This winter has brought the most exciting new addition to our farm: a new family member! Seva and Kalyan welcomed their son Rohan on New Year’s Eve and cannot wait to share the joys of farming and being in relationship with land with him.
The development of our innovative farm has been both rapid and slow. Growing nut trees takes patience, yet the rewards are plentiful! All winter we have hand-cracked and marveled at the deliciousness of the hazelnuts we harvested last fall, while also wondering how to make cleaning, husking, shelling and processing commercially viable at our scale. Luckily we are not alone in this question: the Upper Midwest Hazelnut Consortium and the New York Tree Crop Alliance are working on solutions to this very problem, and – now that we have bushes in production – we hope to focus this year 2020 on learning and developing systems that will finally take our enterprise from dream to reality.
Some people are already calling this the Climate Decade. We are completely on board; let this be the decade when growing perennial tree crops is no longer a niche market but a necessity to stabilize our climate, rebuild our soils, secure our local food supply, and help us to flourish as individuals and as a community. It will take everyone, grandchildren and grandparents alike, to transform and regenerate our world.