Exploring Hazelnut Cultivation: Innovation and Challenges with Dr. Thomas Molnar

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Thomas Molnar from the renowned hazelnut breeding program at Rutgers University. Founded in 1996, the Rutgers breeding program is responsible for many of the recent cultivars that have found their way into the public, including Monmouth and Somerset. To learn more about the Rutgers breeding program, check it out here.

Andy:

Tom, thanks so much for coming on. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up working with hazelnuts.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

First of all I appreciate the interest in the time today. Actually, hazelnuts, for me, go back to 1996. I was one of those lucky people who kind of fell in the right place at the right time with the right interests. When I was a freshman at Rutgers, I knew I wanted to get into plant breeding, and I met a professor who had already had a full career in breeding turf grasses for sports turfs and improved lawns. He was nearing retirement and he got inspired, or followed an earlier passion, to start a new project on breeding temperate nut trees.

It wasn't just hazelnuts; it was hazelnuts and different species of walnuts, almonds, and even ginkgos. We had pistachios, basically everything that J Russell Smith talked about in his tree crops book. I met Dr. Funk when I was a freshman, and I was just really blown away by his ideas of tree crops as part of sustainable agriculture. He started the project in 1996.

I started working hourly for him and basically worked alongside a really well-practiced and successful plant breeder, but to build a new program on a different crop species, you know, grasses versus trees, and allowed me to learn next to a master and was fortunate enough to carry that into graduate school and then fortunate enough to get hired to a master and was fortunate enough to carry that into graduate school and then fortunate enough to get hired as a, as a professor, to continue breeding trees at Rutgers, you know, despite not having a nut tree industry in the eastern united states. You know, twists and turns in there, but you know, I was really lucky to get inspired young, and I mean, that's over 25 years ago.

We had pecans, we had hickories, and it was like 12, 13, 14 years in, and they're just starting to produce nuts. It's not just that first year of nuts. You really have to evaluate these plants to see their value over time. So it was just there was no way that I could have a career breeding something like Northern pecans without industry support. But hazelnuts, within four or five years we get nuts. We have a disease problem that became like a targeted research area where we could make improvements, and it fit, and they're smaller, so the acreage is less, so we jumped into hazelnuts.

Basically, when my mentor, Dr. Funk, retired a couple of years after that, I basically decided it was all hazelnuts. We're going all in—no more pecans, no more hickories, no more walnuts. Yeah, I get that.

Andy:

The thing that's really interesting about hazelnuts, in particular as a crop, is that it's probably, historically speaking, for humans, it consumes. The largest portion of our diets across the globe has been hazelnuts, and they're really not a part of our diet anymore, which is, just, when you think about it, just like wild that the thing that literally kept humans alive for probably 100,000 years. We're just like, no, we don't do that anymore. What's a hazelnut? What does it taste like? It's in chocolate, right?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

The reason we started the tree nut project was because of the new health literature, and this was in the mid-1990s. Dr. Funk was reading the early literature that said if you eat tree nuts, you'll live longer, you'll have reduced health problems from cancers to, you know, blood pressure and all these great things. So he started eating a lot of tree nuts and then decided we needed to make some contributions here. And they’re just incredibly nutritious. I mean, hazelnuts are just really a wonderful food source.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm just going to be really oversimplifying here. So you really have like two major hazelnut varieties. You have the Americans and the Europeans, and then you've got this Eastern Filbert blight. Could you talk a little bit about the blight, like where it came from and why it's a big deal?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Sure. So there are some misconceptions about the blight sometimes because it's easy to confuse it with chestnut blight and how chestnut blight came to the United States and basically wiped out chestnuts, whereas eastern filber blight is a fungal pathogen that's been in North America for as long as hazelnuts have been here. So it's found to be associated with our Native American hazelnut, Corylus americana. The native hazelnut is highly tolerant, or even you could say resistant to it, although it does harbor it. But our native hazelnut has a very tiny nut with a thick shell. It's edible, it can be productive, and it tastes good, but it doesn't really compare to the size and quality of a European domesticated hazelnut cultivar.

So that's typically what people want to grow. They want to grow the larger, thinner-shelled European hazelnut. But unfortunately the European hazelnut, having not evolved in the presence of the fungus that causes eastern filbert bite, is highly susceptible. The fungus that causes Eastern filibuster is highly susceptible. So this has really been, even though there are parts of the Eastern United States where European hazelnuts can grow climatically, if you try to grow them here, or in the past, you've tried to grow them and all of a sudden, or within a couple of years, or even 10 years, the fungus makes its way from American hazelnut to European hazelnut, and it kills the trees. It's one of those diseases that kill the trees, so it's sort of a dead end.

Andy:

Now, I'm assuming that's similar to a chestnut blight, where it kills it down and then reshoots out. Or does it actually totally, 100% wipe it out?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Well, the chestnut has that ancient root system. Over time, those chestnut shoots get weaker and weaker, and they die, too. I think if it was a really well-established European hazelnut, it would probably keep coming back for decades. But most of the time, we have smaller trees with weaker root systems, and at least in New Jersey here, if it's a susceptible European hazelnut, within five or six years, they're typically they're dead, or they'll send up a weak cane, and it gets infected, and it dies off. So sort of similar in that respect. But then the flip, sort of a flip side flip story, because here we're trying to grow a foreign plant with a native disease, so we can't be too upset over it. It's not like it came and invaded and wiped out what we had, it's just it's really makes growing hazelnuts challenging.

Andy:

Now, are you doing any work with American hazelnuts and trying to breed them to be larger instead of the other way around?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

So our breeding program has multiple avenues, partly because, you know, looking to the future, we don't know. We don't really know what's going to work best with all the challenges coming. So we do have a whole side of the program, which is working with American hazelnuts as sources of disease resistance and also adaptation to, say, colder climates, more stressful climates. So we are actively crossing the American hazelnut with the European. Now we're multiple generations in the breeding of trying to basically keep some of those adaptation traits of the American, keep the disease resistance, but then get higher yields of bigger nuts with thinner shells and better quality. Americans will see those kernels and say oh, it's a hazelnut. They won't say what's this? You know, this little tiny, you know, pea that goes in my granola or something.

Andy:

Right, yeah, it reminds me so much of like what we have been doing with the American chestnut in terms of breeding. You know, you've got the what is it? 1/32nd Chinese. Now, Some of the varieties that they've created they're technically Chinese, but they have a lot of resistance. Is that kind of the direction we're going with this?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

We're going with it, very similar, but even with the chestnut they're finding it's more complicated. When you start looking at having durable resistance, there are many genes involved, so we can't in the hazelnut; we can't do a simple backcross breeding program where we just reduce it and keep crossing it back to Europe. So we're having to do a little more complicated breeding scheme. But we have. The beautiful thing with hazelnut is, though, versus chestnut, we're not trying to reforest, we're trying to plant orchards of clones, essentially. So if we get that really good plant, we're not as concerned with well, how does it transmit those traits to the next generation? We're going to graft it or layer it, and then your orchard, you're going to get that clone with all those good traits. We'll still use it in breeding, but we can. It's a shorter-term, a little bit easier goal than you know.

I work with or discuss this with some of the American chestnut breeders, and it's a long-term, complicated process to think about reforestation and stability in that context. Versus well, if I found a really good hazelnut, one out of 10,000 is awesome. We can clonally propagate it, and that's what the farmers will grow alongside each other. I'm not advocating one cultivar is all we want to grow, but um, you know it's, it's a little easier breeding.

Andy:

You know, you've mentioned now that this idea of one out of 10,000—how big of a scale are you guys growing these at?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

The breeding program has been going on at least since, you know, on a significant scale, since the year 2000. And we typically plan about 5,000 to 10,000, depending on the year seedlings every year from controlled crosses. So we cycle through many, many thousands in the breeding program, and each year we're planting more, but then at the same time, every year, something new is coming into bearing. We're selecting plants, moving into clonal yield trials, so we're kind of moving through this whole systematic process. We have over 30 acres in seedlings of hazelnuts and probably about five acres in what we call clonal yield trials. So it's a pretty significant program as we're trying to find those, I'll say, elite hazelnut selections but then also maintain diversity. We're keeping track of different sources of disease resistance. We have the American breeding lines; we have the pure Europeans. There are a lot of different components. So that takes a lot of land and a lot of resources to manage.

Andy:

Yeah, I have to imagine you must have an actual team of farmers or arborists or something managing this because, at that scale, that's some work.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

We did. We have a really great team. There's probably, if you include, like the farm crews that really help manage everything, there's probably five or six of us that are dedicated to the project, the different aspects of it, to keep it, keep it running, and you know, allow me to do some of the other sides of it. Uh, you know, there's a lot of logistical work just maintaining a breeding program and all the trees we grow in the greenhouse and um, but we're also trying to do publishable research and learn new things at the same time. So it's sometimes it's overwhelming.

Andy:

Yeah, I was looking on your research gate, uh, when I was looking up some of your papers, and it was just like there'd be a handful of papers, and it was like new cultivar, a new cultivar, a new cultivar, like all these different things that you guys are working on. So, like, with that in mind, how, like, what does a successful year look like in terms of, like, you've got these thousands of plants? What would you like if we got this many varieties that do blah, blah, blah? This is a good year.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Well, that's a really good question. It's almost hard to answer because of the long timelines. I've been doing this for 25 years, but we didn't release our first cultivars until two years ago, so it's taken such a long time, you know, to go through the selection and evaluation process to the propagation of those, to where, now, you can actually go buy from a nursery or a propagator of some Rutgers hazelnuts.

What we hope for, though, is to successfully raise our five to six or 7,000 seedlings, have enough field space to get them planted each year, and then go through and do successful yield evaluations. It's basically like a sliding. We have about eight or 10 major tasks that have to get done in a year, and you know, honestly, if we get six out of 10, we're doing well. If we can get all 10, then you know the stars were aligned, but we're.

You know, cultivar releases are it's complicated because, um, not only do they have to be better than what's available, they have to propagate well, and you even though, like for, for example, right now, we have some really new, really exciting new potential cultivars, but until you can start ramping up numbers, you don't really want to talk about them, because people can't get them and it's a tree. It might take three years; it might be three or four years to get numbers. So it's, you know, we're learning as we go, I should say, because, you know, 20 years has just taught me some things and made me question a lot of other things.

Andy:

More questions than answers. So are there not to put you on the spot, but are there any cultivars that you're particularly excited about that are coming out?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Well, just recently we have numbers of trees available of several of our new varieties and one that's really looking promising. Its name is Raritan, which is after Rutgers sits on the Raritan River here in New Jersey, so the name comes from Rutgers, and that one's propagating really well. Growers are putting in multiple-acre plantings of Raritan, but hazelnuts also need pollinizers, so that's a little bit of the challenge of what you plant with your Raritans. We released one in collaboration with the Hybrid Hazelnut Consortium, which is Oregon State University of Nebraska, the Arbor Day Foundation University of Missouri. We named it the Beast for kind of a funny side story there, but that's a really great pollinizer for Raritan. So we're excited that farmers are now planting, or homeowners, growers all different types of people that like plants are planting Raritan and the Beast.

And then just this year, probably, it's really for the first time two of our other cultivars will be available, named Somerset and Hunterdon, and we selected these plants. Like Somerset comes from a seed we germinated in the year 2000. Yeah, it's 23 years and this will be the first year 2023, when you can actually get it from suppliers. That's awesome. And then they're not going to produce nuts for four, five, or six years. So it's sorting out, but the trees are going in the ground. We've probably had at least 50 acres of trees get planted in 2022 and maybe close to 50 in 2021, you know throughout the Northeast. So it's unfolding, but we don't have all the answers just yet.

Andy:

Yeah, it'll be an intergenerational thing to see how these things play out, I think.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

It's really going to, because you know, you select a plant in one region, or we select multiple plants, and we try to release a diverse sort of a diverse population or a diverse set of clones, and you just don't know which one's going to perform best where. How far can you push it north? You know what, what are the cultural needs you need for it to perform well? It's all sort of unfolding as we speak.

Andy:

I'm a big tree crop person as well. One of the things that I struggle with or have been thinking about is how, if you breed this incredible hazelnut tree, that becomes a part of the marketplace. Do you see a place for increased hazelnut production where people buy it and want to eat it?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Well, part of what we've been doing over the past probably four or five years is we've been harvesting our extras a couple of thousand pounds, maybe up to 4,000 pounds of nuts, and we've been showing them, and we've been distributing them and selling them to local chefs and bakeries and candy makers, other kinds of restaurants all throughout this Northeast region and especially New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and they absolutely love the quality and the flavor.

So we've been able to sell everything almost immediately. The people who make tasty products see how flavorful a fresh hazelnut is, especially when it's roasted. So I really think once we get the word out a little bit more and the crop becomes available, the market demand is going to be there. Just the products that are being made with these fresh hazelnuts are so good, and you just can't replicate it with something from Turkey or, you know, elsewhere.

Andy:

That's awesome. Yeah, I truly hope that we get to see that at least in our lifetime because, you know, you go to the grocery store and it's like, oh, I want to pick up some hazelnuts or really any nut. There are really not a whole lot of options, and if you want something especially local or native, then you're making that search even harder and extremely expensive compared to any other protein at that price.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

And you think about, like, one of the other alternatives is almonds from California. I love almonds. They taste great, but that's very different than a locally produced nut crop which we've been lacking in the Northeast. So I think that I mean it's going to require expanding the market. If people don't eat a lot of hazelnuts they get an opportunity to see how flavorful they are and also recognize the nutritional value.

One thing I should mention is that once people realize this, the storage life and the shelf stability of hazelnuts. In the shell, you can leave them basically at room temperature for a year, and once you can shell them and roast them and they still taste great, they retain their flavor. So, in terms of local markets and being able to sell a crop basically all year and still have quality, it gets a lot of our farmers excited. That does the farmer stands, and the fresh market stands where you know all your tomatoes have to go, all your peaches have to go at once. Well, here's hazelnuts and you can sell, you know, 50 pounds a week all year. Essentially, if you, if you handle them the right way.

Andy:

That's awesome. Now, have you guys started looking into other additive-type uses for hazelnuts, like breeding for oils or anything else, something that you could utilize in a livestock feed or something like that?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Well, early on we did do some studies on oil content to see if you look at what, what's the variation? To see what's the variation, some have 50% oil; some have even higher, 65%, getting close to 70% by weight oil. We were even thinking there was funding out there for biofuel research and we were kind of looking at it as an oil crop. And then I smartened up and realized the culinary and food value is off the charts for this oil. We also recognize that the main limiting factor is yield and production, not the variation within the plants. It's more like, well, this might have a lower oil content, but we can increase yields by 500 pounds per acre, and that offsets it.

So we've really focused on high-quality kernels because you can press them for oil. But the market's there for the attractive round kernels that when you roast them, the skin comes off, and they're flavorful, and they go into candies and into pastes, and so we figured we'd focus on that because we have the genetic resources to get that. But we do have some growers that are looking into pressing them for oil. They're investing in the equipment because there's such a nice value-added component, I think, especially if you imagine growing them organically, locally and then having a local oil, culinary oil, that's going to go over quite well, I think.

Andy:

Yeah, I think so too. I mean, oils are so expensive, like good cooking oil, and you know, I was just on TikTok today, and I'm sorry I'm bringing up TikTok, but somebody was talking about how there's like this old woman in Greece talking about how, like, the olive oil we're getting in the United States isn't like the same thing as what they have there and people are so distrustful of anything on that scale anymore Because even if 99% of it is what it claims to be, that 1% is just. It makes everyone totally just like shut down and be like; I don't trust anything unless I can talk to the guy who made it. In which case, it speaks to some deeper human condition where it's like we value our community, we trust our community. We don't have that anymore, and we're starting to see the repercussions of not being accountable to anybody because you did something 6,000 miles away.

So I think that comes back to this idea of wanting foods local and with hazelnut oil. That means we have to start thinking about different foods that make more sense where we live, and I think for a lot of us, hazelnuts make a lot of sense, especially given their historical context for all humans across the earth that have required or utilized this plant for tens of thousands of years. But of course, the challenge becomes, and we talked a little bit about it before we started recording, is that when we start talking about tree crops in terms of like the infrastructure for agriculture, it's a totally different animal, although I feel like hazelnuts are kind of the sweet spot, though, because we do have a fair amount of crops already that are bush that we harvest from, versus tree crops. So I'm curious if you've had any of those kinds of conversations with farmers about what it looks like to scale up something like hazelnut production.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

It is one of the topics of discussion, and it presents some significant challenges and changes in mindset. And so if it is going to scale up just the mindset of annual agriculture versus tree crop agriculture, is, you know, for one, just that upfront investment, that the offset and the land required, but also the time required? Really, at this point in time limits, who jumps into hazelnut production? You know, we're seeing a really interesting group of people that get into hazelnuts at this point, being on the front of, well, here are the new varieties and giving out some growing advice, and it tends to be people who aren't always necessarily relying on their farm for a living. They have other sources of income to offset that four, five, or six years that's going to take to get a return on your investment.

Luckily, hazelnuts, as you said, are, although the European hazelnuts, I would say, more tree; the hybrid hazelnuts are bush form, but they're highly mechanized, so you can harvest them without a lot of hand labor. So whether it's the tree-type Europeans or it's the more bush-type hybrid hazelnuts, where there's a number of people now looking into over-the-top harvesting as you do for blueberries or some of the other berries, the main thing is it's not vegetables, it's not peaches. This just takes a few people with the right machines to harvest. So when we have farmers come in, and we demonstrate our harvesting equipment, and they realize that it's very different than peaches or apples, you know. We don't have as many pruning requirements, so you can really mechanize this crop, which brings it into. How do you grow corn, wheat, and soybeans? It's all highly mechanized.

You know, in New Jersey, where we are, land values are really high. The prices of land are high. You know, everything is a little extra complicated, I think, in terms of, you know, the price of land and labor and inputs. But I think once we show some of it in action, you see the trees, you know, recognize you're not having to plant these every year, and in fact, you don't have to prune them every year once they're established, minus sucker control, if you're growing European hazelnuts but you're going to get this valuable crop year after year.

I'm getting contacted by traditional farmers or people in the traditional farming community, whether it's conventional or organic. I'm seeing more of that as their neighbors who moved from the city and bought a nice parcel of land and are now turning into hazelnuts. The conventional farmers are getting a little bit interested, at least it seems. You know we're still. It's happening slowly, but it's exciting to see a little bit more acceptance in that community too.

Andy:

That's awesome, and it's funny that you brought up blueberries because that was exactly what I was thinking about seeing the machines come through on blueberry bushes and just clearing them out. That's exactly what I had envisioned, like a hazelnut production-type system.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

I'm excited about us getting to that point. It really changes the equation in terms of how do you manage your orchard floor, even food safety the nuts aren't dropping on the soil. It gives you a lot of options. It's still being worked out, though. Our best, most productive hazelnuts can be 25 feet tall. Maybe that's a little too large, but the hybrid hazelnuts are much smaller and more compact, but we haven't quite, I would say, identified just the right plant material yet. So I think over the next five to 10 years, it's all coming together. The engineers are working on the equipment. I've seen some really great equipment in working on hazelnuts. So if we can just get the right plants, the right equipment, figured out the timing and you know all the other components, this can be a really nice sustainable crop.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely. And how far north can these hybrids go?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Well, if you look at the upper Midwest really cold parts of Wisconsin, minnesota, probably touching into zone three, but definitely zone four, cold hardiness growing zone, and they have there's big plantings already established, but the problem is they're seedlings, so there's quite a bit of variation. So there are some challenges with that, but the plant material exists to do what we want to do. As a plant breeder of 20 plus years, I'm convinced that you know we can develop plants that grow in the cold region with higher yields and better quality kernels and all at the same time develop the right machines to harvest them appropriately and manage them the right way. It's exciting.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely; I always think about, I keep bringing up that I feel like the hazelnut is like the perfect plant for humans, especially given climate change, because of that quick turnaround, and if you can plant them that far north, they can establish themselves as regions that are right now perfect growing regions for monocrops. We start losing those as that border starts going further north. We've already invested and created what will replace those calories that we're basically going to functionally lose, replace those calories that we're basically going to functionally lose.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

And if you think about the caloric value of something like hazelnut, that's a high percentage of oil and very good protein and just a little bit of starch in there. It's just highly nutritious and the food calories per acre are quite substantial. For me, it's exciting, and it drives the work we do, I think. Now we have plant material that can do well. In sort of the mid-Atlantic region, we're getting to Zone 5, so, like parts of New York State, upper northern Pennsylvania, and then the upper Midwest, there's a couple of universities working there on hybrids, and we're joining forces. You know, it's coming to where we'll have these really productive plants for, you know, just think of the land they have there and the good soils and even the water resources. It holds a lot of promise for the future.

Andy:

I want to change gears just a little bit and talk about some of the stuff you've been doing with dogwoods. You told me you kind of inherited this project, but, like I, I like dogwoods for the simple fact that they're a native tree that we can use as an ornamental, and I don't think many people know that they're a native tree.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

There are actually two parts to that story because of the project that I inherited. His name was Elwin Orton, and his claim to fame was crossing our native dogwood with an Asian species.

What was happening was that we had dogwood anthracnose that was, at the time, looking like it might wipe out the native dogwood. It was really looking severe in the forest settings and even the landscapes. So earlier on in his career, although these two species bloomed about a month apart, really challenging to cross them, but he worked at it, and he was able to make these interspecific hybrids between the two, which ended up being anthracnose resistant, stem borer resistant. Like more you know, hybrid plants can just be more robust than either parent, and so I inherited a program really based on interspecific hybrids or mixing the native and Asian dogwoods. At the same time, we've been continuing to work on the native.

So it's kind of weird how plant pathogens and things change over time. So anthracnose, although it hasn't fully disappeared, it petered out somehow. Something changed, or something compensated, or another thing like a virus or another pathogen. I never got a clear answer, but it didn't wipe out our native dogwoods; it just kind of went away a bit. At the same time, when I was going away, a new strain of powdery mildew came from Asia that just hammers our native dogwood. this is a landscape plant that's supposed to be beautiful, and now it gets these powdery mildew-covered leaves, and it weakens the plant.

Then they get more stem borers, and then the trees either die or branches die. Part of my program is just the native dogwood, and we've been focused on powdery mildew resistance. I've been lucky that we did find a source of resistance, and some of our colleagues at the University of Tennessee also found resistance in the natives. So we've been building improved populations and making some selections where we now have pretty good tolerance to powdery mildew and selecting for, of course, better tree form and better blooms and you can have white or pink or red blooms. So we have this whole disease resistance breeding program in the native. And then we were continuing the the hybrid dogwood program because just they're also inherently resistant to powdery mildew and anthracnose and stem borers.

It's kind of you when you're battling invading pathogens from other regions. If you use their plant material, it tends to work out well. So I work with Kousa Dogwood, which, if you're a fan of native plants, you know that's like boo. You know that it's not everyone's favorite because you can kind of look at it like what's the ecological benefit beyond growing a tree which has benefits, but it doesn't necessarily fit all of the native birds and pollinators and the claims you can make there, but we have some really attractive landscape plants which I think if someone's not going to plant a tree and they're just not going to and if you can convince them to plant a tree in their yard, I feel like it's a positive.

Especially if it's not invasive, because invasive species are still being sold. We struggle just to remove the invasive vines and trees from our 30 acres of tree plots.

Andy:

Oh, I can imagine what you guys must deal with down there. I have a few friends who do a lot of restoration work in New Jersey, and they just say the invasives are out of control.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

The woody vine-type plants. I mean, it's amazing how much work it takes. If you don't stay on top of it, then it becomes an amazing amount of work to clean up trees that are covered in woody vines. And it just happens like two years go by if you don't get to a plot of older trees, and then they're just, and then it's of course like I'm blanking uh, poison ivy is, and you know something simple like that. It's just like if you let things get out of hand, someone has to clean it up, and we spend a lot of time and money on that.

Andy:

Yeah, I know New Jersey's got a lot of wetlands, and Phragmites has just taken over. That in itself is just a battle, like a full-time job. You could take everyone who's on unemployment and have them just deal with Phrag, and you would not put a dent in it.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

It's amazing, you know. I just accept it as the landscape because, like the turnpikes and going up towards New York City, it's just phragmites.

Andy:

It's so amazing how that's all you see. It's frightening. So for people that are listening and, like I know, a lot of people listening are really into hazelnuts. Is there anything they can do, just like backyard people with some couple, maybe a couple dozen hazelnut trees, to contribute to something like this? Or if you weren't working in the field doing this every day, what would be the thing you would do because you care about this stuff?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Right now, I think, is an exciting time for people like hazelnuts because there are a lot of different cultivars and selections coming out, like not just from Rutgers but from some of the nurseries, like Grimo Nut Nursery or Z's Nutty Ridge. There's an assortment of cultivars, and what we don't know is where they perform best. Small garden plot of 10 trees? If someone is interested and they ordered a bunch of these different varieties that are coming out and put them into their landscape and then watch them and see which ones actually work well, when they bloom, which ones overlap, I think there's a lot to gain.

We didn't have this material, at least this number, in the past, so it's fun and exciting to see where they grow. Well, you know, we're trying to build better networks to connect people interested in hazelnuts so people can report back on what's doing well, where, you know. If you're going to invest in planting 10 acres of hazelnuts, you probably want to know. You don't want to jump. That's expensive.

Yeah, you don't want to be out there on your own, you know, if we had a better understanding of what does best where, but then also sharing education on things like eastern Filbert blight. What I don't want is for people to just start growing random hazelnut seedlings all over the potential growing range where these seedlings are susceptible, and now you're creating a load that wouldn't have been there before, which is going to impact growing on a larger scale and durability of resistance genes.

People get excited over doing backyard breeding. Well, to do a good job breeding hazelnuts, you need to expose them to disease. You need to know which ones are resistant, or you're going to spend a lot of time finding a favorite plant, and then when it gets exposed in the future, it's going to die. So you need that disease pressure.

But I also don't want to encourage 30, 40, or 50 different hotspots all over the growing range where people are doing backyard breeding. I don't want to discourage it; it's people's free will. But at the same time, if you're trying to grow a commercial hazelnut orchard and then there's tons of disease inoculum around in a place that wouldn't normally have it, that adds pressure to disease resistance genes and presents challenges. So things are going to unfold as they do, and that's part of life, but I try not to promote like because if you grew seedlings from, say, Raritan or Somerset, for example, at least 50% of those seedlings are going to potentially be highly susceptible and you might not know they are until you have a full several acres, and then all of a sudden the disease is going to spread like wildfire and then you're going to be shooting spores into the atmosphere all over the place and uh, yeah, put some strong selection pressure on everything.

That's not the natural situation. If you grow American hazelnut, you don't have that. You have some disease pressure, but we've been studying it for a while, and it is highly tolerant. You get very few cankers, even if or no cankers. It's almost amazing to know that the fungus has been reproducing itself and living for so long. I should mention we've been collecting American hazelnuts over the native range.

We have a collection of probably close to 2,000 individual bushes from at least 70 or 80 different places around the native range. Maybe more than a dozen states represent us. We have this really amazing collection, and it's under really high disease pressure, we've been tracking it for over 10 years, and it's amazing how resistant or tolerant these plants are in general and how diverse. We've been building a breeding germplasm pool, so we've been selecting from it and using it. But I definitely advocate people growing native hazelnuts as part of their landscapes and, you know, for animal food and it's kind of an exciting, fun plant to demonstrate to people Maybe not on commercial nut production side, but, you know, for your hedgerows and you know, in your landscapes. I think it's a beautiful landscape shrub.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big fan of the American hazelnut. It's so fast-growing. It's wild to see that it's a nut-bearing tree that can grow that quickly. So it's a cool little specimen to have here.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Some have really pretty fall colors, too. I have some in my own landscape at home, and you know it doesn't last long; it doesn't stick. The fall color isn't like you have weeks of it, but there'll be, you know, 10 days or two weeks of really brilliant, like fiery red and yellow, which is a lot of fun because it's also a nut-producing edible plant, you know, and it makes good ground cover or, you know, landscape cover.

Andy:

Yeah. So, for folks who want to know what's going on with the work you guys are doing, do you guys have any social media or anything like that, or a website just to keep up with what you guys are doing or yourself?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

We don't have really any super active social media, but I do have a website and we do have a growing newsletter list. So we have a newsletter we put out probably two or three times a year. Now, if anyone's interested, they can email me. You can find my Rutgers website, Tom Molnar, at Rutgers Google search, and if anyone's interested in being put on our newsletter list, I'd be happy to. Just they can email me, and I'll put them on the list, and, uh, you know, we'll send that out.

We're still working on some of the more efficient ways to share information, but I think we have almost 450, you know, hazelnut contacts on our list. Growers, enthusiasts, you know, the whole range, and that's what's growing weekly. So if anyone's interested, we're happy to to share as much as we can. You know, try to tell from our perspective what's going on, and you know where to get plants and what plants we think will do well and which ones you know may not be.

Andy:

Yeah, I will definitely link that in the show notes so people can reach out and hopefully subscribe and double that readership because hazelnuts are awesome, and I'm very in support of any perennial crop that we can use to start offsetting some of the massive monocropping that we're doing, especially one that's protein and oil-producing and all of these benefits that hazels offer over so many other plants.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Yeah, I echo the same thoughts there. I'm excited to be able to work on a crop that I do feel has potential for climate resilience compared to some of the other crops, especially with careful breeding and a perspective on thinking about those challenges we're going to face in terms of, probably well, the biggest challenge I see is the fluctuating climate, which is a challenge. It's very, very warm, then it's very cold, then it's very warm, then it's very cold. So I think hazelnuts have an advantage or, with the right breeding, could have a real significant advantage over some other crops minus or in addition to the fact it's highly nutritious and those other aspects.

Andy:

Yeah, I feel very strongly in the same way, Tom. This has been really interesting, and I definitely appreciate your time. Is there anything else I didn't ask that you would like to talk about quickly before we wrap up?

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

Well, I think we've covered almost everything. I'm not sure if I mentioned our hybrid hazelnut consortium. I do like to give a lot of credit to my colleagues, so it's especially on the hybrid hazelnut front. It's not just us here at Rutgers. We've really benefited from working closely with Oregon State University, which has been breeding hazelnuts since the 1960s but also considering the native hazelnut and its possibilities for breeding more widely adapted plants.

So you know, working with Oregon State for over 20 years, and then the Arbor Day Foundation was really one of the drivers to pull together this consortium, and they worked closely with the University of Nebraska, which brought in different plant materials and then now, more recently, the University of Missouri at the Agroforestry Center. And the main point of me rambling here is that now what we do is we make these selections and we can send those plants out to these different climatic zones. We also work closely now with the Upper Midwest Hazelnut Group and the University of Minnesota in Wisconsin.

So at Rutgers, I use all this diverse germplasm, I get a really good clone, I propagate it clonally, and I send it to these different locations, and now we're studying like which plants actually perform. You know, the exciting thing is, can I find one, say, an individual plant that performs really well in Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, and New Jersey, and then I feel confident that, you know, we'll see what the weather is going to throw at it if it can handle those different zones. This is a big collaborative effort.

So you know, I've talked a lot about Rutgers and me, but the progress we've made is built on these collaborations. And you know, trees are really a legacy project with multiple generations and years; you build off of decades of other people's work.

Andy:

If you're going to have success, yeah, yeah, and I appreciate the work you're doing. I know a lot of other people do, even though it might be something that flies under the radar of people doing hazelnut breeding, but it's important, and it's going to be a huge part of our food system in the future.

Dr. Thomas Molnar:

I hope so. Well, I really appreciate you reaching out and giving me the opportunity to talk about it.

To listen to this interview, check out episode #187 of the Poor Proles Almanac.