We’ve finally cracked the nut! Thanks to the brilliant work by the New York Tree Crop Alliance (NYTCA) and support from the MA Franklin County CDC and the MA Agricultural Innovation Fund, we’ve taken our first steps to explore commercial hazelnut viability in the Northeast and process our nut crops to enjoy the kernels of the past 8 years of our labors!
At the end of February, we piled our family and gear into our wee hatchback, and loaded 630lbs of hazelnuts (our harvests from 2021-2023) in 45 tote bins into a rented U-Haul truck. We drove for nearly five hours from the edge of the Berkshires in MA to the Finger Lakes of NY across stark and frozen landscapes to meet up with Rusty at Finger Lakes Nut Farm in Locke, NY. As the sun was setting, we fired up the NYTCA’s new Turkish-made Hasatsan 2100 Dehusker, vacuuming up our nuts into a nifty PTO-driven machine to suck off their brown papery husks en masse. In under an hour, we put all 45 totes through the machine and loaded it all back on the truck!
The next day, we brought the de-husked (still in-shell) nuts to NYTCA’s new processing center at the Cortland Commerce Center in Cortland, NY. Jeff and Bryan, part-time operators and coordinators, met us there to walk us through the various pieces of equipment purchased by the organization in the last 6 months. We first used a homemade nut sizer built by Z’s Nutty Ridge in McGraw, NY to quickly sort the nuts into three size classes.
After sizing and sorting the nuts, we used a LOUD Spanish-made commercial Borrell nutcracker to crack the nuts (about 100lbs/hour), and a custom built vacuum aspirator designed in Wisconsin to separate the hazelnut kernels from the shells. The equipment is still relatively new to the center and our nuts were only the third batch to go through the cracking and aspirating process. The team was grateful for the opportunity to continue calibrating and refining their equipment as they slowly scale-up their operations. We all gathered valuable insight and a better understanding of ways to increase efficiency in the future. In the end, we achieved a 25-32% kernel-to-shell ratio, taking home about 130 lbs of whole hazelnut kernels. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time or their right set up to complete the final hand-pick, sorting out the very small uncracked nuts and shell fragments – this we will have to do by ourselves at home. We were also left with several totes of mixed shell and kernel fragments, a by-product we plan to experiment with using as animal fodder.
Overall, the process was both exciting and sobering! Hazelnuts do require a multistep process to get from fresh nut to dry kernel, but as a high-protein, high-oil storage crop that we can actually grow here, it’s more than worth figuring out! Utilizing the commercial grade equipment dramatically reduced our labor hours and will finally allow us to begin experimenting with potential value-added products made from our very own nuts! NYTCA is still in the process of obtaining food safety certification at the center, which they hope to have in place by the fall of 2024. Sadly, this means that we won’t be able to sell any of the nuts from this processing trip commercially. In the meantime, one of our next steps is to get our home kitchen certified for cottage food processing so that we will be ready to go when we do bring home food-grade nuts next year!
So far we have experimented with making roasted flavored hazelnuts, raw and toasted hazelnut butter, nut butter mixed with combinations of honey and cacao, chocolate covered hazelnut clusters, and chocolate-dipped hazelnut butter truffles. They are all delicious – the last one is particularly out of this world. These experimental products will be for testing and sharing with our many friends and supporters over the years.
One small step for Nutwood Farm, one giant leap for agroforestry in the Northeast!