14 CapitalPress.com
April 14, 2017
Farmers experiment with chipping hazelnut brush
By BRENNA WIEGAND
For the Capital Press
GERVAIS, Ore. — This
year hazelnut growers Paul
Massee and his wife, Lynnea
Lane, are trying something
different.
After pruning for eastern
filbert blight, everything 4-6
inches thick and smaller is
kept in the orchard and piled
into windrows. Only the big
pieces go to the burn pile.
Then Lane gets her “new
toy” and grinds the branches
into mulch that stays among
the trees.
“It’s a new experiment
this year,” Massee said. “It
all started when Lynnea saw
a flier for Agrishred out of
Brenna Wiegand/For the Capital Press
Lynnea Lane drives her tractor and chipper-shredder at Massee
Farms in Gervais, Ore. This year they’re putting the smaller ha-
zelnut prunings in windrows and chipping them into mulch for the
orchard.
Newberg advertising the ser-
vice.”
The couple manages about
100 acres of hazelnuts on
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land owned by Paul’s mother,
Judith Massee. Due to Paul’s
teaching job at Sprague High
School in Salem, they have
traditionally stacked all the
prunings and waited until
school ended in June to deal
with them.
There are several rea-
sons they chose to invest
$22,000 in a rear-pulled chip-
per-shredder. Rears Man-
ufacturing in Eugene built
the 10-foot-wide pull-behind
ASH chipper-shredder they
haul behind a John Deere
tractor. The prunings are laid
in windrows and the chip-
per-shredder creates mulch.
The undertaking also re-
quired fabrication of a cus-
tom belly pan to protect the
tractor’s underside from the
prunings.
Instead of the material just
sitting there until June, the
orchard is “opened up” for
the winter and the chipped-
up smaller brush has a chance
to decompose and keep ben-
eficial organisms in the soil.
While an Oregon State Uni-
versity study detected viable
ascospores above chipped
EFB cankers, it determined
that there were not enough
to consistently infect nearby
trees.
“We’re going to have to
figure out if it saves money,”
Massee said. “Right now,
there’s the expense of the
machine and of adding bel-
ly guards to the tractor. The
amount of diesel could be
about the same.”
While Massee is looking
forward to the mulch smooth-
ing out his travel lanes, the
main thing he hopes for is
that shredding EFB-infected
branches significantly reduces
the probability of re-infecting
the remaining healthy trees.
“I’m just hoping it is easi-
er to deal with,” Lynnea said.
“If you take everything that’s
out there and push it into burn
piles you end up with these
huge burn piles. Then you’ve
got to bring the ash back into
in the orchard or find some-
place to get rid of it. It might
as well stay in the orchard.
It’s not going to hurt anything
like this. The wind can’t whip
through and carry the blight.”
Its success remains to be
seen, and comments vary.
“It’s a mixed bag; some
neighbors think we’re crazy
and others think we’re indus-
try leaders,” he said. “It just
sounded like a smarter thing
to do than what we’ve been
doing.”
As for Lynnea, she’s en-
joying herself.
“I’m just going to ride that
tractor and pull that shredder
behind it,” she said.
“Life is an experiment;
we’ll give it a try,” Massee
said.
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