractors rolling over on them.
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I find these things to be weeds in my yard. The squirrels plant them everywhere…probably one of the fastest growing trees from seed. The nuts stink 
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I’m cutting the trees up on a lot that I’m clearing. I love burning it. It has a nutty smell that smells so good when you’re burning it. I like woodworking with walnut too. It smells really good then too. I have a shed full of it from a big tree I had milled. I don’t think the nuts stink. They have a citrus smell to them. Like I have said before, don’t get that black slim from the husk in your eye. I had to go to the emergency. It burned like hot pepper. Milk was the solution that eased the burn. That’s what she said they use for pepper sprayed victims.
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Black walnuts smell like a wonderful, earthy forest. I make my black walnut only twice a year. I pay $15.00 for a half pound over the internet. 
. Wish you all lived closer!
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Thanks so much for posting this and telling us more about it! I have always felt strongly that Black Walnuts represent a major wasted resource. I knew they were good to eat and growing up we would put a couple buckets full in the driveway and by running over them when we come and grow they would eventually be de-hulled. Then my mom would crack and hand-pick the kernels out. HOWEVER, as you know, its such as long, hard process to get such a low volume of eatible material that mom usually just ended up with a couple zip-lock bags for use in various cakes and cookies and my favorite- a pie made exactly like a traditional pecan pie but with black walnuts.
But the reason I always felt they were a wasted resources and that I knew (and know now) where there were lots of trees that had hundreds of them under it but they almost all became squirrel food or just rotted because the above described technique for getting the meat out of them was so unproductive. I live in the same KY/TN area as you and never even heard about a place you could take them to be processed! I’m so glad you told me/us about that. I have a big tree on my own property and 2 giant ones in a city park.
Thanks again, Zack! Good stuff here.
UPDATE: Thanks to your awesome link, I just learned that there is a collection site less than 10 miles from my house (in Franklin, KY). I’m pretty excited about this. When I was reading your post I was hoping I could take a bunch of my still-in hull Black Walnuts to one of these places and pay them to turn them into clean meat/nuts but from what you said they don’t do that. Guess I could sell them my nuts and use the money to order some clean nuts. THanks again.
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Their web address is https://black-walnuts.com/ or their old web address of http://www.hammonsproducts.com/
Black Walnuts from the woods are about 60% good nuts - meaning a lot of them float and are discarded - and when they are good, they are rarely more than 25% meat. I planted 1.25 acres of walnut trees in 1998 and over the next 3 years grafted most of them to good nut producing varieties. If you are in a position to grow some grafted trees and live in the southeast, I highly recommend the old original Thomas, Neel #1, and Football II as good varieties to plant.
Picking up walnuts can be a lot easier and less backbreaking than bending over and picking them one at a time. I have two nutwizards of the large size that make it easy. http://nutwizard.com/
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Just curious why doesn’t anyone put plastic nets that send the nuts into sacks as they fall? Just set a net up in a cone shape at the bottom of the tree to catch them similar to a cherry shaker https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7doY1sgYyHw
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That’s terrific Kevin and you probably could at least work something out whereas they could de-hull a bucket or so for you. Of the actually 380 lbs of dehulled nuts they did for us I kind of regret I didn’t keep a few pounds of the cleaned up ones. When they go through the processor they clean up real nice. Its a real pain as we know to dehull and clean BWs manually (elbow grease).
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