When we first planted hundreds of seed-grown select hybrid hazelnuts from Mark Shephard’s inspiring nursery, Forest Ag Enterprises, in 2016, we were sure that the Eastern hazelnut revolution was about to explode. In a few short years, everyone would be planting hundreds, if not thousands, of hybrid hazelnuts on their farms and field edges, swiftly ushering in the new era of perennial agriculture. Farmers and gardeners alike would soon see the folly of a food system based on annual tillage, the downfall of so many other previous attempts at civilization, and all would unanimously agree that it was time to return to the forest and plant diverse food bearing ecosystems that built soil, rather than allowing it all to wash away.
We weren’t entirely wrong, but we may have been a bit overzealous in our predictions. Afterall, J. Russel Smith published his treatise on Tree Crops in 1929, and we didn’t hear about it until some 85 years later. Like trees, the permanent agriculture revolution has been slow growing. In some parts of the world, a reliance on trees for food has persisted for a millennia or more. But in this country, we have long forgotten, or were otherwise completely blind to the interconnections that once existed between humans and cultivated forests. Imperialist-based plantation landscapes entirely dependent on stolen labor and cheap energy still dominate our imagination when it comes to picturing the quintessential modern farm: a large red barn in the middle of huge rectangular fields, surrounded by patches of tilled brown soil and nothing but a mighty John Deere tractor churning through it all. At the edge of the field is a line of trees: a forest, the place of abrupt change from cultivated to wild.
After so many centuries spent “taming the wilderness,” it can be hard to imagine anything different. Economic efficiency, with all its externalized costs, will always reign supreme as long as our money is worth what we think it is. But farmers have long had a way of shaping human culture; to this day they still mediate our modern day societal relations to the land. And they know, long before most of us, when a thing’s time has come. You can’t argue with soil.
So it seems that the perennial agriculture revolution has quietly begun. Call it ‘conservation agriculture,’ call it ‘regeneration,’ call it ‘no-till’ or ‘carbon farming’ or ‘climate smart’ or what you will. There are plenty of people who firmly believe that you don’t need soil to grow food, but even if that were true, it’s surely not a world worth living in. If we want soil, we need woody plants with deep root systems and abundant leaves to capture sunlight and carbon dioxide and alchemize it into sugar and humus. And if we can pick sweet fruits and fatty acids and dense starches from their wide spreading branches, year after year, without ever sticking more than a spade into the sweet earth, all the better.
Unfortunately, it’s never quite that romantic. Joining the revolution and planting nut trees was the easy part; turning those nuts into (human) food, and an honest living, has not been so simple. Initially, we hoped that in 3 or 4 years before the bushes matured and began producing nuts, somebody would surely figure it out. Small scale nut processing equipment would magically appear on the market and tree crop processing hubs would naturally spring up in every county. As you can probably guess, this didn’t happen. We hand-picked our first half bushel of hazelnuts in 2019, dried them, husked them, and cracked them by one by one. We filled a mason jar. We were elated! In 2020, with the help of a few friends, we picked 10 bushels of fresh nuts. We dried them, and set to work building a DIY ‘bucket husker.’ We scraped some money together and purchased a simple drill cracker. We husked and sorted maybe a third of our harvest. [We also had a new baby and started building our house… among other upheavals.] The rest of the nuts we stacked in poly tote bins in our dry barn. In 2021, we picked 16 bushels. We dried and added these to last years’ harvest, stacking the tote bins higher. We applied for CARES Act funding and other agricultural grants to purchase expensive and hard to find European-made nut processing equipment, but no one seemed interested. We needed a village to help do the work… but instead, we got schooled in mice and mold, and a large portion of our nuts in storage ended up as mulch in our greenhouse the following spring. In 2022, we had a drought, and still picked 22 bushels of nuts. We got smarter, dried them better, and put them more carefully into storage while we waited to hear back from still more grant applications. There they lay, while our baby grew up and our house neared completion, for the day when somebody figures it out. And just maybe, that day has finally come.
As excruciating as it has been to sit and wait these past seven years, the time was simply not yet ripe. We are humble growers, not machinists, not venture capitalists; we knew we might never grow enough to be able to purchase the kind of mechanized equipment that would turn our crop into saleable products. But just because the money hadn’t flowed our way, didn’t mean it wasn’t there at all! As it turns out, a handful of other new and veteran nutheads in upstate New York had also been scheming for a while. Their first big break came in 2019 through a crowdfunder to purchase a commercial nut oil press, and additional grants and investments earlier this year (2023) have allowed them to finally begin organizing and assembling the Northeast’s first tree nut processing facility. It’s the first step in a regional collaboration that will allow small independent growers like ourselves to make this incredible food available to our broader foodshed again, and incentivize more growers to start planting!
Now you know why, after nearly eight years of growing and four years of harvesting… still no nuts (for you!). At 1 acre, we may still have the largest planting of hybrid hazelnuts in the state of Massachusetts. But we really hope that changes soon. Because while we do aspire to inspire, even with accessible processing equipment, we will never be able to supply even the local wholesale market demand – and we get several inquiries every month! But the perennial agriculture movement IS growing – some even say its moment has arrived. We certainly know our own reasons for farming with trees, but it may still take a few more enlightened generations to reach the level of transformation necessary to repair our lands and our relations with our deeply excavated earth mother. There are many complex systems at play. But the solutions are ultimately right here in our hands.
