Paul Kuehne, a farmer in Dayton, Ore., at a hazelnut orchard that’s intercropped to produce grass seed during establishment. With him are his wife, Brynn, and children, Rhett and Sailor.

Juggling two crops in the same field isn’t for the faint of heart, particularly when one is as enduring and expensive to establish as hazelnuts.

Yet farmers planting hazelnuts have a powerful incentive to simultaneously grow another crop in their young orchards: generating cash flow for four years or so while the trees mature enough to produce a commercial hazelnut crop.

Cultivating seed crops between rows of trees is the only way Paul Kuehne of Dayton, Ore., says he can justify committing property to orchards for years without harvesting hazelnuts.

Over roughly a decade, Kuehne has established 2,400 acres of hazelnuts orchards that were intercropped with perennial ryegrass, annual ryegrass, tall fescue, red clover and ryegrass.

“That’s a lot of land to not have income for four years. I couldn’t financially have done it,” he said.

Intercropping requires an elevated level of care and won’t fit every operation, but in reality, the space between tree rows must still be flailed and dragged to remove weeds, Kuehne said.

“You still have to manage that area, so you might as well put the money toward something you can harvest and sell,” he said. An acre of fully mature hazelnut trees yields about 2,700 pounds with prices ranging from about 90 cents to $1.03 per pound.

The key is never losing sight of the fact that the hazelnut orchard must take priority if rodents or other problems threaten the trees, he said.

“We’re always going to make the decision that’s best for the tree. As for the intercrop, it’s always going to be secondary,” Kuehne said. “We’ll pull the plug on the intercrop at any point if we needed to.”

Seed crops

Grass and clover grown for seed dominate intercropped orchards these days, though there was more crop diversity when the hazelnut planting boom began about a decade ago, said Mike McDaniel, a geographic information system specialist who studies hazelnuts.

“It seemed like it was a pretty short window of crop experimentation,” he said. “It’s quieted down.”

Hazelnut acreage in Oregon has roughly tripled over the past decade, from 30,000 acres to 90,000 acres, McDaniel said. The pace of planting has now leveled off at 3,000-5,000 acres a year, down from as many as 11,000 acres at the height of the boom.

“The largest and best plots of land are already planted,” he said.

Intercropping doesn’t seem especially prevalent in any one part of the Willamette Valley, where most hazelnuts are grown, and likely depends more on the expertise and equipment of the farmer, McDaniel said.

“It seems pretty random based on the grower and the operation of the grower,” he said. “It’s more of a personal choice of the farmer.”

While seed crops are most popular, there are still some unexpected crops found growing among hazelnut rows, including Christmas trees, nursery stock, hay, strawberries and hemp. Typically, farmers already have experience with these crops before trying to grow them within orchards.

Christmas trees

“We’re a Christmas tree farm at the root, where we come from. The hazelnuts are a new crop,” said Gustavo Guerrero, whose family has intercropped about 60 acres of Christmas trees with hazelnuts near McMinnville, Ore. “It sticks to the roots we’ve had as farmers in this area.”

Usually, farmers remove the intercrop after the orchard’s fourth year but the Guerreros plan to leave the Christmas trees in place for five to six years.

They’ve used rakes to sweep up hazelnuts by hand as the trees begin producing nuts, which is highly labor-intensive, Guerrero said. They’ve broken even on the nut harvest, but the practice is worthwhile given the strong demand and prices for Christmas trees.

Due to the tight spacing, harvesting the Christmas trees is also more difficult because they can’t immediately be stacked in a trailer, he said.

“We’ve had to hand-drag the trees out of the field, which takes a little more time. But overall the conflict is minimal. It’s manageable,” Guerrero said. “We would definitely plant them again with Christmas trees. Farming is really a game of chance. You learn from that experience, which will help you in future endeavors.”

Nursery stock

Bruce Ernst, a nursery operator near St. Paul, likewise swept hazelnuts by hand in an 33-acre orchard planted with nursery stock, but doesn’t regret intercropping despite the added effort. The revenue generated by the boxwoods, which are now being dug up, was financially defensible.

“I got some good value off that land,” Ernst said. “It was worth the extra trouble.”

Ernst was reluctant to reduce his nursery production, particularly since intercropping didn’t prevent mechanical fertilizing and pruning with a tractor between hazelnut rows.

“Those boxwoods don’t get that tall, so you can go in right over the top of them,” he said. “We never really missed a beat.”

While high in value, nursery stock wouldn’t always be a rational choice for intercropping, however.

Ernst is in a unique situation because he already had a customer base, so he wasn’t planting on speculation.

“I had a market for the boxwood. Otherwise, if I was a regular hazelnut farmer, it wouldn’t work out,” he said.

Orchard grass hay

Perry Lucas of Gervais, Ore., similarly has buyers available for his orchard grass hay, which he intercrops with hazelnuts but also grows in fields beyond his orchards.

The farm relies on a self-propelled haybine that Lucas bought especially to fit between tree rows, but which he uses on open fields as well.

“We’ve got the equipment and the people who buy the hay, so it’s easy to sell,” he said.

Grass seed requires machinery that’s too large for his orchards, which don’t have the space to easily maneuver a combine, Lucas said.

“We’ve got a county road that we’d have to turn around on with a lot of traffic,” he said.

‘Tractor blight’

Operating hay machinery between hazelnut rows does occasionally cause a tree to succumb to “tractor blight” but the problem hasn’t been serious enough to discourage intercropping, Lucas said.

Usually, a damaged tree doesn’t have to be replaced with a new one, though surrounding trees must be pruned to allow it to regrow, he said. “The suckers will come up and you’ll get a tree.”

Irrigation key

Decades ago, Lucas intercropped hazelnuts with wheat but found it doesn’t align as well with his orchards in terms of irrigation.

Irrigating the trees in the height of summer would cause wheat kerns to germinate. Waiting to irrigate the trees until after the wheat was harvested wouldn’t do them much good, Lucas said.

Suspending irrigation before the wheat harvest didn’t kill or seriously hurt his trees, but it didn’t help the orchard, either, he said. “It took longer to establish.”

Orchard grass, on the other hand, can be irrigated with overhead sprinklers after the first cutting in May or June and after it’s harvested in late August, Lucas said. The hazelnut trees need that water to grow healthy roots in their early years.

Farmers who have installed drip lines in their orchards can continue irrigating the trees even while seed crops are allowed to dry out, while Christmas trees and nursery stock can be watered at the same time.

Irrigation is a particularly important consideration when intercropping because vegetation between hazelnut rows will compete with the trees, said Nik Wiman, an orchard crops specialist with Oregon State University Extension.

“If you choose to intercrop, you want to ensure you have enough irrigation to account for the moisture the intercrop is taking from the soil,” Wiman said. “The early years of growth are super important for setting up the orchard. The trees really need to be the focus.”

Wiman said the “long tradition” of growing cover crops in orchards benefits soil health by improving organic matter and water infiltration while reducing erosion.

When farmers decide to intercrop to generate revenue, however, Wiman urges caution. Many hazelnut growers intercrop successfully, but the practice does tend to narrow the margin for error.

“Something changes when the focus is on making money from the intercrop,” Wiman said.

Pest problems

Mice and voles are a serious threat to hazelnut orchards, since can they go from feeding on the intercrop to feeding on tree bark, said Jimmy Lee, a farmer near Lebanon, Ore. Baits can mitigate the problem but extensive infestations may warrant eliminating the intercrop.

“Be extremely sharp on voles or mice. I’ve had mice kill quite a few — girdle some trees,” he said. “If something happens, you’ve got to remember your hazelnut trees are your primary crop.”

Lee said he prefers growing perennial grass and clover crops between hazelnut rows, which require fewer field operations than the spinach seed and cabbage seed he’s grown in the past.

Though these specialty seed crops offered attractive prices, they had to be re-planted each year, unlike perennial crops that last through the orchard’s early years, he said.

“It’s a hassle and if you have to work the ground 15 feet at a time, it’s a lot of costs,” Lee said, referring to the 15-foot intercrop rows.

To make intercropping pencil out, farmers should have enough acreage of both hazelnuts and the other crop to justify owning specialized equipment, he said. Open fields are more efficient to manage with larger tractors, implements and combines that won’t fit between orchard rows.

“Everything has to be small,” he said. “As the trees get bigger and bigger, everything gets tighter and tighter.”

With about 560 acres of hazelnut orchards, Lee figured he “might as well harvest some income” from between the hazelnut rows to offset costs, especially since he was familiar with seed crops.

However, the practice wouldn’t be practical for a small dedicated hazelnut producer, who’d have a hard time rationalizing the equipment costs, he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s for everybody.”