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CapitalPress.com
Friday, April 9, 2021
Oak Park Farms: Efficiencies are key to hazelnuts
By BRENNA WIEGAND
For the Capital Press
SHEDD, Ore. — Oak Park Farms
dates back to 1850, when Washing-
ton L. Coon took out a donation land
claim in Linn County, Ore., eight
years before the first hazelnut was
planted in the state.
He returned to Pennsylvania to
marry Susan, a widow with children,
and they returned over the Oregon
Trail. His stepsons took on the adjoin-
ing 320 acres.
Today, the family’s fifth and sixth
generations manage 5,000 acres in the
fertile Willamette Valley. Mike Coon
and his son, KC, and Mike’s brother,
Don Coon, and his son, Hans, raise
mostly grassy rotation crops. KC
heads up the cropping side of things.
“Our dads doubled it from what
it was, and our grandpas doubled it
from what it was, so every generation
is seeing roughly 100% growth in the
number of acres we farm,” Hans said.
In 2012, Hans introduced hazel-
nuts onto the acreage and has since
Oak Park Farms
Hans Coon, left, and his cousin KC, with daughter Mia, at Oak Park
Farms in Shedd, Ore. In recent years the family farm began adding
hazelnuts to their primarily grassy crop operation.
built it up to 250 acres.
“We’d seen what Ryan Glaser over
at Mid Valley Farms was doing and
really like their program,” Hans Coon
said. “They talked us through it and
told us you can make money at them
if you do it right.”
He said his senior project at Ore-
gon State University was an analysis
of the basic financials of hazelnuts.
“I know a lot more about the num-
bers now, but hopefully they’ll still
work out,” he said.
He sees continued growth in
hazelnuts.
“When we look at the almond
industry and the walnut industry, they
still dwarf us in scale,” he said. “I
think to have any kind of true market
impact and be able to meet reasonable
demand we just need to keep putting
more hazelnuts in.”
The keys to making a profit in
hazelnuts are to plant in good soil,
keep an eye on expenses and have a
plan.
“It pencils out if you put them on
good ground and watch your expenses
and have a direction you want to be
heading in,” Coon said.
This includes bringing large-scale
farming practices to hazelnut grow-
ing. In addition to using a large track
fertilizer spreader, the Coons process
their nuts in bulk.
“We specifically designed all of
our orchards for bulk processing,
so whereas standard headland is 15
feet, mine are about 50 to 75 on aver-
age,” Coon said. “We’re the only ones
I know of who are running a shuttle
truck, essentially a bankout wagon for
the harvester so it never has to stop.
“Most everyone in the hazelnut
industry uses 4-by-4 wooden boxes
to put their hazelnuts in and trans-
port them and we’re doing it in semi-
trucks,” Coon said. “We’re trying to
pick up efficiencies everywhere.
“It’s not that we’re smarter than
anybody else; it’s just that up until
our generation the hazelnut indus-
try in Oregon has been boutique so
it needed boutique methods of pro-
duction,” Coon said. “We came from
100-foot sprayers and all that stuff so
we’re looking at it thinking we’ve got
to do this fast; we’ve got to be effi-
cient and we’ve got to be effective;
what’s the best way we can do that?”
Their program coming out of the
gate is meant to be different, he said.
“We don’t want to handle boxes or
be in the field any longer than we
have to; we want to get in and get out
quick.”
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