Filbert Trees; Out with the Old, In with the New…Again

The first filbert (aka hazelnut) trees planted on our farm were in 1990 by my parents. They were the Barcelona variety that is common in our area. We have slowly been taking out blocks of these trees and replacing them with newer varieties. Mainly this is due to Eastern Filbert Blight that has become a losing battle and we felt like our trees, no matter how much money we poured into them in the form of labor and preventative sprays, were still going backwards.

While not wanting to take acres out of production all at once; a filbert tree takes about 4 years to start producing a crop and then another 6 until they would be considered more close to maturity, we didn’t want to take that hit all in one solid block.

So a number of years ago we started with 25% of the trees and have been slowing chipping away. This winter we decided that it was time for our final block to be removed. Now once the ground gets a little drier we will prepare to get new trees planted this spring.

This isn’t an easy decision to make. A neighbor farmer once told me “We don’t want to take the trees out when the price is low because we need as many nuts as we can get for our yields to make up for the low price. And then when the price is high, we need as many nuts as we can get to make back the money from the poor years.” So when then does someone make the call to remove the tress?

It wasn’t an easy decision. However with the new varieties coming online they are producing faster and getting us back to getting some return on the land faster than before. This past year the first block of trees that we planted 4 years ago to replace our removed Barcelona trees actually produced about half compared to the 34 year old trees. Which has a lot to do with better yielding varieties, different spacing with more trees per acre (we didn’t double density plant but changed our spacing to a tighter pattern), and less inputs in the form of less sprays and less pruning labor.

So as the other acres come online with newer varieties so will this one in the near future. I’m hopeful that we can keep these trees in for a long time. You never know what lies ahead, new blight or pests or climate that can change our growing seasons around here, but I hope that we can treat these trees like the permanent crop they are meant to be.