New farmers take over filbert orchard

TACOMA – The teeth-rattling roar of a harvester is shattering the peace at Filbert Acres in Puyallup.

The commotion erupts from a “hazelnut picker” that farmer Jonathan Nichols pulls through the rows of his 60-year-old filbert orchard.

The picker crawls over acres of nuts that, prompted by autumn’s cool temperatures, have plummeted to the orchard floor and been swept into piles by volunteer farmhands. The machine scoops up the earth, separating filberts from leaves and twigs, then spits the nuts down a chute and onto a flatbed trailer.

It’s time for harvest and renewal at Filbert Acres.

Nichols, 35, and his wife, Alison, 34, are resurrecting the only filbert farm in the Puyallup Valley.

The farmstead has been a fixture on Pioneer Way since at least the 1940s, but fell into decline when its former owner died a few years back. With help from their parents, the Nichols family took over the 9-acre spread in September 2009 and are working to make it a viable enterprise.

“Some days, we look out and say this place is still a mess; it’s been a year,” Jonathan said. “At the same time, we also look out and say we’ve got a lot more done than we would have dreamed was possible. And mostly that’s due to friends and family that have volunteered.”

They continue to harvest the farm’s namesake: the filbert, a meaty nut also known as the hazelnut that can be eaten by the handful, bathed in chocolate, and baked in pies and entrees. They sell the nuts at their farm and at the Proctor Farmers Market on Saturdays.

But the Nichols family also has added vegetables and berries to the farm’s yield, and are raising a flock of chickens that will eventually find their way to market.

It’s a demanding, yet rewarding, lifestyle.

“Sometimes, I’m trying to get a website together. Other days, I’m harvesting tomatoes. Other days, I’m off at the market. It’s interesting because it’s something different all the time,” Jonathan said. “We didn’t have any illusions it would be nonstop fun and success. We thought it would be hard but something we’d like to try. We’re really happy with it.”

Chris Benedict with the Washington State University Extension is elated that the family is maintaining Filbert Acres as a farm.

Between 2002 and 2007, Pierce County lost about 17 percent of its farmland, said Benedict, WSU extension educator in Pierce and King counties. Hopes of saving existing farmland lie partly in the growing trend of people without traditional agriculture backgrounds, such as the Nichols family, becoming farmers, Benedict said.

Exploding consumer interest in locally grown foods and the people who produce them is supporting the movement. More and more small farmers do business by selling directly to consumers.

“The Nicholses are pretty symbolic of how things are being reborn in a certain way,” Benedict said.

Running a farm is a huge undertaking for a couple bringing unconventional backgrounds to the tradition.

“I was a suburban kid from Kent,” Nichols said. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy and a master’s degree in education, which he conceded “are not very useful for farming.”

Two mornings a week, he teaches Latin to teens at Covenant High School in Tacoma.

“Ali has the legitimate agriculture background,” he added. “I’m the one who reads soil textbooks for fun.”

Alison, who holds degrees in biology and crop science, once worked at the WSU King County Extension agricultural program. The daughter of missionaries, she interned on a farm in South Africa and prepared for a career in development of Third World countries.

After meeting at college in Illinois, the couple served as missionaries in agricultural development for five years in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world. Though the climate and crops were practically the opposite of the south Sound’s, they got a glimpse of a constant reality in farming. “We sort of learned to make do over there,” Jonathan said. “You couldn’t always get the right tool, and you couldn’t always do everything the right way.”

Their dream of having their own farm materialized in 2008, when they returned to the Puget Sound in the depths of the recession as real estate values were plunging. With the help of relatives, the Nichols family obtained the farm in September 2009, and harvested their first crop while their boxes were still packed.

They bought the farm knowing that the orchard is succumbing to the eastern filbert blight, a fungus that’s sweeping through Oregon, the nation’s filbert capital. The fungus slowly covers filbert tree limbs with black, football-shaped spots called cankers and girdles branches, causing leaves to fall and the tree to die.

This winter, the couple plan to replace up to a third of the orchard with a new disease-resistant filbert tree developed at Oregon State University. Meanwhile, the new trees won’t yield sizable harvests for five years.

“We see that we may someday be Filbert Acres without any filberts. If these other trees die before the new trees get productive, what are we going to do?” Jonathan said. “The name of the game is diversification.”

Last year, they removed 50 filbert trees and converted that plot to corn, strawberries, Brandywine tomatoes, Graffiti cauliflowers and other veggies for a small Community Supported Agriculture operation. That’s an arrangement in which a set number of customers pay for a share of the farm’s produce throughout the growing season.

They’re raising 80 Buckeye chickens that arrived as day-old chicks in the mail in March.

The couple hope the multipronged approach to farming pays off.

“Come back in five years, come back in 10 years. It’s not obvious we’re going to make it. We’re willing to give it a try,” Jonathan said. “I hope we’re still here 10 years from now, farming and making a living at it. I think we’ve got a reasonably good chance at it.”