Locally-Adapted Hazelnut Cultivars

After nearly two decades of evaluation and testing, the UMHDI has released a series of high-performing, EFB-resistant hazelnut cultivars adapted to the harsh growing conditions of the Midwest. These "1st Generation Selections" are available exclusively through Midwest Hazelnuts, LLC.

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Understanding Cultivars

A cultivar (sometimes called a "variety") is a vegetatively propagated plant with known and typically desirable traits, such as high yields, excellent kernel quality, disease resistance, etc. There are important considerations when choosing which hazelnut cultivars to grow.

• First, does the cultivar have the traits you want?
• Second, how widely have the cultivars been tested and how confident are you that they'll perform as advertised on your farm?
• Third, hazelnuts do not self-pollinate, which means you need reproductively compatible cultivars. One way to limit the risk of incompatibility is to plant pollinator rows of diverse seedling-type plants.
• Fourth, all the plants of a cultivar are genetically identical which creates the risk that if something goes wrong with that cultivar, such as a new disease emerges or markets change, then all the plants of that cultivar are at risk.  That's why we recommend at least five different cultivars as well as seedling-type pollinator rows.

Continue the Legacy of Hazelnut Seedlings

Early leaders of the hazelnut industry in the Midwest, Phil Rutter and Mark Shepard, set the vision of highly-diverse plantings consisting of seed-origin plants. Realizing this vision will take generations and you can play a part. You'll have more variable production than from cultivars and average yields of seed-origin plantings have not yet proven commercially viable, but by planting seedling-type hazelnuts you can carry on the legacy by helping develop seed lines and finding the next great cultivars.

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Understanding Seedling-Type Hazelnuts

Hazelnuts are relatively easy to grow from seed but very difficult to vegetatively propagate, which is one reason seedling-type hazelnuts are more readily available. The problem is, plants grown from seed are all different from each other with highly variable yield and nut quality. As a result, the average yields of seedling-type plantings in the Midwest, so far, have not been high enough to support commercial production. But, the resilience from the genetic diversity of a seedling-type planting is highly desirable and with generations of selection and evaluation it is theoretically possible to have seed lines with average yields, disease resistance, and nut quality sufficient to support commercial production. It is an admirable goal and we support it. To that end, we work with breeders and nurseries to offer the best seedling genetics possible. As a grower, it is important to know the lingo:

Full-sibling progeny families (full-sibs) - Full-sibling progeny come from a controlled cross between two known parents. The quality and uniformity of the progeny will depend on the quality and uniformity of the parents. The more diverse the parents, the more diverse the progeny.

Half-sibling progeny families (half-sibs) - Saving seed from the best plant in a planting is the most common way to produce seedling-type hazelnuts, but because every seedling in the progeny family potentially has a different pollen parent there is typically more variability among the half-sib progeny than with full-sibs. Likewise, any poor quality traits from the pollen parents may be passed on to the half-sib progeny.

Open pollinated (OP) seedlings - One strategy to produce seedlings (and by far the easiest) is to save seed from many different plants and mix them all together such that the parents of any given seedling are unknown. This is a good way to maximize diversity in a seedling-type planting (good for Eco-Warriors), but also a very slow method to make genetic gains.

Seedling-type growers often want the "best" seedlings possible.  Though it is impossible to know for certain how any given seedling will perform, there is information that can help us make predictions. First, has the progeny family (especially full-sibs) been grown before and is there data on its performance?  Second, what is known about the parents? Have they been grown in replicate at multiple locations? Third, were parents chosen based solely on phenotypes or were genomic prediction models used?