 So the Midwest model is based in somewhat on a high post-blueberry production system, and what you're looking at is an old blueberry harvester that turns out it worked really well with hazelnuts to harvest. So the big difference here, differences are shrubs that were growing instead of trees. We're harvesting the nuts directly off the plant instead of letting them fall because one issue, right, well there's many, but one is if we let these fall to the orchard floor, the ground in the fall and in the Midwest, they're going to get wet. We get rain, we get mud, they're going to be a disaster. The other part is we have a lot of smoke, we have a lot of water quality concerns. We want stuff growing on the orchard floor, okay? So it works well, the harvest system, so that's the model that we're pursuing. Now there's 100,000 different ways to use hedgerows in a diversified system, and it starts at the establishment phase with alley cropping. So this is actually out in Oregon where they're doing some grass seed production. And we have growers now, I mean, we've got people growing asparagus, strawberries, they're just mowing it, they're growing hay between the rows, you can do whatever, especially in that establishment phase. One model we're kind of interested in is curds up. Anyone heard of curds up? It's an intermediate wheat grass that's being developed as a perennial grain. It might be a good model that could work because it's a perennial grain, but it doesn't last that long, you know, three to five years. By that time, you've closed your canopy anyway. So we've got a couple dairy farmers working with that model right now at the alley cropping stage. This, of course, is what everybody's interested in, is can you diversify the hedgerow itself, either within the straight line or alternating rows of some other model within your orchard. The multifunctional, multi-revenue diversified perennial polyculture, I always kind of have to put with the animals in there to make the silt and pasture people happy. But there's opportunities to diversify plants. Lots and lots of questions about how you mechanize this, how you do this without a huge labor pool if you don't have one, right, to pick all this stuff. Of course, this is, you know, in practice, it looks good on an image like this, but in practice, well, how do you manage that, right? So you've got vines and you've got different shrubs and different trees, so anyway, a lot of people are excited or interested in this, but there's a lot of questions. Okay, so this is what I call Hazelnut's 101.0. The Weske Badger Sack hybrids were sold by nurseries in the 1990s, early 2000s. We have lots of growers, and those of you that raised your hands, this is what you're growing, right? So these seedlings came from private breeders, they selected seed from their best plants and shot them out and sold them to you. If that, so there's a lot of things going on here. One, there's a lot of people that were interested at the time. Two, there aren't anywhere near as many blue dots on the map anymore because the plantings just didn't really work, they weren't really commercial for a number of reasons, but that was 1.0, it's just grow above the seedlings. Now from a deployed genetic diversity from a breeding program perspective, this was a dream, this was great, because put all kinds of variable genetics out there that we could then select from to pursue any number of different breeding methodologies, either continue with the same approach and with recurrent selection, just keep saving seed from the best plants, or just try to find the top couple of plants and clone those just like you would with apples or blueberries or any other fruit crop. So when they were growing, these were hybrids, of course, between CrossFit, between American hazelnut, European hazelnut, and the theory was, you combine the best traits together, you get the hardiness and the IP resistance on Americano and the nut size and the thinner shells on Europeano. Okay, but here's sort of the problem, right? Anyone grow vegetables? Like tomatoes in a greenhouse per chance, we do that on our farm. If every fourth plant didn't produce any tomatoes, you wouldn't be very happy, right? So what's happening with the hazelnuts with those seedlings is because they're so diverse in an initial population is you would walk down a row, there's no nuts in this plant, no nuts on this plant. Well, this one has a few nuts, this one has, whoa, that's a really nice plant. The next plant in the row has no nuts. They're just so variable that no one can make any money growing just those seedlings. And you see this in the data, so see if the point works. You look at the blue bars would be H5 at three different locations where we grew these seedlings. And this is the percentage of plants that basically we use in numerical system one through five, well zero through five, zero has no nuts five as wow, that's the best plant I've ever seen. And really it's gotta be a three in our rating system to be even worth picking it. Otherwise it's like pick three nuts out of that plant, right? And so we would like to see that they're all, 100% of them are three or more, but at H5 we're seeing for the hybrids, depending on the site, less than 30%. Even by age nine, forget the fact that your cash flow model is completely destroyed by age nine, right? If you're having to wait that long, we're still only at 60, 70% are good enough. I mean, we sort of knew that, right? If you think about this level of diversity that was deployed, we would expect this. But I think growers had different expectations. They thought, well wait, we were told maybe these are all ready to go. They weren't. Okay, so we also have been able to track some of these seedling plantings over time. And there's some interesting things emerging that supports perhaps this continued recurrence selection, although it's going to be really slow, is starting to make some progress. If you take up, there's a planting just outside of the cross. These are real life measurements, right? So this is a, it's only an acre, but still it's big enough to get some real data. Harvesting mechanically with all the pressure of blue jays and chipmunks and deer and all the things that can go wrong in a real planting. And this is the inch shell yield per acre. You can see as the plant is aging, the yields are going up. So this last year, just over 1,000 pounds of inch shell per acre, and there's only about 30% kernels in the problem we've got. The shells are really thick. And so that's 1,000 pounds of inch shell, but it's only about 300 pounds of kernel. So you can start doing the math. What can you sell for, you know, farmers market, right, at least $1 a pound. If you add some flavor, put it in a smaller packet, make it $15 a pound. You guys are open marketers, you can figure that out. You can look at your revenue stream. But that's just revenue. Now you've got to subtract all the establishment costs, which aren't included in here. And then this, you've got to pay for your harvest costs. So, and my pointer's not working so well. So, hand harvesting is really slow. It can be done like an acre. If you've got lots of friends in family, maybe two. But generally it's too slow. So what's the mechanical harvest cost? And we'll get to that in a second, but that's one part of our project. But anyway, your return, you know, you're pushing $1,200 an acre by year six in the planting, which is not bad. It's getting closer. It's not great, right? There's still a lot of duds in that planting. But the point is, the Barnabell planting, which has much lower yields, is one of the very early of the Blue Dot plantings. The La Crosse one is one of the later ones. And so the private breeders have to make this progress. All right, so what we did starting in 2008, 2009, is we started working with all those growers and said, just down again. Where's Mr. Blue Dots, he was here a little bit ago. Okay, I will go back to yelling. So we took the top plants from all those Blue Dots, not all of them, but a lot of them, and made copies of them through mountain layering and established replicated germ plasm trials. That's the fancy word for germ plasm. Just see how they grow at different sites, okay? So we had four main locations all the way from far northern Wisconsin and Bayfield, down to Lake City, and grew those out until about 2017, and we identified our top 10 at that point. And here they are. So these were selected based on total yield, resistance to EFB, winter hardiness, decent kernel size. These are roughly half the size of a European hazelnut kernel, but bigger than an American hazelnut kernel. So kind of what we expected, given that these are hybrids. But based on the yields from those germ plasm trials, they can support commercial production. We can get to the thousand pounds of kernel per acre, which is kind of that magic benchmark, to make some money and cover all your costs. So we've had these since 2017, we've known these. The problem has been propagation is so slow with hazelnuts. But to give you, maybe you can't see this picture quite so well. Those in the back, you can turn around too, and you can see the presentation back there. Come on, get a closer look. Anyway, we've been selecting compact, small shrubs that produce a lot of nuts every single year. That's what we're after. We don't want 30 foot trees because they're gonna be harder to manage. We want compact shrubs that we can harvest with a lube or a lube. So that's generally what they look like. This Eric 421, this is Norm Erickson's plant that he selected from his planting down by Lake City. So widely adapted, we've found it's a total show off because it produces all these big clusters, but the nuts are actually pretty high quality as well. Can you still hear me way in the back? I know, okay. All right, so propagation, right? So all of you want these plants, at least plant some of them. When can I get them? That's your question. And I've had to unfortunately answer that for like five years and say I don't know, and I'm still here today saying I don't know is the problem. And where we're at basically is we have to use mountain layering. And so we can go from one plant to like 10 plants. That's our multiplication, like every five years. It's just that slow is the problem. What we've been after is trying to do tissue culture and some other faster methods. We just haven't gotten there yet. Okay, that said, we are able to produce some of this material, make copies of these plants. And we're trying to be strategic about how it's made available. So we've started out with these blue and red dots. These are another round of trials with all those top selections. And the blue dots actually have not only our best plants, but also the best plants from Grimo, nut nursery, the hazelnut consortium, and even those Europeans that are coming out of the Rutgers program. So we've got about 30 different varieties in those blue dot trials, which is good. That means we're getting ahead of all of you so we can give you better data on what to expect and which of those varieties are best. And in fact, the first publication out of those blue dot trials is now on our website, midwestasemonts.org, that reports on the performance of the Grimo material out of Ontario. And there's one variety that's head and shoulder to involve all the rest. And Linda's gonna kill me for saying this because you're gonna flood her phone line. But Linda Grimo, Grimo nut nursery, northern blaze is the top variety so far out of their cohort. Our selections should be even higher yielding but they were established a couple of years later. And so we haven't, we don't have the nut yield data yet. We should start seeing yields off those plants this year. So stay tuned. Okay, so this propagation bottleneck, at this point we're trying everything we can think of to make copies of these. Stem cuttings, tissue culture, and then this is a new one we're trying called seed graft layering. Basically you sprout a little seed, you graft a one bud piece of scion, hey it's working again. You graft that onto the stem and then you get the scion to grow and then you can put that right away. So we should have a much faster multiplication rate to get plants available. Okay, so that's sort of the 1.0 story. And now we're right now in the middle of this what I call the 2.0 phase where we're waiting, but we can start to be thinking about scaling up in a little bit more coordinated way than the blue dot method of 20 years ago. So this is the Ashland Gold First Farm. It was just established in November or October, November of this last year, 2021. And what we're advocating or recommending at this point is you start with seedlings. Yes, they're gonna be highly variable. And you, as a standalone crop, it may not be commercially viable. Okay, that's good. So go into it with your eyes wide open, but there are lots of other good reasons to grow seedlings. One, they make great border rows because that's where the wildlife are gonna come first when they're looking for hazelnuts in the fall. So this is sort of your protection, protect the higher yielding varieties. Hazelnuts do not self pollinate. So you need a whole diverse pollen cloud in your orchard and these seedlings will provide just that. Not only diversity of genetics in the pollen, but also diversity in the time during the spring that pollen is shed to make sure that your good plants are all having, are getting pollinated. And then the reality is if we're gonna be successful with this program long-term, we need growers to participate in the plant breeding process. That's the only reason we've gotten as far as we have now is all those folks like you that put your hand up, you made the decision to plant seedling hazelnuts and evaluate them and folks like Norm Erickson said, hey, I've got a really good one that I think is interesting. We need that participatory plant breeding to continue long-term. So by planting seedling hazelnuts, you can do that, but we wanna be smart about what seedling hazelnuts are planting, right? Let's make sure we're making progress as we do that. Then as the cultivars become available, you basically fill your planting. So in this particular case, here's a rose of Price W41 and here's a seedling hazelnut pollinated rose. There's some other plant breeding things going on in this planting, but you get the idea. Okay, so last year we launched what's called the UMHGI. UMHGI stands for Upper Midwest Hazelnut Development Initiative and we call it the Starter Planting Program where we really want people to get their feet wet here with hazelnut and the starter plantings start with seedlings. So all that's being offered this year is seedlings and we've got three farms that we're working through nurseries that are each working with a diverse seedling population, right? So they're saving seeds from their diverse population. New Forest Farm, that's Mark Shepard's operation from their farm. Superior View Nursery up in Bayfield is growing out seed that we've saved from our top first gen half seed. So we're saving seed from those germplasm trials that we established in 2009. And then Badger Set still continues that the experimental farm network is now carrying on the Badger Set program and so you get access to those genetics as well. Again, if you're gonna plant this, I expect every plant to be different, highly variable, some may not produce any nuts at all, but in general, we're making progress, okay? All right, if you go on our website, newmusthazelnuts.org, you'll see this icon or that photo, click on it and it'll get you right to the nurseries that are selling this plant material. Forest Ag has a plant material that's ready for spring of 2022 and the other two nurseries are selling potted material that's available fall of 2022. We actually really like fall plantings for a number of reasons and the hazelnut fuchsia is one planting in September, October. Okay, so here's what you're looking at from Forest Ag. These are barith dormant plants you get in the spring, gorgeous plant material, they've always provided gorgeous plant material and these are the containerized plants that would be available in the fall. Leaf on, but they're in on their way to dormant soon to go. All right, let me just say, so that's the hybrid world, right? But we have to remember that in our backyard there are thousands and thousands of acres of American hazelnut. No one's ever looked at it. No one's ever gone through a look for the good plants. We really don't know much about this population. Here's one that's in a plant thinker of a site on county Forestland in Batheville County in similar growth form and loaded with dust. And so, you know, there's potential out there. We just haven't ever really looked. You'll see really high, but generally these kernels are really small. The effort to make that picture can begin to tell you the hand-sorting of the spinal step when it's really small. And I should note that because in the world of hazelnuts, you go out to Oregon and there's a multimillion out of processing facilities, all the fancy equipment and what's up the very end of the line? A conveyor belt with like 15 people sitting there picking out one last little bit that the machine's missed. And so the smaller all that stuff is, the harder it is for those hand-sorters to get that last little shelf, right? Or that last little moldy kernel out. So even though we don't have to have large-size European-style hazelnuts that have a viable industry, there is some minimal where it just starts to get to be a pain, right? So let's talk more about the production model, give you some sense of cost involved right now with this system that we're using. So this is an alfalfa field and we just came out with a rototiller. We do recommend, especially anybody perennials, always pull a deep-shanked ripper through to break up that subsoil compaction. So we just do one pass with a single-shank ripper and they came back with a rototiller, plant right into it and then we do it when planting the fall. We do put a tube on these. Luckily they can be used for a number of years because they're not intended to help the plants grow, right? These are only 24-inch tubes. It's to protect that initial stem from the winter winds and from the rabbits that might be out there in the winter and then they'll come off in the spring. So you can reuse these year after year. So you can take that cost and you'll spread it out over multiple years. Okay, guess what? Even the hazelnuts, there is such a thing as weeds. So we're gonna do something, the establishment here, if you don't, it's gonna slow you down. The production, but all of you in the organic world know how to do this. There's no one method that works. You just have to find the system that works for you. In our particular case, we're relying heavily on mulch and I'd like to show this video for words so that you're all jealous. I got some mulch for $200. All right. Yeah. Because we have an active wood industry up there, lost again. So anyway, we mulch heavily and then we'll be using basically some mowing and weed whipping to control the weeds. But we do have, this is an alfalfa field, so we may be looking at that. Yeah, the microphone's dead for those of you that just came in, so I have to alternate between yelling and the microphone. What kind of mulch was it? It's just sawdust, hardwood sawdust. Yeah. Just mixed hardwood? Yep. Okay. Mainly birch and maple, or maple, soft maple. Doesn't seem to matter, just put it on thick. And that's basically it. But there are, of course, other methods. Some people use the plastic landscape fabric with wood chips that works fine. It works great, and then I've actually got to deal with plastic, but these eco-weeders, we have some growers using these with the mechanical cultivation works fine too. You're just trying to keep the weeds down in the first couple of years. If you can do planting into rice double is also an option. Again, anything you can do to keep the weeds down. A spale seed bed always is great. And then alley cropping as much as you can. Now, the other reason for the tubes is that, as we know, with weed control, we have, why do I even yell into this when it doesn't work? Is that things get out of hand, right? And you get behind, and whatever happens. And so having those tubes there, at least through the first year, at least you can see where the hazelnuts are. So you don't mow them down. So they're probably more to protect the plants from you than from the wild. Yeah, quick question. Alley cropping, if you're a produce grower, is there allergy issues for new safety? And if so, when does that start? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't really know the answer to that. I mean, the pollen is shed in March, so the pollen's long gone before you're selling any produce out of there. So I don't think the pollen's an issue. In terms of the proteins that might be in the plant material that would cause allergy issues, I don't actually know if there's stuff that's shedding off the leafy cereal or off the nuts themselves. It's a good question, yeah. I mean, to give you some, I have a, my brother and his son is allergic to hazelnuts and they haven't visited our farm in 15 years, right? I'm like, ah! Now, whose fault was it? I planted the hazelnuts before you had the kids, so. So this is what you're looking at close to maturity, and we don't really want the plants to get much taller than this. One issue with the seedlings, those of you that have older plantings, you know some of those plants get really big. And so we're trying to develop pruning strategies. We don't really want to rely on hand pruning. That's fine on a one acre basis to get down there in your hands and knees every spring, but if we're doing this in 30, 40, 50,000 acres, we just don't have the labor pool to do it by hand. So we have to develop mechanical size management strategies, and we've got a bunch of trials started to do that and it turns out that, surprise, surprise, it's very specific to the genotype of the variety. So some sucker a lot, some grow more upright, and so we just have different strategies. So when you buy a plant, let's say you buy price W41, there's gonna be recommendations specific to that plant, how to manage size-wise. The other thing, and this is kind of interesting, is it's from a, right? So anytime a new crop comes out, who always gets the advantage, right? Those of you with amazing soils, right? I live up in far northern Wisconsin. We either have pure clay or we have pure sand, and it turns out that hazelnut's growing on the world's greatest soils grow really well, but they get really big, okay? And they produce a lot. However, the plants get too big perhaps, and now you've got this management issue. In Spooner, up in central Wisconsin, where we've got sandy, lone soils, the plants produce roughly the same on a sort of per square area basis, but the plants stay smaller. So there may very well be a Goldilocks zone somewhere in the upper Midwest, whereas the right combination of soils and climate, that we get a manageable plant with good enough yields. We don't know where that is yet, but we suspect there is gonna be something that shakes that over time. Okay, anybody that has hazelnuts knows about this one in particular, the Blue Jays. The Blue Jays are amazing. They don't show up in our planting until the day those hazelnuts are ripe, and then there's like 30 Blue Jays, and they take these things, huge clusters, like three times the size of their body, and they fly up into trees, and they take the nuts out of the husk, and they stick them in the cracks of trees, and then they bang on them with their beets till they can get the nuts out. And then at the bottom of the tree, there's just this pile of all your hazelnuts that are all eaten, right? I mean, it's an amazing pest, so we have to deal with these. So when it comes to deer, site selection is key. If you're gonna take a 40-acre woodlot and carbot, one acre planting in the middle, you're gonna get hammered by the deer. If you're right next to a woodlot, right? So if you're out in the middle of the field, you're gonna have less deer pressure. They don't chew the plants to the ground, but they definitely slow them down, right? It's this whole thing, not preferred deer food, right, or deer browse, but you know what that means. It just depends on how many deer you have. Yeah, question. Three microphones working, man. All right, good. So, Fencing, if you've got high deer pressure, and you're all farmers, you know how to deal with deer, but it is an issue in hazelnuts. It won't chew them to the ground, but it's high pressure, it will slow them down. And then this answer, only you can see that, don't go on vacation in the fall, okay? And in particular, if you've got seedling hazelnuts, that ripening period happens over almost a month and a half. And what happens is the blue jays in the squirrels just follow the plants as they ripen. And so what often happens for beginning growers is the first ripen up they see, or as soon as the critters show up, they go out and harvest everything in the planting. And now they've got this mix of mature and immature hazelnuts, and they try to de-hust the hazelnuts that weren't yet mature, and you can't get them out of the house. It's a nightmare. And then the nuts shrivel because they didn't remove the moisture yet when the ripening process. So you actually have to be there and harvesting like every other day and keep track of which plant is ready when and then pick it before the squirrels and the chipmunks do. If you have five plants and you lose all the squirrels, don't call me and say, hazelnuts don't work because the wildlife got them, right? Of course, you only have five plants. It's like if you only had one blueberry plant. So in Oregon where they don't have a whole lot of wildlife, it's a huge, they're in the Willamette Valley. It's a huge agricultural, horticultural area. They're still losing the outer two rows to hazelnuts. And they'll tell you that, right? So, but on the other hand, right, hazelnuts are a great wildlife crop. So you just have to be prepared. You're going to lose some, but you just have to outwit them. That's one reason why we can shorten the ripening period by going to a mix of cultivars instead of that huge pool of seedlings. And that's going to make it easier to keep the head of the critters in the harvest thing because they're all ready at the same time. And even blue jays can't eat that many. They'll, they'll try. All right, so we've been, hazelnuts 1.0 was also a honeymoon period when it comes to pests because we just didn't have pest populations building up to any levels, but now in our older plantings, we're starting to see pests. And of course, right? Well, crops have pests and so that developed IPM strategies to deal with them. This is going to be the main one. These are nut weevils. The, we'll also have a picture. These are also pests, but I'll ignore those other three for now because this is the main one. So there's the female and the female will go and drill a hole into the nut. And this is usually happening in June or early July. Turn around and layer eggs into the nut and then the larva develops along with the kernel and the larva feeds on the kernel. And then at the end of the year, when it's time to pick the hazelnuts, the larva tunneled out of the hazelnut, dropped to the orchard floor, overwinter and the cycle continues anew. And so what you end up with are empty hazelnuts with a little hole in them. So we're seeing these older plantings at losses can be as high as 25%. Because weevils only eat hazelnuts. They're not moving in from trees or something, right? So we've got a graduate student, Haley Shannon, who's working on this. We need to better understand the theology, the life cycle, understand the beneficial insects better out there and come up with any strategies we can. We're also looking for resistant varieties. It turns out that the thicker shell nuts tend to not have as much weevil damage. So that's good. So anyway, the last thing we want to do is to be out there spraying, whether it's organically approved or not. So we're trying to make sure we get ahead of this at least on the knowledge side, so we know what to do. But that's the reality. Over time, we're going to have to deal with this pest. Let's see. So I'm going to shift gears here, right? So when we started the hazelnut project, when all those blue dots started, there was no way to get your hazelnut process. We don't have a nut industry in Wisconsin or Minnesota. So what are you going to do? And one of those blue dots started producing nuts before raising their hands. Hey, what should we do? We're going to try to get this stuff processed. So by processing, I mean de-hust, crack, and clean. So we launched this hazelnut processing accelerator, and it's a public private partnership where we have built a pilot scale, what we call a bridge processing plant. It's up in Asheville, Wisconsin. And most of the hazelnuts grown in the west that are actually harvested anyway have been coming to Asheville to get processed because it's really the only facility. At this point, it's almost free to use. You don't pay to use the equipment. You just have to pay Northam College where the facility's located. An hourly rent to use the overall facility. But at this point, it's free to use. So we're just trying to make it easier to get the value to get your hazelnut to market. You can sell in-shell hazelnuts and some do at a farmer's market, but what's the last time you've eaten an in-shell hazelnut? Maybe you walked by the thing that the grocery store display and, huh, hazelnuts, okay. Right, the market just isn't there. So we've got to get kernel. So we've got to be able to crack them and clean them. Oh, look at that. Okay, so the first part of our accelerator was really looking at the various harvesting platforms that are out there in small fruit that are all in production and see what we could do to optimize that equipment and get it as cheap as we can for growers to use. So that's a rotary shaker harvester used in blueberries. It has fingers that get into the hazelnuts and shape the plant. Works really well. Let's see if the next one works. I don't know how noisy it is, right? You just sense the grandeur and the scale. That's a prototype olive harvester that was built by Oxbow. When we got it, it was sitting on a research station trying to harvest oranges. It's really fast, it works really well, and it's really expensive, like $400,000, right? So those of you with one acre you're probably not gonna buy it. But it works great. So the issue is, what do we do? We're at it because it's so expensive. So this is where working together and eventually pooling volume to afford this and there's a co-op that owns one and a group of growers owns one. The other issue though is that that unit is self-repelled and it's too heavy. Imagine if you've got wet soils and you gotta get an harvest and you gotta do it every year, you're gonna start causing serious compaction, right? Okay, so to drive cost out of it, the idea is to build a pole behind unit that anyone can pull with a 30 or 40-horse tractor. The other thing is this blueberry equipment was designed to handle things that go splat and hazelnuts, you can bang around all you want and they're not gonna crack. So we can make much simpler material handling systems for these harvesters and that'll bring the cost down because all these little bucket elevators and things in there are expensive. So we've got a process in place where we're trying to get a new prototype built by this ball that uses what we've learned from these trials over the last year. I'll show one more. This is a blueberry picker. I think there's four of these being used in the upper midwest right now because they're relatively cheap if you can find them, they're like $12,000. You gotta put a little money into them, but generally they work. These are from like the 1970s or so. So for now anyway, they work fine. The problem isn't so much the harvesters, it is every plant in that row is ripening at a different time and the cluster detachment force, meaning how much shaking it takes to pull that cluster off is different. And so you've got to make multiple passes and not have to remember to go. But, all right, so this is what your next step, this is what you have in shell, or in husk hazelnuts out in Oregon, they don't have to deal with this step because the nuts fall free in the husk and swept off the floor. If you go to Turkey in the fall when they're harvesting, you're going to see piles of this everywhere. This is how most hazelnuts in the world are harvested still in husk and then they're dried down in these piles. Here's one, this is a grower by Barnabell. And then the call-out in Turkey, the call-out comes along with their mobile harvest or de-husking unit, runs them through the unit and takes the unshalled nuts off the market. So that's sort of a stop-gap measure that we're doing too. And so folks that develop different husking technologies, we have plans for a do-it-yourself husker, this barrel husker, and it works for a couple of acres, you can stand there and run product through, it works fine, you do have to drive down first though. This is one of those Turkish units, the bottom left corner that was imported, and there's three of these now in the Midwest and it's basically a big vacuum system that goes really fast, it works really well in dry material as well. What we want to do is get to a stage where we can de-husk immediately, we don't have to go through that drying step of the husk because it's a lot of material handling to do that. And so what we're looking at is this PenDragon X12, which is a prototype unit that does a really good job de-husking green hazelnuts. You can buy one of these now, but we've got some changes we want to make and ultimately we want to integrate that into the harvesting platform, and now we've got a combine that does it all in the field. Okay, so that's on the harvesting side, right? And so that's more or less where most growers will finish their operation. So they're going to grow them, de-husk them, and then sell the in-shell nuts to the processor, or a grower-owned processing company or however you want to structure it. So that's why we've built up this, you know, a tool to help you answer the question, can I make money growing hazelnuts? Well, there's 100 million variables involved, and so this allows you to customize your own growing plan. How much do you, how much does your tractor cost to operate? How much is your labor supply cost, right? All those variables that you need to adjust, and so you can build out your own enterprise-funded model. It's on our website. Do you know where we're doing the planning? It's on our website. So we did publish a document called, Can I Make Money Growing Hazelnuts? That's available on the website that goes through sort of our best guess of what we know now and how much it costs to produce and what the harvesting costs are and the de-husking costs. Go ahead and download that thing and read through it and just scoff at all the numbers and say, I can do it way cheaper than that. Like, good, then do it, right? So take that spreadsheet tool and build out your own enterprise budget and then you'll be able to make a go-no-go decision. This particular document is based on the projected yield of our top material, but you can plug in lower average yields for the seedling material too. So again, stuff that you can play with. All right, so to give you some idea on our projections of what the Midwest Hazelnut world can do is this is the annual net income. Pity is principal interest taxes. I forget another one. Anyway, insurance, there you go. So that's the cost that's more specific to how you're financing, right? So we leave that out of the enterprise budget, but anyway, this would be your cost of production and then the net income year by year. So you're gonna spend a lot of money, just back on it, establishing the plans, right? We all know that. This is no different than blueberries, apples, anything. And then you wait until they mature and then you start seeing some revenue and positive cash flow. The orange would be the Midwest system and the gray is the Oregon system and you can see we're roughly competitive over time. The other big advantage we have is we have land, especially as you go into the more marginal production areas that's value that at most a couple hundred dollars is acre rent, right? In my region, that's about $20 an acre to rent land. In Oregon, on that prime ground, we're looking at 10, 15, $20,000 an acre, okay? Of cost, not annual rent. It was annual rent that we were agreeing to. I feel that. So we've got a competitive advantage on land cost, I think. So we're seeing that we can be competitive on yields. And so that's good, right? All right, what? You all have to be prepared for the reverse jay curve. You're gonna be in the hole for a while. Projected break even is around year seven, year eight. Okay, but that's true for any other perennial crop. So, or what do you mean perennial crop? But the upside is your children, your grandchildren will only thank you for establishing the space on that. Because they're seeing a really low input system that produces some significant revenue potential every year. All right, so the processing facility, oh, back off. This is what we're operating right now. And right now we can process the Midwest hazelnut crop in about two weeks. So lots of capacity even on the small equipment. This is a Burrell cracker that we imported from Spain. We tried lots and lots of different crackers and this is the one that works the best. Now, this is an aspirator in the middle that we use to separate the first shell fragments from the kernel. And then the drum size, or basically it's a game of how can you get as many of those shelf fragments separated from the whole kernel after cracking so that you don't have to do it by hand, right? Give you some sense of how small we are in the industry right now is 2021, we'll probably end up doing about 7 to 8,000 pounds of in-shell nuts. There's not very many, right? But it's enough that there's a company, the American hazelnut company, is able to get some traction and get product to market. And so that was the whole goal of this accelerator. But like I said, we have 50 open weeks left available to process any nuts that you grow. So bring it on, right? We've got the capacity. This was very different five years ago when people said, how do we process our nuts? We have no options, right? So I feel like we've gotten rid of this bottom line. All right, half glass, full people, raise your hand. Okay, half empty or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that blue bar, that's the annual per capita consumption of hazelnuts in the USA, right? How many of you, what's the last, well, how many of you have eaten a hazelnut in the last week? You're all lying. No, you're not. Okay, you're an exception. Yeah, right. So we just don't eat many hazelnuts. Not because we don't like hazelnuts. It's because they're kind of hard to find, right? They're not in most of our standard cereal products or nut bars or whatever else. You kind of have to go looking for them. So there's a big opportunity. Midwest or consumers have not eaten many hazelnuts. They can be convinced to eat them if they're given an opportunity to try them, right? So it's a big opportunity. However, keep in mind that this isn't, this is not gonna change forever. That opportunity is not gonna be there forever because organs expanding as fast as they can. Chile is expanding as fast as they can. Australia is expanding. And we're back home. And so eventually those hazelnuts are gonna make their way to the Midwest. So we need to get into this market fast. All right, so here's the American Hazelnut Company and we sort of have a two-part development strategy for the Midwest. Eventually companies like General Mills and Mars will say, and that's what they have said. Yeah, we'll buy hazelnuts. We just need truckloads every day. Oh, right, we're a long way from there. But that market is there, right? So there's really a lot of upside potential here. What we're focused on is this growing value added. We want you to take hazelnuts and sell them direct to a consumer so you get the full retail market. So the American Hazelnut Company was launched to grow around hazelnut processing and marketing company and they take hazelnuts from the members, they send them to Ashton to get processed and they take the kernel and they turn it into oil, meal and now they have a flavor hazelnut product called Hazel Snackers. And they're selling through online on the web or they have a couple of retail outlets. So here's the product that they launched was that last October. And they, it took them, you know, the first year, it took them like, yeah, question. What about hazelnut milk? It seems like it's way more sustainable than almond milk and would be a good option. I love that idea and here's why. Our initial production costs, right? Because if we're small in scale, it's high. So you got to sell hazelnuts for a lot of money and so it kind of limits your market potential. What I've told folks in American Hazelnut companies, you need to sell hazelnut as an ingredient and sell water, right, through hazelnut milk. It's a great example of how to do that. So yes, we got to find another way. So for example, Nutella of the world, you know, it's like 40% of the world's hazelnuts applied. What do you buy when you buy Nutella? You're not buying hazelnuts. Palm oil and sugar and cocoa powder, right? Anyway, so they're going to sell out the Midwest hazelnut supply about three months this year. Just one little product, just add a little bit of flavor, make a small fat side, put some marketing on it and we'll walk. So we need more hazelnuts, that's the situation we're at. That's why I keep saying that time is now. And so we sort of have to think about, okay, I don't have a million price W1 for you right now but we do have seedlings now in the year or two we'll have the advanced material. So let's get started. All right, so your next steps and then I'll hand it over to Pete here. Check out midwesthazelnuts.org. It's the portal for all things hazelnuts in the Midwest. We do have a conference. This is an annual conference on the first weekend of March. It's coming up. We might even be in this room, I don't know. We're down here on the cross. And we have two evening sessions that are virtual. Wednesday and Thursday next week that are free and another in-person is here Friday and Saturday. Anyway, it's all on the website. We have hazelnut grower clusters established in the Midwest right now. You can join a network and join like-minded folks that are working together in your geography. And then really think about this opportunity in 2022. Just to say, so we have six clusters established and each of them have a cluster coordinator run by an individual plus their organization to support it. And I'll just leave these. So the idea is go find where you live roughly and then go to our website and you can find these nice people and they will help you get scattered hazelnuts in your backyard, right? Or in your region. Is Meshki, is that what you were talking about earlier? No, that's not the grimo for my cherry on it. It's different than that. G-R-I, I don't know. Okay, I keep eating it at peace time, so I'm gonna, maybe, do you need to do a slide or do you need to transfer over? Okay, so, well, he's getting organized. I can take any questions. Yeah. If you have an established hedgerow and you have some non-producers in there, can you pull those out and put new seedlings in without getting them amongst those mature trees or shrubs? Yeah, so the question is, I'm paraphrasing, but I'm one of the blue dots on the screen and I've got seedlings and I have a row of hazelnuts and some of them haven't produced anything. What should I do with those? Can I pull them out of the ground and replace them with other genetics? And yes and no. So one model that's being proposed and it's a great model for the nurseries because they sell a lot of plants, but is to plant every three feet in the row and then about year four, year five, when you start seeing how they're doing, then you take out roughly every other plant. So that works relatively early on. The problem with the mature planting is if you take the one that you've got, the two competing plants, they're gonna fill that space so fast that they'll out-compete anything new that you plant. So it's more about thinning the row than it is replanting within the row. Yeah. Two questions. Have you heard of the beast? Yeah. And okay, so how does that compare with some of these you're doing? Yeah, so OSU 541 is a release that developed by Oregon State and it was evaluated at Rikers and out in Nebraska. It's 75% European, 25% American hazelnut. We have it in our germplasm trials of the six locations, Bayfield Staples, St. Paul, two sites in Iowa, and in Madison. Anything north of Madison, it basically freezes back to the ground. That is not proven winter hardy unfortunately because it's a really nice plant. It's doing, the plant is doing really well in Madison, but at year five, it still hasn't produced any nuts. So it better produce nuts next year. Otherwise, we can't wait that long for production. It just ruins the cash flow model. And so stay tuned. But at this point, it doesn't look for the broader midwives. Yeah. The second question is, your mechanical harvesters, how often do you harvest them? Yeah, so the growers that are like the ones I showed data for, two to three passes per year. Is it? You know, that's fine, but it's just that it's cost. Ideally, we want one pass and you get a lot. But with the seedlings, they're just so variable. Yeah. How are you applying the semi-load of sawdust to these new plantings? What are the aggregations of these new plantings? Did you notice how nice and neat those piles were during the plant? And it was one shovel full at a time in the back of a pickup truck. Well, I mentioned a couple of dairy producers that are doing this. They also have access to that. And they just have a chopper box with the sawdust charge. So you just load the chopper box and pull it behind and just fill the road that way. Yeah. And the way back, it depends. So sometimes those suckers, when they come out, they will have roots. And sometimes they're just basically rhizomes that eventually turned up and they'd already root on them. So you can try layering them where you actually get in there, find where it makes that turn and then girdle it with a twist tie or something or a zip tie right away in the spring and then put some sawdust around it and see if it'll grow roots for you during that year and then you can harvest it in the fall. So it just depends whether it's from the road. Okay, one more question and I'll hand it over. E-E-E. Yeah. What's the life span, productive life span in the shrug format as opposed to... Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, Hayes a lot, they just keep recycling wood. So they'll just send up new shoes as older ones die, right? So it could be many, many years. Our oldest plantings are 30 years old, I think, that some of the growers have. And they're still productive. Yeah, there definitely is some wood recycling that's happening that we can better manage. Okay, well, thanks, I'm gonna hand it over. Yeah. Hi, good morning, I'm Dr. Pete Lammers. I teach animal nutrition classes at UW-Plainville. I also work with sustainable pork producers and poultry producers and pretty much anybody who wants to feed something a little bit strange to livestock, they seem to find me and that's okay. So, passing around some samples of the various plants I'll be talking about today. If you wanna talk more about them, I'm around, check me out. The three questions I was asked to address as part of the CERA project was, how can we effectively feed in-chill hazelnuts? What can we expect when we feed pig's hazelnuts? And to estimate a market price for the in-chill hazelnuts as a feed stuff for pigs? Because sure, it's really, really great to sell a whole nut for 12, 15, 20, 30 bucks a pound, whatever that price comes down to be on those six ounces samples. But you're gonna have a lot of hazelnut that is not gonna make grade, even when you have it working. So what's gonna be the value of that? What can we do with it? If we look at the nutrient profile of hazelnut products, you'll see that not surprisingly, the shells pretty much just fire and not a whole lot of good stuff in there. And the kernel is really rich in oil. And if we grind the kernel of the shell, it looks more like shell of the kernel because there's a lot of shell on that kernel. That's fine and good, but how does that compare to some of our other feed stuffs? Well, you can see it's got way more fiber than most of the feeds we would usually feed the pigs. But it also has a lot of fat, even with that extra fiber. And so it's not a perfect trade-off, but I sort of think about the more fiber I feed the pig as long as I add some fat to get the energy back up. Maybe they'll still do okay. What's really exciting about hazelnut's that offer a unique opportunity for value added feeding to livestock is the fatty acid profile of the various products. If we look at the hazelnut kernel and the end-shell hazelnut, you'll see that most of the fatty acid is a lye acid. Is that valuable? Maybe? Let's talk about that in a few slides. Okay, so the first step if we were gonna feed this to pigs would be to, yes, pigs will happily chew on this, but if you mix this with corn and soy beans, they're just gonna spit this stuff out and eat the other stuff. So the first step is to grind it so that they will have to eat it, mix it in with the other feed and force them to eat it. And yeah, they really like the kernels, but they're not big fans of the shell, but you know, I also had to eat broccoli a lot and rhubarb when I was growing up. So, the way we compared the hazelnuts, we use the two horsepower roller mill that was designed for home brewers. It says it can handle 60 bushels per hour. It came out of Canada. We found that we could process, this is great, about 200 pounds of hazelnuts per, 200 pounds of hazelnuts in about 15 minutes using this equipment.