Talk today in Oberlin! And harvest status.

I know this notice is super-late, but figured I'd try to get it in anyhow. Chestnut harvest time here on the farm; all super busy.

Philip will be giving a talk on Woody Agriculture at Oberlin College today, 12:20-1:15. The talk is open to the public, and will be held in the Craig lecture hall of the Science Center which is on "North" campus, at the corner of Lorain and Woodland St. It is a large lecture hall on the second floor. You can tell anyone to just ask someone to point them in the right direction.

I will do my best to get more harvest updates here soon. Hazel harvest is done; we have enough seed that in 2011 we should be able to produce 2-4 times as many as we did this year. I'm pretty sure we're already sold out of select material, however. Hickory harvest has started, and chestnut harvest is beginning. If anybody wants to show up on the farm this weekend for harvest help, there should be chestnuts to pick up!

Dr. Susan Wiegrefe Joins Badgersett Research

Badgersett Research Corporation is immensely pleased and proud to announce that Dr. Susan Wiegrefe is joining the company.

Dr. Wiegrefe's doctorate is in plant breeding, and she comes to us from the Morton Arboretum, where she had responsibility for breeding maples, Viburnums, and several other groups, and from a professorship at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.

Dr. Wiegrefe will be involved in all aspects of crop development at BRC, for hazels, chestnuts, and hickories. Besides her unusually broad comprehension of the many aspects of botany, she has also been a specialist in plant propagation, and will be working both in the field and the greenhouse to advance our projects using those skills.

A large reason for our enthusiasm about hiring Dr. Sue is that she is not limited in her interests to just the plant genetics; but is deeply interested in working on all the integrative factors needed for woody agriculture to move into the mainstream. Besides taking chief responsibility for the apple crop this fall, next spring she will be taking primary responsibility for our long postponed efforts to add sheep to the cropping systems here.

Welcome!

Illinois Harvest info-

Here's the very quick skinny on how the hazelnut harvest went at the Illinois planting: really good; considering.

Sorry to say Dr. Brandon has all the photos at the moment, and he's up to his neck in the regular alligators; and I'm in Virginia.

Details: alas, only about 20% of the nuts we saw in mid-August were still on the bushes when we arrived Sept. 4. Three factors; we'd had several days of very high winds just before (the kind that blows semis off roads); deer had been eating a couple specific breeding-lines of the hazels far more intensively than we'd ever seen before, and there were more tree squirrels in the plantings than we'd expected (gray squirrels, is what we saw).

We did pick up a fair number of good nuts from the ground, but only a tiny fraction of what had been blown off, of course. Sept. 4 is extremely late to start harvest, of course, so this was not entirely unanticipated. We kept hoping a machine would materialize, which made us put it off longer than we would have otherwise.

With 8 pickers, it took us 1.5 days to pick what was there; not bad. We DID get in a substantial quantity of nuts; Dr. B has a photo of us all and the pile of bags; we'll get it up here soon.

So; no tonnage; but, lots of good news:

The bud mite is well established throughout the planting.

EFB (Anisogramma) is present, though we'd failed to find it earlier, and is well established on several plants; some of its companion microorganisms are also already present.

The overall quality of the nuts from this planting are very greatly improved from earlier plantings, demonstrating that BRC breeding techniques work well.

The genetic diversity in the planting includes several variations that will make machine harvest easier. A primary chore ahead of us is choosing which of several harvest strategies to pursue.

The genetic diversity in the planting was also important in a little extra incentive to Dr. Wiegrefe; as you'll see in the next post...

A bit of info on the Big Picking event..

Hello, Meg here:

Both Philip and Brandon are swamped getting the picking weekend organized as well as getting the work here running well enough to leave for a few days.

Therefore...

I'm going to be the on-farm center to coordinate volunteers, meetings, ride-shares and so on.

Here's the scoop...

Philip and Brandon will be on the site as early as they possibly can Friday, which MIGHT mean they will leave Thursday night as it is quite a distance away. They are willing to guide anyone in from the (sign up/call in to pick to get this info...) We are doing this for two reasons, first this is a private site (both for Badgersett and the owner) and also because the roads are highly confusing to navigate and literally dangerous in some places. Call me and LEAVE A MESSAGE at (888)557-4211 ext. 6; that will alert me through my email. I will be checking constantly throughout the weekend.

(For those wondering; the site is in NE IL; right in the corner.)

Driving arrangements can be made. Car-pools are welcome to meet at Badgersett and leave one or more of their vehicles here. Please let me know if you want to car-pool and when you will be arriving at Badgersett so I can set you up with like minded people.

Brandon and Philip will welcome a few riders going with them, but those people must stay at the site the whole weekend (returning Monday morning) or arrange to ride with someone leaving earlier in the weekend.

Sleeping arrangements are a little loose at the moment. We have two triple rooms reserved at a local motel in which we can probably stuff about 12 people. If you need a place to sleep, remember that they are available, but you may be sharing your sleeping arrangement with some new friends! Also if you are bringing a RV, tent, or even a van that you are planning to sleep in please let us know so we can find you a place.

Please remember that we would love to have you for the entire weekend, but if it is not possible feel free to come for the amount of time you can spare. I would just like to know when you will be arriving and leaving so I may arrange to have enough picking supplies for you as well as letting the guys know when you will be there.

Please feel free to call or email me starting from the instant you receive this so I can make this weekend a great experience for us all.

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.