Bill Nash of Nash Nurseries in Michigan discusses getting hazelnut trees from tissue culture to nursery containers in a fog chamber.
Jeanne Romero-Severson, Director of the Tree Genetics Core Facility at the University of Notre Dame, talks about her work with chestnut ancestry and germplasm.
Roger Blackwell has been president of Chestnut Growers of America for the past 8 years.
From tissue culture to saleable hazelnut trees in one year.
Hazelnut seedlings in a greenhouse that hydrates the young plants with a dense fog of precipitation.
Eric Cornell of Sharon, Vermont
Bill Nash of Nash Nurseries in Michigan discusses getting hazelnut trees from tissue culture to nursery containers in a fog chamber.
READING, Pa. — Planting chestnuts, hazelnuts and other nut trees, as well as minor fruits such as paw paw and persimmon, can be fun and profitable, and is beneficial for the environment.
The industry has a promising future, if it can attract younger generations of growers.
The joint annual conference of the Northern Nut Growers Association (NNGA) and the Chestnut Growers of America (CGA) took place Aug. 7-10 on the Penn State Berks campus.
Jeanne Romero-Severson, Director of the Tree Genetics Core Facility at the University of Notre Dame, talks about her work with chestnut ancestry and germplasm.
The 113-year-old NNGA promotes scientific research in nut breeding and culture and advocates for the standardization of cultivar names.
Much younger but no less passionate, CGN began as the Western Chestnut Growers in Oregon in 1996, then morphed into the national nonprofit to promote the tree crop, deliver information to and improve communication between growers, support research and breeding work and deliver high-quality chestnuts to the marketplace.
The conference kicked off Sunday with a show- and-tell event, where members offered short presentations on equipment and technique innovations, promising selections or cultivars, successes and failures.
Monday was packed with technical presentations followed by the annual NNGA/CGA auction including artwork and other handmade donations, plant material, nut kernels, baked goods and gift certificates to raise funds for research grants awarded by the organization to members.
More presentations were scheduled for Tuesday followed by a day of field trips, with choices including a trip to Rutgers University’s hazelnut plantings or currently operating chestnut orchards and American chestnut plantings.
Despite the NNGA’s longevity, it’s treasurer, Debbie Milks, expressed some concern for its future.
“It’s all about getting younger people involved,” said Milks, who with her husband runs a 20-acre chestnut orchard with 1,500 trees in Lawrence, Kansas. “I see way too many gray heads.”
Eric Cornell of Sharon, Vermont
With a full head of hair, no discernible gray and toting a laptop and a favorite tome, “Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture” by J. Russell Smith (1929), Eric Cornell of Sharon, Vermont, was preparing for his presentation on Historic Nut Tree Nurseries Throughout the northeastern U.S.
Cornell — co-founder of Beforest, which helps clients create forest garden ecosystems — and others pointed out that where native nut trees and minor fruit trees are concerned, decades of planting and research often gets lost to development, or when property is passed to succeeding generations.
Raised in Buffalo, New York, Cornell said he was managing the produce department in a co-op when he began thinking about the environmental disconnect between growing organic food and shipping it thousands of miles.
“It got me really interested in local food systems and foraging, and then one thing leads to another .... And I found out about the Northern Nut Growers Association through learning about Jay Russell Smith, who was an economic geographer and professor of business at Columbia and Wharton. He became the mouthpiece for the NNGA in the early 20th century.”
Around Smith’s time, the American chestnut, a fast-growing deciduous tree in the Beech family, was being decimated by chestnut blight, a fungal disease from Asia. While the American Chestnut Foundation and others work to return this tree so significant in the country’s early history, commercial growers now typically rely on European/Asian chestnut crosses.
Roger Blackwell has been president of Chestnut Growers of America for the past 8 years.
“I'm in this for growing a sustainable crop,” said CGA President Roger Blackwell, who tends 12 acres of chestnut trees in Michigan and plans to plant an additional eight.
“I just planted 60 young trees around Memorial Day,” he said. “These trees could last hundreds of years.
“I'm in it to make money from it, from my own standpoint, but also I’m in it for other people who want to develop an orchard. You can grow an orchard, and within 15 years you can have a pretty good crop where you can get your money back for all the time you put into it. ... I have an orchard that pays all my expenses for the property and equipment we buy.”
Blackwell said he belongs to a 20-year-old co-op of around 40 growers in which everyone owns an equal share and is compensated based on production. Customers include Whole Foods, Detroit Produce Terminal, ethnic groups and chestnut connoisseurs as far away as New York.
“They pay for the shipping,” he said.
Back at the registration table, Milks expressed encouragement about the unfolding conference.
“This morning, it's not a board position but we nominated a few people to our nominating committee ... and my guess is they would be in their late 20s or early 30s, and you usually don’t see that in the governance part of the organization.”
Milks knows firsthand the value of young blood. When harvest season comes to Chestnut Charlie’s — the 27-year-old business she started with her husband, Charlie NovoGradic — mid-September to mid-October, young people, including university students, make up a good portion of their volunteer harvest crew (they get compensated in chestnuts).
An accountant by trade (Charlie is an attorney), the couple were Peace Corps volunteers on the island of Yap in the western Pacific Ocean when they returned to Lawrence, where they both had attended college, in the mid-1990s to care for Charlie’s ailing father. They bought the land, interplanting Christmas trees and chestnut trees two to one, and after 10 years culled out the Christmas trees.
From tissue culture to saleable hazelnut trees in one year.
We think we’re doing the right thing by planting trees, and we want everybody else to do it, too,” Milks said, still beating the drum for the NNGA.
“I’ve had a conversation with — I hate these buckets we put people in — a millennial and I was like, ‘Why wouldn't you join an organization ... it’s 40 bucks a year? Well, for one thing, he was concerned about the price, and he said, ‘But you get everything off the Internet,’ and I'm like, ‘No, you get unfiltered, unvetted information off the Internet,’ you know? And I never met a group of people like the nut growers for sharing, you know, real valuable knowledge.”
Hazelnut seedlings in a greenhouse that hydrates the young plants with a dense fog of precipitation.
HUFFS CHURCH, Pa. — Mention Lennilea Farm Nursery to a fan of native flora in this neck of the woods, and chances are their eyes will light up…
The Penn State Extension Lehigh Valley master watershed steward program received a $10,000 Healing the Planet Grant from Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful to help build environmental stewardship by connecting families with community green spaces.
Dan Sullivan is the Digital Content Editor for Lancaster Farming and a former editor and writer for the Rodale Institute’s NewFarm.org and Organic Gardening and Biocycle magazines. He can be reached at dsullivan@lancasterfarming.com or 717-428-4438.
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