Hybrid Hazelnuts – A New Resilient Crop for a Changing Climate

In the face of global threats like climate instability, food insecurity, and water pollution, scientists are looking to how we use our agricultural land for solutions. One such group of scientist-farmers in Minnesota have collectively spent nearly three decades developing what could be the new ecological crop of the future: hybrid hazelnuts.

The following is an excerpt from Growing Hybrid Hazelnuts by Philip Rutter, Susan Wiegrefe, & Brandon Rutter-Daywater. It has been adopted for the web.

Imagine for a moment what the environmental benefits would be if we could grow our staple foods—corn, beans, rice, wheat—without plowing. Now take another moment, and imagine it some more.

Perennial crops have been a perennial aspiration, even extending to corn. When corn’s wild grass relative Zea diploperennis was discovered a couple of decades ago, plenty of mainstream agronomists began to fantasize about, and work on, developing perennial corn. It’s a dream that has proven very difficult to realize.

Hazelnuts, by contrast, are a perennial food crop that already exists and that once did serve as an important, storable, staple food for many prefarming cultures across Asia, Europe, and North America. They could again.

Once established, a planting of hazels requires no plowing or even cultivation. No water runs off the fields, because infiltration rates are dramatically improved regardless of soil type. Tiling should not be necessary in moderately wet soils. No fertilizer ever escapes into groundwater, because the crop has extensive permanent root systems, at work 365 days a year. No soil is lost to wind or rain; in fact, this crop builds soil. Wildlife finds cover and food all year, instead of naked soil for eight months and a monoculture for the other four.

Hazelnuts have a large and expanding world market. The existing world hazelnut crop is based on tree-type hazels from Europe in a system little changed, and with genetics little changed, for hundreds of years. New plantings tend to follow that model, although many plantings in Turkey and Eastern Europe rely on the ancient non-mechanized large bush culture that is tens of thousands of years old.

Choosing Hazels as a Focus

I first became seriously interested in hazels because I couldn’t find any. In the 1970s, my first wife, Mary Lewis, and I both decided to leave our nearly completed work in doctoral ecology programs at the University of Minnesota and move to southeastern Minnesota to live on a farm we found ourselves rather accidentally owning. The intention was to “play pioneer” for a few years while we figured out what we “really wanted to do.” We built a log cabin and grew a big garden.

We did not disdain our education at all; I’m one of those who believe no bit of education is ever wasted, on anyone. It enriches your life, particularly if you use it. I’ve long been fascinated by plants, trees, forests, and human interaction with them. Although my PhD program in ecology was through the Zoology Department, you can’t be an ecologist and know nothing about plants. So I had plenty of botany and plant community education crammed into me, and found it all fascinating. The playground of the farm astonished us by having a deep ravine—“coulee” in local vernacular—with almost 40 acres of good forest.

It had been logged, but the trees had regrown enough that it was time to think about logging it again. However, it was so steep that logging it couldn’t be done casually. And because of that discouragingly steep slope, the native plant community was mostly intact. There were enough big sugar maples that we could make maple syrup and sell it. We did, which is how I made the acquaintance of Helen and Scott Nearing. (The Maple Sugar Book is the best education I know of on the history of maple sugar—and everything else, for that matter.)

We also found beautiful native orchids. Shooting star, rare out in prairie but sometimes found under limestone cliffs. It was quite natural, and pure fun, to make a list of the native plants on our land. But there were some things missing, including hazels. I looked hard, but there were no hazels. It wasn’t hard to guess why some species were missing. We had rented out the 90-some tillable acres to a “regular farmer” neighbor. The rent money paid the taxes on the farm as well as a good chunk of the contract for deed every year.

We discovered that our “back hill” (mostly in contours of corn and hay then) didn’t have the topsoil on it that it should have, according to the USDA soil survey maps (dating from the 1950s) we’d looked at before buying the place. The map said the back hill had between 12 and 18 inches of black topsoil covering it. But in 1976-ish, a full foot of that black topsoil was gone. At best, the land had 0 to 6 inches left. Most of the hill now looks pale brown if plowed—the color of subsoil.

We were horrified. I knew what this meant. Agriculture was changing this land into desert at tremendous speed. This incredibly rich farmland, which should feed us all forever—some of the best in the world—was being utterly destroyed. And this was not some random faraway global problem; this was right here. My problem. So I thought: I’m sitting here with this fancy education aimed right at this problem. I need to use it. If nobody ever starts working on it, it will certainly never get better. It’s a bad habit of mine; if there’s a problem right in front of me that I have the ability to attack, then I feel it’s my responsibility to attack it. (That’s also how The American Chestnut Foundation came to exist: luckily for all, Charles Burnham shared my responsibility quirk.)

My neighbors—for hundreds of miles around—were farmers. They needed crops they could grow that wouldn’t wreck the land and that would allow them to support their families. So I began to wonder: What used to grow here, before the plow? I once saw a map of Minnesota’s original vegetation, based at least partly on the plants used by the original land surveyors as monument trees for property lines and corners.

Known as the Marschner Map for the man who spent untold hours putting it together, it now exists in multiple versions, each one carefully bringing the “correct” names of the different vegetation types up to date, so they differ tremendously from one to the next. The version I first saw said most of the land around my farm, and widely common across the region, was “oak-hazel savannah.” All the newer versions mention the hazels too.

My hand points to the cut off top of this hazel. We excavated this root system to learn what they truly look like; the hazel survived. To the right you can see both plain roots, the largest being not more than ¾-inch diameter, and the much thicker “storage” root; found only immediately attached to the crown.

So I began to ask: Could we grow hazels as a crop here? The answer from various departments at the University of Minnesota was laughter. I was told that hazels couldn’t withstand the winters and they would all die of a deadly blight. So why were there hazels all over my original vegetation map?

I was already planting nuts on the farm at this point, an old interest. Chestnuts of various kinds, walnuts, butternuts, and others. And I had found a tiny book called Growing Nuts in the North on the shelf in the early hippie food co-op just off campus. This author—Carl Weschcke— had been growing thousands of nut trees in River Falls, Wisconsin, for several decades and was a past president of the Northern Nut Growers Association. About half the book was about hazelnuts. Hybrid hazelnuts, in particular, which he considered one of the most promising types.

I found out that hybrid hazelnuts had been under development in the Upper Midwest since the 1930s, though progress and attention to the work had been sporadic, unofficial, and fragmented. I kept hazelnuts on my list, and I joined the Northern Nut Growers Association. I also went looking for—and found—Weschcke’s farm, and his plantings; I regret hugely that he passed away before I could meet him. He died thinking he’d failed with his hazels, and he did not.

I got permission to work on his bushes for three years, then selected the seeds that became the foundation of the genetics my co-authors and I are still working with now. He put in 30 years of work that I built on—and it couldn’t have been done any faster. Weschcke didn’t have scientific training and he didn’t understand the underlying genetics, but he planted out thousands of hybrid hazels and their seedlings (nearly every one of which I examined). This method is known to work. I also began collecting stock developed by other breeders, including Jack Gellatly, George Slate, Cecil Farris, and John Gordon. My work needed some kind of formal business structure, so I created Badgersett Research Corporation. We started planting the first select seeds at Badgersett in 1982. Fairly quickly we had requests, and then demands, for seeds or seedlings from other nut enthusiasts. The word spread, demand grew, and we found Badgersett also becoming a licensed nursery business.

Following a decade of initial testing, major new plantings were made of crosses among various breeding lines, and I began a new round of intensive selection and breeding at Badgersett Research Farm. By 2001, it was becoming clear that the developing neohybrids contained the characteristics necessary for the foundation of a genuine hazelnut industry for the northern US Corn Belt and eventually beyond—perhaps far beyond.

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The Epic Saga of the American Chestnut

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