Who is this guy Professor Barkslip?
Bill Whipple began his fruit career at the age of 18 as an apple picker in Washington state in the early 1980's, and lead a picker's strike in a 500 acre orchard that provided better conditions for the workers, and has been wreaking havoc on convention ever since. He picked five subsequent seasons in various conventional and organic commercial orchards in Washington State and West Virginia, finally homesteading in West Virginia where he planted 2 acres of pears in 1987. He has raised these trees organically and markets the pears regionally. He has added over 1000 trees of mixed species to his farm in the last 10 years and has begun a small scale fruit and nut breeding program.
Since 2004, as a community volunteer, he has initiated and organized stewardship of four edible parks in Asheville through the Buncombe Fruit Nut Club, with an emphasis on community building and outreach to schools. Here is a video he made.
He is the purveyor of Outcider, West Virginia's "oldest cidery". Most recently, he has partnered with, and is mentoring, four other aspiring young orchardists to create the Nutty Buddy Collective which has cracked open the land access issue for young farmers and is planting fruit and nut orchards around Asheville on long term leases. He presently manages his pear orchard and genome demonstration orchard on his farm in West Virginia. He is in the midst of founding the Acornacopia project a "no-profit" that aims on arming the entire world with small scale nut processing equipment and replacing commodity corn and soy beans with perennial nut trees. Is president of the Chinese Chestnut Foundation, and this year he launched his new seed company- "Seeds of Doubt" which wrecklessly proliferates wildly hybridized organisms (W.H.O.) He earned a one year degree in agriculture at Sterling College in 1983 is the inventor and maker of the travel violin, Wiplstix.
"Fruit is the only food that wants to be eaten"
- Tom Robbins
