WWOOFing on a hazelnut farm in Macedonia has given me new appreciation for the complexities of nuts and the people who grow them
At the Nelkoski Organic Hazelnut Farm in southern Macedonia, orderly rows of hazelnut trees, spaced evenly every six or seven feet, stretch across the 5-hectare plot. There are 5,000 trees on this property, and an additional 4,500 on another plot about 10 minutes away. Bosko Nelkoski has plans to grow high-quality, organic ingredients for a line of hazelnut butters that will reach specialty stores across the world.
But it’s early March, and these hazelnut trees look, well, pretty naked and barren to my untrained eye. They are only starting to emerge from their winter dormancy, with wispy pollen stems and tiny flower buds that will turn into hazelnuts in the summer. It takes a bit of creative thinking to imagine this orchard green and lush, laden with hazelnuts come August.
I’m here in Macedonia trying to learn about the nut business, the complexities of growing nuts, and what makes one nut taste better than another. I had left my job with the UN last year to devote time to learning about this field, with the hope to launch a business to import distinctive, single-origin nuts from small farmers in developing countries. I found Bosko and his farm through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF. In exchange for room and board, I would spend my days out in the hazelnut orchards or in the processing plant, volunteering my time and learning about the intricacies of hazelnuts.
Oregon State University did an analysis of the costs and returns for setting up a hazelnut orchard, and concluded that orchards only begin to have a positive cash flow after seven years. They generate a profit only at Year 11. Hazelnut trees don’t really bear any nuts for four years, start to really get going around Year 6, and then can continue producing for five decades with greater and greater profit each year. Of course, you must have the resources and patience to wait that long.
Bosko is heading into Year 9, and has just started to see a positive cash flow. He started the farm with his father in 2010 in their hometown of Struga, a resort town on Lake Ohrid near the border to Albania. It’s not the most obvious place for a hazelnut farm, as Struga’s biggest claim to fame is its annual poetry festival. The majority of the world’s hazelnuts come from Turkey, followed by Georgia and Italy. (Italy, of course, is home to Ferrero’s Nutella, the world’s largest buyer of hazelnuts.)
Yet Macedonia does have good growing conditions for hazelnuts and a small but growing hazelnut production in the eastern part of the country. Bosko saw an opportunity to set up a business close to home, and began searching for funding to set it up.
He’s very matter-of-fact about starting a hazelnut business despite knowing next to nothing about hazelnuts. “I visited hazelnut farms in Georgia and Turkey, and worked with experts from the Netherlands. I learned, bit by bit.” He says it like he’s talking about buying a TV, not mortgaging his home and borrowing money to start a new venture
It’s a “just go for it” attitude that I’ve noticed in other entrepreneurs. While I’ve often hesitated and preferred to research ad nauseam, many of my entrepreneurial friends are more likely to dive in and worry about the details later. WWOOFing is, happily, a way for me to dive in by doing research. It’s giving me hands-on experience and exposure to the realities of this business, yet it’s not my business.
So what does a WWOOFer do on a hazelnut farm in the beginning of March? There are unshelled hazelnuts in storage from last year, to be sorted and shelled in the processing plant. There are holes to be dug in the ground for planting new hazelnut trees. The trees need to be pruned and trained so that they grow into their best selves. Mostly, though, there’s a lot of suckering.
Hazelnut trees aren’t actually trees, it turns out. They are shrubs, which naturally grow multiple stems from the ground if left on their own. They’re more productive and easier to harvest if grown as a single-trunk tree, which means diligently cutting away these shoots, or suckers, as they appear. Conventional farms can use chemical sprays to control the stems, but as a certified organic farm, Nelkoski Farm has to remove those suckers manually, three times a year.
This is how I find myself most days, squatting on the ground in the sun, reaching down to cut off the suckers at the root with a pair of electric shears, battery pack strapped on my back. There can be as many as 20 suckers that have sprouted around the tree, some as tall as the tallest branch and thicker than the trunk of the youngest trees. To reach the base of the suckers, I have to first yank out the thorny weeds that have overgrown around the tree over the winter, which threaten to choke the branches and hazelnut flowers.
After a few hours of this on the first day, I start to wonder whether the term “sucker” comes from the fact that they suck energy from the main tree, or that it’s a sucky kind of job.
I’m the only one working in this field at the moment. It’s the newer plot, which had to be raised last year and requires a lot more work. The local guy that they’ve already paid has ghosted them, not showing up for work and locking the door to his house when Bosko’s father comes searching.
I am actually enjoying this opportunity, though. Perhaps that makes me a sucker. There’s a joy to taxing your body through exhausting, repetitive work. I find myself focused on the task with a single-minded clarity: pull out the weeds, grasp a sucker and shear it off at the root, repeat until only the tree stem remains, and then move on to the next tree down the line. I’d never had this all-encompassing focus at my desk job. But being out in the sun, surrounded by the snow-capped Jablanica and Galičica mountains, I’ve felt meditative and peaceful during the days. And at the end of it, I enjoy the ache in my back and legs and pile of discarded shoots that show I’ve accomplished something.
A person can sucker anywhere from 30 to 50 trees in a day. That’s about 190 person-days to sucker all 9,500 trees on the farm. Then multiply that by three times a year. I think about the work that has gone into these nuts, the costs of labor, and the opportunity costs during those first six years when the trees aren’t producing. At the end of it, a kilo of shelled hazelnuts can go for $7 at farm gate prices. After all this work, it doesn’t seem enough.
The next time I buy a bag of organic nuts, I will try to picture the Turkish farm laborer, or the Georgian, Italian, or American, and think about them crouched on the ground, yanking out these suckers. And the farm owner, investing into his orchards year after year, hoping one day to finally make a profit.
