The agricultural potential of hazelnuts
I
started this adventure merely searching for a tasty hazelnut to plant
in the understory of my forest garden, but the researchers who produced
the hydrid hazel have
loftier ambitions.
They figure hazels can produce food for people, a new cash crop for
farmers, a high protein feed for livestock, and an efficient way to
make biofuel. The scientists even promise that planting woody
hazels instead of the usual annual vegetable crops will help combat
global warming.
I'm most intrigued by
the potential to produce hazelnut oil. As
long-time readers probably know, we've been interested in the idea of making our
own cooking oil
for a while. We had settled on sunflowers as the easiest crop to
turn into oil on our farm, but now I'm starting to wonder if hazelnuts
wouldn't be easier. Hazelnuts have the definite advantage over
sunflowers of being perennials which need less care after the initial
planting. And even though deer and squirrels love hazelnuts,
birds are less attracted to them than to sunflowers --- our sunflower
crop this year went into the bellies of birds.
Producing our own oil is
a long term goal which will require several
steps, but it wouldn't hurt to start growing hazels as a potential
source of oil. After all, hazelnut
oil has a nearly identical nutritional makeup compared to the healthy
olive oil.
| This post is part of our Hybrid Hazelnut lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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