Tree Crops in the Midwest?

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Tree-based agriculture systems are common on the coasts but the Midwest is dominated by row crops. CEO of Canopy Farm Management, Kevin Wolz, believes the potential is there, as they’ve seen profits resulting from chesnuts and black currants. Next on the list of crops to try are hazelnut and elderberry.

Wolz… “The runner-ups are probably hazelnut on the nut side and elderberry on the fruit side. Hazelnut has the potential to take over the Midwest and be this really incredible crop but we are still honing some of the genetics and we have a lot of trials going with the universities and at the Savannah Institute. We have the first ever colonial hazelnut production farm now at a Savannah demonstration farm in Illinois, trialing that you know for kind of uniform machine harvesting. So we're getting we're getting close with hazelnuts and once we crack that code then yeah all bets are off. They're going to go crazy. And on the elderberry side, I mean elderberries, really valued for its nutraceutical properties. The problem is that right now, we can’t machine harvest it. It’s all hand-harvested, and that is really a limiting factor for hitting scale. And so there are various parties working on mechanical harvester. Until we can crack that, it's going to remain kind of a smaller part of the portfolio.”

Canopy Farm Management is establishing tree management via a mobile fleet of state-of-the-art farm equipment, appropriate automation, and holistic strategies for tree-crop integration.