Growers in good heart over hazelnuts Talk of growing hazelnuts in Canterbury may have seemed visionary at best 20 years ago but those that took the step are now reaping the rewards.
For Farmlands shareholder Peter Barrowclough, planting hazelnuts on his 10ha property in Canterbury was born of a desire to fill his land with a crop that provided a good return, was environmentally friendly and easy to manage. That was 12 years ago. The Chair of the Hazelnut Growers’ Association of New Zealand (HGANZ), Peter is now being rewarded with strong and consistent yields of a nut that most will associate with Nutella chocolate spread or Ferrero Rocher chocolates. “I needed something that I could manage while still working full-time and hazelnuts are relatively bulletproof – they aren’t too frost sensitive and do their pollination during the middle of winter,” Peter says. “I purchased the trees from a local nursery and planted 3,000 on approximately 3ha. I have the Whiteheart variety – it is a smaller tree than the other varieties but produces a high-quality nut but lower yields per tree than some of the larger varieties like Barcelona.” Introduced 20 years ago by Lincoln University’s Professor David McNeil, the Whiteheart variety fits well into the cooler Canterbury climate and offers strong disease resistance.
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“They start producing after 4 years of growth and then there is a delay before they hit peak production after 10 years. From there you’re getting 20 years plus of production,” Peter says. “It’s a consistent crop but does have some biennial bearing tendencies. Other varieties that can grow in New Zealand are Barcelona and Ennis but the Whiteheart is the mainstay for the industry.” Hazelnut trees are not favoured by many pests in New Zealand, adding to the ease of care. “We get the occasional rabbits but don’t have a lot of problems. While the Australian orchards have trouble with kookaburras, the trees themselves don’t generally suffer from pest and disease and I haven’t had to use sprays on the canopy,” Peter says. “The real bonus is not having to harvest straight away – the nuts start falling in early March and if I can’t get to them straight away they’ll be fine for a couple of weeks.” For domestic hazelnut growers, most of their produce is sold locally. Peter supplies to a commercial processing facility but many growers process the nuts themselves to sell at local markets or to bakeries.
Farmlands’ Category Specialist for Horticulture, Kasia Henderson, stumbled into the industry when she and her husband bought a plot of land outside Christchurch that had an existing hazelnut orchard. “Hazelnuts grow wildly where I grew up in Poland so I was familiar with them. We started with a small orchard of 10-year-old trees when we purchased our property and found very quickly that there was a market for fresh hazelnuts. As demand for our products grew we started harvesting nuts from a neighbouring orchard of 1,800 Whiteheart trees. “We have been able to build a small business from it. We harvest and process nuts to make a variety of products from roasted and raw kernel to oil, dukkah, butters and flour to sell at local markets and boutique retail outlets. “Hazelnuts are relatively easy to grow, hardy and don’t have big input requirements so you can have them as part of a lifestyle block to provide an extra income stream. “However they can be quite labourintensive during harvest and for processing so you do need to have a significant amount of trees to justify the purchase of harvesting machinery
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