Hazelnuts. Photo / Engin Akyurt, Unsplash
By Monique Steele of RNZ
As the last of this season’s hazelnuts fall off the tree, growers from across New Zealand are calling for more research into increasing production to crack the local sector open.
The Hazelnut Growers’ Association of New Zealand represents about 70 growers, processors and marketers who produce just 10-15% of the 200 tonnes of hazelnuts Aotearoa consumes and bakes with each year.
Marlborough’s Deb Whiteside and husband Alan Crawford quit their public sector jobs in 2021 and bought Uncle Joe’s, a five-acre farm with 500 hazelnut trees, off the pioneering Malcolm family.
The farm in Grovetown, north of Blenheim, also featured two walnut trees more than a century old and a factory,
Whiteside said it had been a bumper crop this year, taking off just in time, before wild weather hit Marlborough last week.
The company cracked and sorted the nuts on site, as well as supplies from other growers, in addition to oil processing.
Whiteside said there was still plenty of room for greater nut production nationally.
“We want to grow the industry,” she said.
“We don’t export at the moment, but we’ve got a lot of contracts with larger bakeries, so there are all sorts of opportunities to develop good, niche, high-value, quality products, as well as the staples of hazelnuts being used in baking and direct eating by consumers, of course, just as whole nut kernels.”
She said cracked kernels from New Zealand were much fresher than cheaper imported product, which spent many weeks and months in transit, affecting the quality.
“Fantastic nuts, because they’re extremely fresh, and we generally crack to order, so you won’t get nuts that are more than 4-6 weeks old.”
She said New Zealand’s hazelnut industry was small but bursting with specialist expertise within the industry association, willing to share its knowledge with growers.
“We’re competing especially with the United States and Turkey, where there are massive orchards and massive processing capacity, and very automated, while ours tends to be a little more artisan in terms of what we produce.”
Whiteside said trees needed shelter and good light, and growers were developing methods to address mites.
One mature hazelnut tree could grow between 1-7kg of hazelnuts, depending on variety, age and climate.
The association said it was seeking partners for yield improvement research in efforts to displace imports and then grow New Zealand exports.
Yields, cultivars and environmental impacts of hazelnut production were areas of focus for regenerative farming advocate and academic Alison Bentley, with her field-trial hazelnut farm.
Bentley had 65 trees at her Tikitere Farm in Rotorua in the trial to test low-nitrogen forms of land use.
She said more growers should take up growing hazelnut trees because they were a low-care crop, with low chemical use and minimal nutrient leaching that was also a carbon sequester.
“We see lots of potential in growing, and that potential can’t be realised until we’ve done some more research,” she said.
“We’ve got a market for import displacement ... and the potential to produce hazelnuts off-season from the main hazelnut-producing countries on the other side of the world.
Alison Bentley said because hazelnuts were a tier-three crop, not of high volumes, they struggled to access funding for research and development.
“[We need] more research to go into improving the yield of our trees to lift our production to the level of displacing imports and the yield on orchard to make it a really financially viable land-use proposal.
“We’ve got lots of positives in the environmental considerations, but it’s still really hard to get funding because we don’t have volume, but we can’t get volume until we’ve got funding.”
She believed more research would help catapult the sector to grasp both domestic and export opportunities.
Stats NZ data showed that the value of exports of New Zealand nuts and nut products, including walnuts and chestnuts, has hovered at about $21 million in the past couple of years, with around half going to Australia.
- RNZ