Your urgent help needed.

First; look at this video. It'll take a few minutes. The first 30 seconds or so of film show UNfertilized row; after that (when the bushes get big and green) the rows were fertilized.

That is our Badgersett Research Corporation expansion farm in Illinois.

You are looking at some 3-4 miles of harvestable hazel bushes; with a substantial crop ripe; right now today.

So far, both BEI and Korvan have failed to respond to our repeated requests for a picking machine, to start working on real machine development (in spite of our offer to pay up to $3k in costs).

We will be picking these rows by hand; on Sept. 2/3/and 4. All day; fast; all the people we can get. Almost everyone there will be volunteers.

We're expecting to harvest up to 2 tons of dry nuts; perhaps more. These will finally give us the nuts needed to work seriously on cracking/sorting etc. machines. We're hoping Lee Pothast will be working on this harvest to develop his husker further.

If you want to see what a real hazel harvest is supposed to look like; of nuts at commercial potential today (no 20 years from now) - you should come; volunteer; camp overnight, and help get this incredibly historic harvest in. This is it. The first real full scale harvest of neohybrid hazels.

Be aware; the nuts in this field are 10X better than yours. Or the ones you've seen at Badgersett. They represent the cutting edge of our breeding work (as of 2003). So they are 15-20 years beyond anything at Arbor Day Farm, for example; which contained no cutting edge material, even at the time it was planted.

Bring anyone you want who wants to help; but note; this is a restricted private research site; belonging to Badgersett; persons representing competitors or researchers from other entities are BARRED from attending this event. The owner does not want the site public; if you are coming, we'll arrange to meet groups in a town in NW Illinois, and then guide you to the farm.

More info will follow here; if you can come; comment here with your email for more info; or call our new corporate toll free number, 888-557-4211, and leave your info.

Now- look at that video again.

pocket gophers

As a result of short help and lousy luck with health over the past 3 years, our pocket gopher population on the farm has metastasized. Look below for an old blog post from 2004 for abundant details and photos about how serious pocket gophers are for hazels.

In the past we've relied on the specific gopher poison we sell, "Answer" (not set up on the web yet) - which is labeled for use on food crops, and works better than anything else we'd found, in terms of dollars/time/per gopher.

However- we now have animals of various kinds, and while secondary poisoning is supposed to be uncommon, we really really don't want to take the chance with a working dog we've spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours on. And we have 3 dogs now.

There's also a chance of secondary poisoning for our cats (5 - 3 barn cats for horse shelter and greenhouses), and our guinea fowl/chickens, which we are hoping to actually make some tangible money with this year, besides their non-monetary contributions of tick and general bug control. If a carcass gets pulled up on the surface, and attracts flies- there will be maggots- and the poultry will eat them.

All of this is low probability; but too high for me to like it.

So- we found another path, and it's been working quite well.

Amish boys. The township here pays a $2 bounty for gophers- which is quite sensible given our terrain and soil; the erosion they can start is very serious.

As additional incentive- we pay our 2 experienced gopher trappers an extra $1/gopher; a 50% bump in their pay, basically. The township takes the 2 front feet as proof; and we take the tail.

Our boys are brothers, 10 and 14, and we usually drive them to and from their home (about 3 miles away) 3-4 days a week.

We just finished the first two weeks- total gophers = 44

This time of year this are big old gophers from last year; many lactating females, so effectively we're getting the broods too.

And these 44 came out of our most sensitive places- where they were or were about to really hurt hazels.

If you've ever trapped gophers- that's a whale of a lot. The boys and their family were seriously pleased with the $44 bucks. We've got lots more gophers. And some happy helpers.

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Old Blog Post by Phil Rutter, 9/27/04 at 9:01:26 AM.

Gophers Again-

Pocket gophers- Geomys bursarius in the East, Thomomys sp. in the west; turn out to be extremely serious pests. This time of year; early Fall, is when the young of the year leave their home burrows, and invade new territory. You MUST get them out; one way or another.

This kind of gopher; pocket gophers, not the cute little stripy kind (which can eat tons of hazel NUTS if you leave your grass too long all summer and the population builds up...)

Here you see the teeth, that they cut roots with (their main food) and also use to dig with; their tremendous claws, and the deep cheek pockets that give them their name.

In 2001, the extent of the damage to young hazels by pocket gophers finally became crystal clear to us.

Hazels from 1-2 years old are too small to be very interesting to gophers; they may eat one or two, but damage will be minimal.

From 3-5 year old hazels however ARE big enough (the root systems), so that a pocket gopher may settle down and EAT. All the roots. All. Then go on to the next hazel in the line, and eat (ie. kill) that one. Then the next. This is a disaster.

Each of these sticks was a 3 year old hazel.... this is all the gopher left.

Once the hazels are a little older, their root systems are SO big that in most cases the gophers will get either full, or bored, and move on before doing lethal damage to the plant; most will survive. (There are some indications that genetics plays a role here, with native North American genes making the hazels less tasty to gophers, and European hazels getting worse damage levels. Maybe, we think.)

So - it's become critical to exclude pocket gophers from our young plantings - and yours, too.

Fall is an important time to GET them, for two big reasons:

1) They do NOT hibernate like some other rodents, and will cheerfully eat roots all winter; under frozen soil and snow where you can't get to them. 2) The juvenile gophers of the year spread out, in mid fall, and invade new areas. This is the only time you'll ever see a pocket gopher above ground; once a year, the young will get up on the surface and run like mad- maybe a mile; maybe two; then burrow in. Possibly this is a mechanism to prevent inbreeding in a mammal that otherwise moves very little from its home territory.

So, in fall, you'll see new gopher invasions, where you haven't had them before- and, these new sites are almost entirely young, DUMB gophers, which are very easily trapped.

The good news is; gophers CAN actually be controlled; unlike mice, which you could trap and remove by the hundreds, without making a dent in their population, gophers breed slowly, and trapping can actually keep them effectively out. But it's work getting there. Best way to do it is not allow them to get established in the first place.

A whole treatise on gopher control will take more than this web log to cover- main point here is; if you have gophers, GET them OUT of your hazels, right now. One gopher can easily kill 20-40 hazel plants per year; and not newly planted ones, mind you, but 3-5 year old plants, just ready to start bearing those nuts- a 5 year old hazel is vastly more valuable than a 1 year old; all that work; all that time. Hard to put a dollar value on, but we'll guess it's somewhere around $40/plant, IF you could find a similar replacement, which you can't. So; one gopher, at 40 X $40 = $1,600.

Holy Cats! Really?? Yeah, if you're counting.

Get the gophers out. Most farm neighborhoods with gophers have bounties on them; and kids and sometimes adults who make money trapping them out. Find your local gopher control folks (call the county agent if nothing else occurs to you), and get them out of your hazels, right now; before the ground freezes.

!!!