Blight fight
Oregon’s prized hazelnut trees are under attack and the
industry is scrambling for a solution before it’s too
late.
By John Schmitz
Oregon’s celebrated hazelnut orchards, which produce 99%
of the country’s crop, are in trouble, and it’s
going to take a huge effort from Oregon State University to get
them out of it.
Ask hazelnut growers from Hillsboro to the Eugene-Springfield
area what’s most on their minds these days and
they’ll tell you it’s eastern filbert blight (EFB),
a fungal disease that attacks silently and invisibly in the
spring and, if left untreated, kills limbs and even whole
trees.
“We are at a critical juncture in the industry,”
says Polly Owen, administrator of the Oregon Hazelnut
Commission in Tigard. “We have enough heavily blighted
trees that tough decisions have to be made by growers.”
Those decisions include either pulling out trees and replanting
with a resistant variety, or taking out trees and going with
another crop.
According to the Oregon field office of USDA’s National
Agricultural Statistics Service in Portland, the number of
hazelnut trees growing in Oregon dropped more than 8% from 2001
to 2005. There are now 3.46 million trees, and this
year’s crop is valued at $42 million.
What role the blight played in that decline is not exactly
known, but it certainly has been a significant factor, Owen
says. It has become such a menace that Oregon’s largest
hazelnut processor, Hazelnut Growers of Oregon (HGO) in
Cornelius, made the decision this year to do what no other
company in the state has ever done: import nuts from another
country — Chile.
“We’re going offshore for two reasons,” says
HGO president Compton Chase-Lansdale. “We want to make
sure we can take care of our customers on an ongoing basis, and
faced with the blight, there’s a potential future for a
declining Oregon crop.”
Also prompting HGO to go offshore, Chase-Lansdale says, is an
increase in orders. HGO sells most of its hazelnuts to food
processors, which use them in products such as baked goods, ice
cream and candy.
One grower near Canby, Rich Birkemeier, has torn out 300 acres
of hazelnut trees to drive the disease off his property.
He’s replacing them with new, highly resistant varieties
from OSU, some still experimental.
“In our area we can’t have a sustainable farm in
the presence of eastern filbert blight with [any variety]
that’s not immune,” Birkemeier says. “I just
got to the point that I didn’t want to spray and prune
for blight anymore.”
Salem-area grower Bruce Chapin, whose trees have been stricken
hard by the blight, has taken out 35 acres of Ennis trees and
plans more extractions in the near future. “I’m
looking at blocks that are most infected and talking them out
first.” He plans to replant with new, highly immune
varieties coming out of OSU.
WHAT MAKES THE BLIGHT EVEN MORE DISHEARTENING is that it
prefers Ennis, a large nut variety for which Oregon has been
famous. Daviana, a popular pollinizer found in many orchards,
also succumbs easily.
Chapin says it’s conceivable that Barcelona,
Oregon’s signature hazelnut variety, could also fall from
grace. “I think the industry is going to move on past
Barcelona. In my area it appears we’re pretty much
holding our own. But it’s my understanding that people
who’ve fought eastern filbert blight longer than I have
say that in time the disease wins.”
“We’ve been fighting [EFB] ever since the very
beginning,” says Hillsboro grower David Brown.
“We’re going to take out the last five acres of
Ennis this year.”
As for his take on the fate of Barcelona, “If you fought
it hard from the very beginning, it may stay a very healthy,
productive orchard,” Brown says. “But some years
[the cost of treatments] takes the profit margin right out of
it.”
Owen says that while most of the blighted trees that are being
removed are being replaced with other varieties, it’s
going to take several years before those trees get into full
nut production.
EFB drove out hazelnut production from the northeastern United
States decades ago, and was first discovered in this corner of
the country near Vancouver, Wash., in the 1960s.
At the time, most Oregon growers didn’t give it much
thought. After all, they reasoned, there’s no way the
wind-borne spores that spread the disease could make it over
the mighty Columbia River to infest Oregon trees.
Around two decades later they were proven dead wrong. The
blight struck in eastern Multnomah County in the late 1980s and
began to move westward and southward.
For several years the disease lingered in the northern reaches
of the Willamette Valley. Then it began creeping south to Salem
as prevailing winds wafted the lethal spores. Three years ago
it surfaced near the Eugene-Springfield area and growers
finally came to realize that no orchard in the state was
safe.
While there are fungicides growers can use to fend off EFB,
they’re costly and time-consuming to apply. What’s
more, if not properly applied, even they can be breached.
Growers can also remove and burn diseased limbs and whole
trees, but this passive approach only ends up in a slow death
for the orchards.
GIVEN THE HIGH COST OF CHEMICAL TREATMENTS and the futility of
removing diseased limbs and trees, the hoped-for solution to
the blight lies just east of Corvallis, where the OSU
hazelnut-breeding program is located.
Researchers there have over the years been busy making tens of
thousands of hybrid crosses in their search to develop a
handful of varieties that can not only stand up to EFB but also
carry other favorable traits as well, such as high yields and
good kernel quality.
But this all takes time, 15 to 20 years from hybridization to
release, because the process is carried on the old-fashioned
way, without resorting to controversial gene-splicing.
During breeding, pollen from selected male parents is united
with tiny flowers on trees that also have desirable nut
characteristics. The flowers are then hooded to shield them
from unwanted pollen filling the air.
Nuts from these unions are grown out into seedlings, which are
analyzed for susceptibility to EFB. Those that show resistance
are moved along in the program.
While tens of thousands of experimental hazelnuts are
harvested and evaluated, only a very few of the crosses pass
muster, receive a name and are officially released by OSU.
The two latest OSU releases showing very good resistance to
EFB are Santiam and Sacajawea. Some growers are shunning these
new offerings for the time being, however, because
they’re either anticipating superior varieties in the
research pipeline or preferring to let other growers “be
the guinea pigs,” as one grower put it.
Lewis, a highly resistant variety released several years ago,
is popular with some growers rebuilding orchards and lost
trees.
So just how long is it going to take before hazelnut growers
in Oregon will have varieties that can stand up to EFB and also
produce high-yielding, high-quality nuts? It’s
anybody’s guess, most industry experts will tell you. As
one grower asks: Who’s to say the blight won’t
adapt to the new varieties? Even with all the force of science
brought to bear, there appears to be no such thing as a totally
immune hazelnut.
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