Nut Farm Internship Opportunity: Hazelnut Harvesting and Processing Intensive
Fall 2021
Dates: September 1 – October 15, 2021 (minimum commitment is 3 weeks)
Accommodations: Camping
Food: Provided (can accommodate most diets)
Stipend: $75/week or $500 for 6 weeks
Nutwood Farm seeks 1 or 2 interns this fall for a 3-6 week nut harvesting and processing intensive. The interns will be highly involved in all aspects of the harvest including assessing the field for readiness, hand harvesting, drying, and mechanically husking, sorting and shelling. This highly educational opportunity will cover additional topics such as site preparation, planting, and cultivating hazelnuts, and will prepare you for establishing a small commercial hazelnut orchard of your own.
Interns will be expected to work 6 hours per day, 5 days per week, rain or shine. All meals can be provided with most diets accommodated. Tent platform overlooking the orchard is available for camping. No pets, please.
Nutwood Farm is a diverse ecological farm cultivating a wide variety of edible perennial nuts, fruits, and herbs. Our goal is to produce nutrient dense foods that will regenerate the soil, enliven our bodies, and enrich our community. Nutwood Farm is part of the leading forefront of small new innovative farms redefining agriculture and shaping the next generation of an appropriately scaled community-based ecologically sound and regenerative food system.
To apply, please email Seva at nutwoodfarmers@gmail.com. Please include any relevant experience and what you hope to learn through this internship.
Thanks to our friend Mark Auerbach, host of 89.5FM/WSKB On The Mark for interviewing us! Our segment will premiere on both WCPC15 and 89.5fm/WSKB on Wednesday, January 27, 2021 at 8AM ET. You can watch it on WCPC15, listen on 89.5fm/WSKB and/or stream at www.westfieldtv.org and/or www.wskb.org. The program will also be posted to Westfield Community Programming’s YouTube page.
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.
For the second year, Nutwood Farm has submitted an educational display to the Cummington Fair Agricultural Hall during the 151st Annual Fair! This year’s display focuses on swale and berm earthworks: how to lay out, build, and plant a swale system to maximize water retention, manage flash flooding events, and mitigate drought on the farm.
Come and see our exhibit! August 22-25, Cummington Fairgrounds
Regenerative agriculture, also called “carbon farming,” is a set of practices intended to restore degraded lands and improve the health of soils and ecosystems while producing a yield. It has been shown to increase the complexity and diversity of the life in the soil leading to higher fertility, better drought resistance, reduced need for pesticides, fertilizers and other fossil fuel inputs, and improved soil structure.
What are Earthworks?
A technique often used in Regenerative Agriculture, “earthworks” are practices that alter the slope or contour of the land to better harvest, store, and distribute water. Installing earthworks on sloped land is an ecological method that has been used by small-scale farmers around the world for thousands of years. When used in conjunction with low- or no-till operations and perennial crops, it is very effective in reducing soil erosion and improving water retention, enhancing the overall agro-ecosystem.
How it Works: Swale-and-Berm
This style of earthworks involves excavating a shallow band of soil on contour and moving the earth down slope to create a small earthen dam just below. The concave ditch or “swale” creates a place to collect water during heavy rainfall events, allowing it to slowly seep into the water table below instead of running off and eroding precious topsoil. The convex dam or “berm” provides a large raised bed for planting multiple species, including perennial shrubs and trees, keeping their roots high and dry while giving them access to ample moisture from the swale above.
Most earthworks projects are a one-time intervention that will vastly improve the health of the agroecosystem for tens or hundreds of years. Many farms use a side-throwing plow or an excavator to dig and shape their earthworks system. To be effective, new swales and berms should be planted and mulched as soon as possible to prevent soil erosion and rebuild the soil structure. The alleys in between the swales and berms can also be planted with annual crops, grazed by animals, or used for hay production. Integrating perennial crops and livestock has been demonstrated to sequester carbon very effectively and support extremely healthy and diverse soil microbiology.
How to Build a Swale 1-2-3
Find and mark the contours of your land. This is the line of equal elevation across a landscape that is perfectly horizontal. It is often used in topographic maps to show valleys and hills, and the steepness or gentleness of slopes. You can do this by hand with a simple A-frame or a water level, also known as a bunyip. Or you can use a laser level if you are working on a larger scale. Mark points of equal elevation perpendicular to your slope and “connect the dots” to create a contour line.
NOTE: The number of contour lines you mark will vary by the size of the land and steepness of the slope, and your intended use. Consider if you will be planting annual crops in between your swales, or grazing livestock, or simply harvesting from the perennial crops on the berm. For more information on sizing and spacing earthworks appropriately, see Brad Lancaster’s Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Vol. 2, Water Harvesting Earthworks
Dig a shallow ditch along the contour line and move the excavated soil down slope creating a band of earth to act as a dam, preventing water from spilling out of the ditch. You can use a shovel and garden rake for small projects, or you can dig with an excavator for large scale projects. If your soil is sandy, you can also bury branches and other woody debris in the berm to slowly break down and increase the organic matter in the soil. If your soil has heavy clay, be careful not to make your berms too large or it may cause a landslide in heavy rain events.
Plant the swale and berm right away to minimize erosion after disturbing the soil. Clover is a good choice for the swale as it can tolerate more moisture. Larger trees and shrubs can be planted on the top of the berm, and any mixture of quick-growing annuals and deep-rooted perennials can be planted into the sides of the berm. If you cannot seed cover crops or plant perennials right away, you can mulch the soil heavily with grass clippings, straw, or woodchips. This will also increase the soil organic matter while preventing erosion and building fertility.
Where Has All The Soil Gone?
The FAO led Global Soil Partnership reports that 75 billion tons of soil are eroded every year from arable lands worldwide—a rate that is about 13–40 times as fast as the natural rate of erosion. This equates to an estimated financial loss of US$400 billion per year. Approximately 24% of the world’s agricultural land is seriously degraded. According to the United Nations, an area of fertile soil the size of Ukraine is lost every year because of drought, deforestation and climate change.
Soil loss is exacerbated by poor agricultural practices such as excessive tillage and bare soil cultivation. Wind and water are both natural forces of erosion that can be managed with simple techniques such as continuous cover cropping, reducing tillage, planting wind breaks, intensive rotational grazing, and leaving crop residues in the field to biodegrade.
Not only is soil erosion bad for agriculture, it also causes global climate change by releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. Conventional agriculture is currently responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, yet we could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions by switching to regenerative organic agriculture (Rodale). Healthy soil has the power to prevent soil loss and reverse global climate change.
In the US, overall trends of soil loss have improved over the last 25 years. Water and wind erosion has dropped from about 7.3 tons per acre in 1982 to 4.8 tons per acre in 2007 (NRCS). Many farmers are learning to adopt new techniques to prevent soil erosion, improve soil fertility, and increase their bottom line.
This summer, Gettysburg College student Miriam Martinez (pictured, right) filmed a short documentary of her week-long internship at Nutwood Farm and unscripted interview with Seva and Kalyan.
About the filmmaker: Miriam grew up in San Rafael, CA and is planning to major in Environmental Science and minor in Women & Gender Studies. She was the founder and Captain of the San Rafael High School Girls Wrestling Team and is very interested in exploring the intersections of gender, culture, and environmental sustainability.
In today’s world, I feel as though individuals no longer have that same connection to the land that existed so many years ago. Through Gettysburg’s Career Development program, I was able to attend a week-long externship in Massachusetts at Nutwood Farm, run by Seva Tower- a Gettysburg alumni- and Kalyan Uprichard. At Nutwood Farm, they are nurturing several varieties of nut bearing trees and working with the land instead of against it. One of the most noticeable aspects of their farm to me was that their trees were not arranged on a flat piece of land with perfectly manicured rows and sections. The trees were actually planted on a hill, and the soil was formed into berms and swales to help with water intake and drainage in case of drought or flooding. This concept was entirely new to me, and during my week on the farm I got to help maintain them and see the berms working their magic through several hot days and rainy nights.
In addition to learning about the farm’s berms and swales, I was able to have a lot of fun learning about how Seva and Kalyan aim to make Nutwood Farm fully self-sustaining in the future. The property has a plethora of wild blackberries and raspberries surrounding the fields, and I was able to help pick them and learn how to properly make my own jam! Another Gettysburg extern and I were also able to go blueberry picking with Seva for several hours. We ended up with over 60 lbs of blueberries by the time we were finished, which we later made 27 jars of blueberry jam and sauce. They also had ducks which gave eggs for breakfast, and lunch and dinners were made with vegetables right from the garden!
In the tree fields, I noticed that instead of spraying weed killer and pesticides, Seva and Kalyan were encouraging plant growth in the surrounding soil of their trees. It was explained to me that this was promoting the kind of ecosystem often seen in forests, where the soil is nourished by the diversity of plant life and beneficial organisms. By stripping the soil of these plants and insects, it can often deprive the plants of many beneficial microorganisms and soil nutrients that they could have access to naturally. S.A.R.E (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program) has also given Nutwood Farm a research grant that Seva and Kalyan utilized to plant several rows of hazelnut trees with specific groups of plants growing in the surrounding soil to see how they affected the hazelnut trees’ growth and production over several years. During my externship, I was able to also help with bug identification for the research grant to record the various kinds of insects thriving on the farm. This analysis will ideally be able to help assess the field itself by assessing whether or not these insects are beneficial or harmful to Nutwood Farm’s trees. Learning more about the relationship between a crop or tree and their surrounding soil nutrients, plants, and insects will be valuable information for me to consider if I were ever to pursue agriculture myself.
Nutwood Farm is also involved in community outreach and invites local kids and camps to help them on their farm while learning more about agriculture. Thanks to their involvement with the Gettysburg Externship program, Seva and Kalyan are also teaching about their mission and experiences to college students like me as well! This externship is applicable to where I see myself in the future since I have always been interested in making a difference through food awareness and farming. Right here in Massachusetts, I was able to experience and join two individuals who were doing just that. This was a fantastic learning experience for me filled with experiential lessons and the opportunity to meet incredible people who are truly making a difference in this world.
Photo above: Kalyan and Seva pose proudly with their diversified nut orchard at Nutwood Farm in Cummington, Massachusetts. Winter 2018. Credit for all photos: Mark Phillips
IN THE SPRING of 2017, 35 people gathered at Back the Lane Farm in Stephentown, New York, for a workshop with Mark Shepard, author of Restoration Agriculture, to witness the design and implementation of a permaculture inspired chestnut and hazelnut orchard. As the founder of New Forest Farm in Viola, Wisconsin — a commercial scale, perennial agricultural ecosystem that mimics the native ecology of its Wisconsin bioregion — Shepard has served as resource and inspiration for farmers aspiring to use agroforestry, or the intentional cultivation of trees, as a vehicle for ecological restoration and financial profitability. Our story highlights the work of three diversified tree farms in the Hudson valley area, united by the bold vision that chestnuts and hazelnuts can one day be the staple food of the Northeast region and beyond.
As woody perennials that produce nuts year after year without the annual tillage required of grains and vegetables, chestnuts and hazelnuts are ecosystem services providers par excellence–reclaiming degraded landscapes while sequestering carbon in topsoil and plant biomass.
With the temperatures dropping and the lush green of summer beginning to fade from the hills into the muted and brilliant crisp colors of fall, we have held steady in our persistence, day by day, block by block. This past season has served us up plenty of humble pie as we learn, slowly and many times over, what it really takes to accomplish big dreams.
Which is to say: everything in its own time.
After a beautiful yet very wet June, we finally managed to prep and pour the foundation for our new barn in July only to grapple with the monolithic task of laying 396 cement blocks for our inner thermal wall. This week, we topped the eighteenth course with its final layer of sand, rebar and concrete, and celebrated for a few glorious moments before dashing out into the looming thunderstorm to gather fallen pears from a neighbor’s road side tree. Spiced pear sauce, anyone?
With our impressive many-lithic wall finally behind us, our attention is turning eagerly to the pile of lumber that will soon become the walls and rafters of our now internet famous unique multi-purpose nut farm structure. When helping hands come at just the right moments, and support from the sidelines reenergizes our mental state, all doubts and delays melt away leaving determination in its place! This barn is going up! Perhaps not as quickly or easily as we imagined, yet these steep learning curves have only enhanced the significance of this work for us. One cannot haste through life’s lessons on sequence and time. There is a rhythm of observing, planning, working, and assessing; no amount of force will speed up or pass by a critical phase in the cycle. And then there is heat, and rain, jobs and commitments, visits from old friends and social gatherings on the hill, not to mention the rhythm of ourselves and our own need to rest, to heal, and to take care of our being.
It is finding some semblance of balance between self-care, oikonomia, and economy that has been our most pertinent challenge these last few months. With so much still hanging on our plans for the future, weathering the slowness or soreness or minutia of the day can take its toll, on both body and being. We are learning to create and give each other more space and support, and – most of all – to acknowledge that each step is likely to be more complicated and take far longer than we anticipate. But the truth is that it is all okay – we have so much to be grateful for that to not notice what we have for want of what we don’t (yet) would be intolerable. Cultivating the equanimous joy that comes with the ache of impermanence is part of the path we walk. And one day we will look back on it all and just smile.
