Were you able to make it to a showing of this film? I was not able to make it to the only showing I could find in Maine, wondering if is worth the effort to track it down.
I haven’t seen the film yet, unfortunately. My last contact with TACF in general was back in November when the CT chapter president came to my house to pick up several hundred nuts that I had harvested from various places. With the recent announcement of them abandoning the D-58 GMO trees, it kind of took the wind out of my sails honestly. My plan is to stay involved, but focus my efforts on growing seedlings every year then planting them on favorable sites locally. In that way at least some of the original local genetics will be preserved.
The TACF is based in Asheville just north of me. They have some seeds for sale that are a hybrid american with intermediate blight resistance. I outta look into getting some of those.
TACF advanced hybrids have shown promising results, although they never achieved their original goal of breeding American with Asian trees, then backcrossing the offspring with American while retaining the resistance of the Asian trees. Still, they are popular and will generally have more resistance than their pure American counterparts. Besides TACF there is the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation which has taken an entirely different approach to bring back the species. What they've done is bred surviving wild trees that have shown some degree of natural resistance. Their trees are non-GMO, and have only American genetics. You can buy their most advanced strain here: Get Your ArcheWild American Chestnut - ArcheWild - Architects of Wild Spaces At my house I have 2 pure American trees and one 50/50 American-Chinese hybrid. With hybrids you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes they're just as susceptible as pure American, sometimes they inherit a lot of resistance from the Chinese parent tree. They could grow like a shorter sprawling Chinese orchard tree or tall and straight like the American parent. It's a crapshoot and you won't really know what you're going to get until several years pass by. Chestnuts are fun to grow and they do grow moderately fast to fast.
