Alternate-year pruning may also be feasible. Fortunately chestnuts are relatively free of pests. No mechanical system of chestnut harvest has yet been perfected, but most likely would be essential to lower labor costs. Some existing harvesting techniques for other crops such as walnuts, filberts, and processing cherries seem to be adaptable to chestnuts. Chestnuts should be treated more like apples in storage than like other tree nuts.
Chestnuts dry out even at high humidity, so protective packaging is needed.
Mold inhibiting fungicides and controlled atmosphere storage would most likely improve chestnut quality in long term storage. Propagation Seedling trees are quite variable and definitely not acceptable for commercial production. Seedlings can, however, be used as rootstocks, but only with scion wood from the same tree of origin as the seedling, because of widespread graft incompatibility problems. Grafting of high quality scion varieties onto random seedling trees commonly produces a poor graft union in 1 to 10 years. Self rooting the trees is perhaps the best procedure for mass production, through layering, cutting, or tissue culture.