Phil Rutter of Badgersett Research Corporation has spent 25 years perfecting hybrid hazelnuts and chestnuts

By Cindy Green

Canton, Minnesota — “It’s true. The future of the world is nuts.”

So proclaims badgersett.com, the Web site for a research farm developing hazelnut bushes and chestnut trees. Phil Rutter, founder of Badgersett Research Corporation, says his “woody agriculture” is well suited to the Midwest’s erosion-prone farmland, and he’s determined to make it profitable.

Since Rutter settled on 160 acres of undulating, verdant farmland in Fillmore County 25 years ago, he’s evaluated over 10,000 hazelnut and chestnut varieties and developed disease-resistant hybrids suited to northern climates. Not only do the hardy trees and bushes produce high-value nuts, but also oil and fiber for fuel, paper, building materials and a myriad of other uses.

Trading the zoo for woods

In the early 1970s, Rutter, who was born in Maryland, started studying zoology at the University of Minnesota. He and his wife fell in love with southeast Minnesota and built a small log home tucked in the woods. Deeply interested in evolution and ecology, Rutter investigated his new farm’s geological history.

An old land survey showed one hill on his farm had 6 to 12 inches of topsoil in 1950; in 1975 the same hill had zero to six inches. “The topsoil was lost over 25 years, which is slow enough that farmers can’t see it. … This is some of the best ag soil in the world, but it’s fragile. It got here as dust during the glacial period … and it washes away easily.”

Digging further back, he discovered the area was once known as an oak-hazel savanna. “The hazel roots successfully competed with sod and the tops withstood fire, but they were wiped out by cows and plows.” He also learned of an old-time amateur plant breeder, Carl Weschke. “He started developing hybrids in the ’30s but was not trained in biology; he ran into disease problems and lost hope.”

Twenty years later, Rutter obtained access to Werschke’s plantings and selected starting material. “He expected everything to die, but of course they didn’t and I was able to find outstanding survivors to carry forward,” Rutter says.

Rutter, convinced woody agriculture would keep the topsoil on his rolling hills intact, also started breeding chestnuts. Career-wise, he “jumped tracks” and instead of obtaining a doctorate in zoology, settled for a masters degree and started Badgersett, a British word meaning “badger’s home.”

Solar panels and cloned bushes

Since hazelnut and chestnut breeding didn’t bring in much cash the first years, Rutter lived simply. His log home is still powered by solar panels, enough to operate his laptop computer. So is his earth-sheltered greenhouse, which “uses one-fifth the power of a standard greenhouse,” he says.

Though Badgersett has operated on a shoestring, it has received some help from a Minnesota Department of Agriculture sustainable agriculture grant and recently received a $50,000 contract with the U of M program, “Experiment in Rural Cooperation.” AURI also helped finance propagation research at the University of Minnesota, and Dan Lemke, AURI communications director, produced a video program for Badgersett.

Along with interns who assist with research and production most summers, Rutter’s two grown sons help care for his 70 acres of hazelnuts and chestnuts. They actively participate in marketing and research, and Brandon Rutter will be living in China for six months to set up joint business ventures.

“We are now becoming a mainstream enterprise — with the intention of making a profit,” says Rutter, who is selling Badgersett Research Corporation stock through a private offering.

Cloned plants are his next step. With “spanking new (propagation) technology” from University of Nebraska researcher Paul Read and graduate student Mehmet Nuri Nas from Turkey, Rutter says he can “crank out genetically identical plants that machines can harvest.” A new husker that cleans harvested nuts, designed by engineering students at Dordt College in Iowa, “is 800 times faster” than husking by hand and “goes through a bushel and a half a minute.”

Rutter is also cooperating with 40 farmers from around the country, each raising two or more acres of hazelnuts, to form a growers group to collaborate on value-added products and marketing. This year, “we’ll have the first ton of production from a Nebraska field owned by the National Arbor Day Foundation,” says Rutter, past president of the Northern Nut Growers Association.

Hardy hazels

Of the two woody perennials, hazelnuts are best suited for Minnesota because they are native, grow quickly with abundant yields, and resist disease and harsh weather. “These hybrid hazels are environmentally unstoppable here,” Rutter says. “There’s nothing the weather can do to even challenge them. They survive 40-below-zero temperatures untouched.”

Rutter has crossed his local hazelnut varieties with species from around the world. He’s bred insect and disease resistance into his bushes and, with help from an abundance of bug-eating frogs, doesn’t use pesticides. Tall, dead trees placed throughout the groves attract hawks, which keep mice and squirrels away.

Hazel bushes grow nine to 12 feet high in sun or part shade, bear nuts when three to five years old and will live through drought and floods. Deep, spreading roots tolerate both heavy clay and sandy soils.

The bushes produce clusters of nuts — about one pound per year, adding up to a thousand pounds per acre annually. “We’re working up to two to three pounds” per bush per year, Rutter says. “Our record is seven pounds.”

“Every time we ask plants to do something more for us, we discover they definitely can,” Rutter says. “The plants grow several times faster than we thought they could. … Work is proceeding rapidly; whatever we did last year is not good enough this year.

“But as with any alternative crop, you can’t just give farmers something to grow — they must have a market.”

Nutty markets

Hazelnut markets are promising all around the globe. Also known as filberts, they are popular in drinks and gourmet foods such as Italian-made Nutella, a blend of mashed hazelnuts and chocolate. Scandinavians are known for their hazelnut pastries, which Rutter says were once part of the American-Scandinavian cuisine until hazels became scarce.

The aromatic, flavorful oil is used in coffee, honey, even candles. Because of their high oil content, “anything you can do with soybeans, you can do with hazels,” Rutter says. The 70-percent monounsaturated oil is popular with the French, who use it like olive oil. In fact, Badger Oil in Wisconsin “buys hazels from Turkey, presses them here, and sells the oil to France,” Rutter says. The company recently pressed a test batch of Rutter’s hazels, which could open another market for Badgersett.

After studying the proper methods to dry and store nuts for packaging and distribution, Rutter started selling hazelnuts, as well as plants, over the Internet. While hazelnuts sell for only 45 cents per pound in the commodity market, he nets $3 per pound by selling directly to consumers.

The challenge of chestnuts

Chestnuts are more challenging, Rutter says. “This is the coldest, driest place in the world where anybody tries to seriously breed chestnuts.”

In the same family as oaks, chestnuts have been cultivated for thousands of years in the Orient and Europe. They also have a long history in America. “Twenty five percent of the Appalachian forest was once chestnut, but a blight from the Orient wiped them out in 1904.” Most are now imported from Italy, although China is the top producer.

Chestnuts yield high-starch, high-protein, low-oil nuts, with potential uses similar to corn. Besides the old-fashioned “roasting on an open fire” treatment, chestnuts are candied in Europe and Japan. The nuts are also ground for bread, pasta, stuffing — even animal feed.

Rutter says developing the right chestnut hybrids for the Midwest will yield a high-value crop that could also serve as windbreaks. “We’re finding chestnut trees can grow as fast as hybrid poplar,” says Rutter, who has trees up to 18 years old.

Not only do the trees produce food, but their timber is rot-resistant, lighter than oak, splits easily and is stable when dry, making it suitable for shingles and other products. The fibers work well for papermaking, and the bark and heartwood contain tannic acid — used in tanning leather — that, if composted, isn’t toxic like other tanning chemicals.

Nutty agriculture or world solution?

“People haven’t really looked at woody plants for feeding the world,” because their assumptions are based on wild plants rather than new hybrids, Rutter says.

“We can’t expect wild plants to give us food. It would be the same as designing a state-of-the-art dairy operation, then stocking it with bobcats.”

“We’re trying to generate Holsteins and Guernseys. ... We’re not quite there yet — but we’re close to milking Shorthorns, anyway.”

Visit www.badgersett.com for more information on woody agriculture or to purchase hazelnuts, chestnuts and seedlings.