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CapitalPress.com
April 17, 2015
Orchardist uses unique tactics to overcome blight
By DENISE RUTTAN
For the Capital Press
West of Silverton, Ore., near
the old North Howell store,
you’ll find a hazelnut orchard
that carries the legacy of John
Meye’s family.
That same legacy brought
this
educator-turned-farmer
from Illinois to Oregon to help
out his grandmother on the
farm when his grandfather be-
came too ill to work. After his
grandfather passed away, the
farm then skipped a generation
and changed hands directly to
the grandson. Meye was in his
30s when he dropped his plans
to obtain a Ph.D. in education
and fell instead for the lure of
agriculture.
“I’d worked at the farm all
my life and always enjoyed
coming up here. I ended up
changing careers and my life,
Denise Rutan/For the Capital Press
Nuts from John Meye’s hazelnut farm west of Silverton, Ore., are
shipped around the world.
and lo and behold, 20 years
later I’m still a full-time farmer
and part-time musician,” Meye
said.
When Meye is not playing
piano for a local church, he
tends to his 27 acres of nearly
2,800 trees, mostly of the Bar-
celona variety, that his grand-
father planted in 1972. Part of
that legacy, unfortunately, has
meant dealing with the nui-
sance of Eastern filbert blight.
Orchards such as Meye’s
that were planted in the 1970s
and 1980s are largely Barce-
lonas, an older variety that is
susceptible to blight. Over the
years that Meye visited his
grandfather’s farm, he saw the
disease become a problem.
“A lot of the old orchards are
full of blight and many farmers
just take out their trees because
they don’t want to deal with
it,” Meye said. “Oregon State
University has since developed
blight-resistant hazelnuts so
there are lots of new orchards
now with blight-resistant vari-
eties.”
Why does Meye keep at
it, then? He wants to keep his
grandfather’s legacy alive
— and, through the orchard,
he’s managed to stay fully
self-employed since 1983, a life
he relishes.
But it hasn’t been easy,
thanks to this disease. When
the fungus first appears, it
looks like a small, black, foot-
ball-shaped canker.
“After a few years and you
don’t deal with it, it will start
killing sections of the tree and
if you don’t deal with it at all it
will kill the whole tree,” Meye
said. “It will take a few years
but it will kill a whole tree if left
unchecked.”
To fight it, Meye has at-
tacked on several fronts.
“Theoretically, if you prune
enough and spray hard enough
it will eliminate it but the cost is
astronomical,” Meye said.
Meye has developed a sys-
tem of his own in which he
sprays just a little fungicide
early as he finds the disease and
as late in the season as is neces-
sary. He prunes what he can but
not too heavily.
He’s also tried a tactic that
involves neither spraying nor
pruning, nor even replacing the
whole orchard. Filberts must
cross-pollinate with another va-
riety to produce nuts. Many or-
chardists in the old days planted
an extremely blight-susceptible
variety to pollinate every 20
Barcelonas.
“If the pollenizers got blight,
the disease would spread like a
brush fire,” Meye said.
About eight years ago Meye
removed his blight-susceptible
pollenizers and replaced 500 to
600 of them with several new-
er varieties like Lewis, Yam-
hill and Gamma, which are far
more resistant to blight. The
key is diversity plus disease re-
sistance.
The tactic has paid off.
“The pollenizers are now
pretty clean,” Meye said. “It
hasn’t cured it but it’s helped
heal it.”
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