Features
How to Grow a Lovely Bunch
of Hazelnuts
From plant agriculture to business, Guelph experts aim to help grow new hazelnut industry from scratch
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Six thousand tonnes is a lot of hazelnuts — and a lot of Ferrero Rocher chocolates. That’s how many nuts arrive from Turkey every year to fill the popular confection made by Ferrero Canada Inc. at its Brantford plant.
Now a handful of U of G faculty members hope a fledgling research project will help develop a made-in-Ontario hazelnut industry to supply the company and more.
Along with Ferrero Canada, nut growers and other agencies, Guelph plant scientists working in three southern Ontario locations have teamed up with a business professor on campus to develop nut varieties and write a business case for cultivating a homegrown nut industry, more or less from scratch.
Currently, farmers grow only about 50 acres of hazelnuts here. But Prof. Adam Dale, Plant Agriculture, hopes to see up to 15,000 acres devoted to the crop, including former tobacco land in southern Ontario.
All going well — and the project faces a number of hurdles — those nuts would supply that big chocolate maker in Brantford as well as other markets from grocery stores to makers of candies, nut pastes and other products.
“I’m excited,” says Dale, who works at U of G’s Simcoe Research Centre and has studied berry crops since 1983. Six years ago, he began breeding disease-resistant chestnuts.
Shortly after that, he started talking about hazelnuts with officials at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA).
In 2008, he received almost $90,000 in provincial funding to start variety trials at Simcoe. Besides testing cultivars for hardiness, he is seeking varieties able to withstand a fungus that causes eastern filbert blight (filberts are another name for hazelnuts).
“That takes a heavy toll,” says Bruce Thurston, president of the Society of Ontario Nut Growers, which represents about 350 growers in southern Ontario and is a partner in the hazelnut project.
Thurston grows various kinds of nuts, including hazelnuts, on 12 acres of a 75-acre farm in St. George. “If we can come up with blight-resistant trees, that will be a benefit.”
Dale will also test yearly crop consistency and — a critical question — which varieties meet quality standards for a Ferrero Rocher chocolate. He aims to double the size of Simcoe’s plot to test more varieties. And he plans to grow cultivars at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre.
Dale will start the trees through micropropagation at Guelph. He’ll work with Prof. Praveen Saxena, Plant Agriculture, whose tissue culture techniques will produce test- tube plants for faster, easier propagation.
Normally farmers retrieve root suckers from existing trees — perhaps 15 from a tree — for new planting. Micropropagation will allow the researchers to reap hundreds of offspring.
“My role in this project is to develop in vitro production systems of this important crop,” says Saxena. “My lab’s technology has great potential for creating plants with larger yields, disease resistance and perhaps enhanced levels of phytochemicals that may not only add to flavours but also enrich the nutritional status.”
The plant agriculture professors will share a graduate student for this project. Dale will also share a student with Hannah Mathers, an Ohio State University professor who is a senior research fellow at Vineland and an adjunct professor at U of G.
At Vineland, the researchers plan to study technology — including growing techniques and retractable-roof greenhouses — to produce hazelnut trees more quickly and efficiently.
“There aren’t a lot of trees around, so we need to speed up the process,” says Mathers.
Hazelnuts are native to southern Ontario. The nuts grow in clusters on the shrub, which reaches about eight feet high. The shrubs normally take about six years to mature.
Turkey produces about 80 per cent of the world’s hazelnuts. They’re also grown in Europe, the United States and British Columbia.
“There’s an opportunity for tree fruit growers,” says Dale. “Anybody growing tree fruit would be a natural for hazelnuts, as well as all that tobacco acreage. We have the knowledge and the acreage.”
His technician, Dragan Galic, and Todd Leuty, an OMAFRA agroforestry specialist, are writing a production guide for growers.
Growing hazelnuts is one thing, but can producers make money?
To help answer that question, the researchers enlisted Prof. Elliott Currie, Business, who has analyzed business prospects for a variety of crops and products. “We think it’s probably a go,” he says.
Currie’s computer-based model, which he plans to share with growers, includes assumptions about prices, costs and yields. He figures nut growers would need to plant at least 10 acres to make money and be willing to invest for perhaps six years before reaping a crop.
Having a large prospective customer helps reduce some risk, says Currie. “Many businesses start not knowing whether they will have enough customers.”
Referring to former tobacco farms, he adds: “You’re also converting low-productive land into something productive that may be incredibly profitable.”
Dale says growers could make about $1,000 an acre or about two or three times as much as corn or soybeans.