21st Annual Badgersett Field Day

Badgersett Farm, Canton, MN
Saturday, August 18, 2012

...To this year's field day at Badgersett Farm (click for directions), which will be our twenty-first. Check out the schedule of events, bring a tent and camp out, but most of all come and see because there's just no substitute. We have more to see than a day will allow, but we'll focus on this year's tour and harvest highlights.

Tour Format

We'll have four different tours in two time slots, morning and afternoon. Thus, everybody will be able to take two different tours. The following is a tentative schedule of the day.

We have some exciting developments to share with you this year, including:

• Bumper Hazel Crop! Our mature second- and third-generation hazels are truly loaded, and many of our younger hazels are bearing serious crops as well.

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• Hazel Harvester! This is our second year using it, and we'll be running a demonstration of this slightly modified blueberry picker. It works!

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• Performance In Drought The nuts are ripening a bit early with the drought and extreme heat, but there's no doubt that the crop will ripen here, even if it doesn't rain until September.

We will have hazel and some chestnut tubelings available for sale, as well as the items available on our online marketplace, and maybe even a few hazel and hickory-pecan nuts from the 2011 harvest. Field day handling discounts!

Don't let the name fool you; more experienced growers will learn something new on these tours as well. They are suitable for new folks, though. These tours should give you a good, up-to-date introduction to the basics.

Woody Agriculture

An interactive, field version of What is Woody Agriculture? with emphasis on practice and applications. This tour will include basics on hazels, chestnuts and hickories. For a good preperatory talk for this tour, check out the first talk from the 2011 short course

NeoHybrid Hazels

The broad basics of what you need to see and know about Badgersett NeoHybrid Hazelnuts. Particularly suitable for people thinking about establishing hazel fields.

These more specialized tours will be most useful for people who are familiar with the basics. For those of you who are that familiar, there should be enough new information in these tours to keep you interested even if you've attended all of our previous field days and short courses.

Morning Advanced Tour

To Be Determined: let us know what you want most! Probably one of:

1. Mature Hazel Field Management and Harvest. An overview of the tasks involved in management and improvement of mature and maturing hazel fields. Including a great view of the heavy crop, and info about coppicing and coppice response in a twenty-year-old planting. Tips and rules for selection of superior plants, and plantation improvement including in-field clonal propagation.
2. Animal Integration What you do with the ground between rows of hazels and chestnuts has a substantial impact on the bottom line. Our latest experiments and observations with integration of poultry, sheep and horses in woody ag fields.
3. Establishment Including in-field cloning and a likely focus on establishment under catastrophic conditions. How-To and How-Not-To, both of which we're continually researching.

Hazel Harvest

For the first time, we'll run one tour completely on harvest. Including harvest preparation and pest control, ripeness judging, hand and machine harvest, crop handling, and initial storage and processing. If we can fit it in, this will include demos of some processing equipment as well as the harvester. Some of our newest and most exciting developments!

During the last half hour of the lunch break, we'll be running a short demo of the hazel harvester. See for yourself some of the modifications made since last season!

Badgersett Research Corporation's CEO and Chief Scientist Philip Rutter will give a fifteen minute "New and Important" talk covering the most important current developments in Woody Agriculture theory and practice, which will not have been conveyed in all of the tours. This talk will be followed by the question and answer session as usual.

Attendees are invited to camp at Badgersett Farm both Friday and Saturday nights. We don't have developed campsites- ground is uneven and it's a hike to get to water or an outhouse. But we'll have some space mowed, some of us will be camping there, and it's the most complete way to experience the woody agriculture ecology of Badgersett Farm.

There is so much to see at Badgersett that it's just not possible to get to everything you might want to see in a day. So, we're inviting you to walk about on Sunday and find the things you missed. Some further advanced tour guiding may be available in the late morning and/or early afternoon.

We'll have display tables, literature, and a place to gather and talk with other growers under the hickories in Row S. We'll try to have a staffperson there all day to answer basic questions and hear what you've got to say. Expect this to be a hotspot for lunch, and the gathering spot for the "New and Important" talk and question and answer session.

Hazels and Hickory-Pecans for Cracking! We'll have warts-and-all nuts from last year's harvest available for cracking and inspection, and maybe even some from this year's harvest after the lunchtime demonstration....

As in many of our past field days, some of our local Amish neighbors will be here selling baked goods, and possibly some produce as well. It isn't a lunch menu, but you might want to leave room for these goodies! We will post it here as soon as we have solidified the arrangements.