July Board Meeting

Erickson’s hazelnut orchard has over 4,500 bushes ranging from 6 yrs to 1 year old. Norm has recently been inventing machines scaled to local processing of hybrid hazelnuts: a patent application has been filed for the Crack-M-All™ nutcracker, and another is in the works for the Sort-M-All™ nut sizer/sorter. Both machines can be easily adjusted to handle nuts ranging from the smallest hazelnuts to the largest black walnuts.

Hazelnuts are a woody perennial bush, similar in appearance to a lilac bush. The nuts are delicious and nutritious, and their high unsaturated fat content earned them a heart healthy designation by the US FDA in 2004. Hazelnuts contain three times the oil content of soybeans, and could turn odd areas on farms into fuel source production plantings for the new era of energy descent, and provide a high value nut and oil crop in the interim. Hazelnut kernels currently retail for about $14 per pound, and oil retails for $1 to $4 per ounce.

Norm Erickson background:

Norm worked for IBM 32 years before retiring from Lab Technical Education at 52 in 1992. A few years later he went back to work in a litigation support department for 6 months that turned into 14 years. While on vacation in 2003 he read The Party’s Over by Richard Heinberg, and returned to MN with a Peak Oil powerpoint presentation ready to go on his laptop. It is important to note that the primary motivation for starting the hazelnut farm in 2004 was the concern about peak oil and the energy descent turmoil that lies just ahead.

Norm has been a community activist for decades. He wrote a weekly energy and environmental issues column for the Rochester Post Bulletin for most of the nineties, was a leader in the successful campaign to get the local municipal utility to install a new pollution control system on its coal burning power plant, led volunteer buckthorn control projects in Rochester Parks for eight years, is a member of the Emerald Ash Borer early detection team, a MN Tree Care Advisor, had a tree farm for 35 years, designed, sold, and installed solar thermal systems in the early 80’s and taught community education solar classes at the local technical college. A recent initiative by Norm resulted in the MN House designating Lake City, MN as the Hazelnut Capital of Minnesota. An annual fall festival celebration will be developed based on that new city identity.

The Erickson’s now sell bare root hazelnut bushes and as potted 2-year old bushes. Hazelnut kernels and hazelnut oil will be available as processing bugs are worked out.