You’ve heard of that ‘old chestnut’ – perhaps we have defined it here:

The Chestnut industry in New Zealand has been arduously nutted out many times over; but it always seems to relegate itself into the ‘nearly made it’ chest.

This time – 2013 – there still remain international markets pleading for product.

A leading tree propagator of great experience holds a bud grafting workshop featuring chestnuts.
He has supplied thousands of trees over decades for this elusive industry –
Where is this chestnut industry that has swallowed up so much effort?

While we wait for answers from the many people attempting a rebirth, let us see what we can find from the archival chest of dreams about this unfulfilled crop.

Below is a Basic Crop Fact Sheet from 1997, abridged only to remove references to authorities believed to be no longer with us.

We intended to follow up with coverage of recent progress outlined at the field day (embargoed), much of which is inspiring.  (We never did find a reliable method for returning to topic after the 3-month hold, but thankfully those requirements have eased.)

Meanwhile, a great export market goes unsatisfied – which we are well placed to supply.

See the Chestnut Cart in the Nut Crops Summary

← Back to Nuts

Written by Eric Cairnes, NZTCA – February 2000

So you’ve bought or are thinking of buying a rural block and perhaps earning some retirement income from growing something, preferably something you yourself like eating.  What about nuts? They are high value, store well, are eary to transport, lend themselves to niche marketing and can be managed on a fairly small scale.

Remember the in shell nuts you indulged in over Christmas.  If you chose well, you found some excellent quality locally grown walnuts or hazels.  Most of us however, bought mixed packs of nuts imported from around the world.  They were stale and rancid and we wondered why we had bought them.  Well perhaps its too cold for Brazil nuts here and peanuts are pretty marginal, but, almond, walnut, hazel, macadamia, pinenuts and chestnuts do well.  And how much better they would have tasted fresh.

The New Zealand Trees Crops Association, which has branches in most areas of the country, can help you get started, and most importantly, can put you in contact with other growers around NZ.  Information is willingly shared at field days and evening meetings and through fact sheets, because we recognise that this is the best way to learn more ourselves.

From time to time there are specialist nut seminars held, and the annual conferences (this year at Lincoln over Easter Weekend) nearly always feature field events and seminars given by experts on nuts.

So if you are serious about a commercial nut venture, you should do your homework.  Check out the world scene for indication as to potential.  (Get yearbook data and search the Internet).  Monitor trends in world prices, trends in planting and disease.  Does NZ offer a strategic advantage (eg. season, climate, disease, access to markets etc)?  What is the size of the local (ethnic) market?  What are the costs of growing and harvesting/processing the crop?  What supporting infrastructure is there to assist you?  Membership of NZTCA makes it easier to find answers for these and many other questions.

Decide how to market you crop.  Will you drop it on the local auction system, and accept commodity prices, or develop niche outlets for processed products and control the situation better.

In a general sense, the marketing aspect is the biggest hurdle for most small scale industries.  In NZTCA, many of us are green fingered growers, and not strong on the presentation/marketing end.  However, there are also many market success stories for niche products.

A new product in NZ such as gevuina nuts, may have difficulty establishing market demand unless there is sufficient supply.  Wholesalers or large retailers may not want to invest in promoting or stocking a product line unless quality and supply is secure.  Thus, even for products where there is established demand, but no local supply (eg pine nuts and pistachio), there is a ‘critical mass of product’ required to develop the market.  This amount is quite likely more than one or several growers could supply, so don’t try to capture the market on your own.  If you are keen on exporting, the amount of product to do business with may be orders of magnitude greater than would be necessary for domestic markets.  Our advice is to cooperate with other growers to develop the infrastructure and markets.

Thus one of the strategies of the newly formed Gevuina Action Group is to get as many trees as possible planted as soon as possible in order to be able to “launch the product”.  Quite deliberately, they are focussing on a few selections into order to standardise the product.  Naturally there are risks involved with new crops if the best selections are not yet known and market demand is uncertain.

In the case of macadamias, walnuts, chestnuts, and hazels, there is now an established demand for local produce (or for export) and some established infrastructure to harvest, process and market the produce.  The NZ Hazel industry is still very small, and gevuina, pistachio, almond, pecan, and pine nut are yet to gain ‘critical mass’ but gate sales and specialist retailers would still be interested in spot market sales.

The history of serious nut growing in NZ is quite recent and began with the foundation of the New Zealand Tree Crops association, 25 years ago.  Some of our early researchers were also on the staff at DSIR or MAF and no doubt this assisted with the professional approach and early successes.  A key trial area for nuts was the Crop research block at Lincoln and the cooperative venture with the then DSIR was a major success story.  Some of these trials continue in the grounds of Lincoln University under the auspices of Dr David McNeil, a Research and Development Coordinator for NZTCA.

Before the formation of NZTCA, no one had done any systematic selection or breeding of nut trees suitable for NZ conditions.  We weren’t even of the limitations of our climate.  How then to develop a nut industry?  The quickest way was not to spend 15 years breeding new varieties but to see how existing material would perform. The opinion was that NZ conditions were sufficiently different to other major nut producing countries, that imported varieties may not be any better than some selections already growing and adapted to NZ.

So in order to get the industries started, NZTCA held nut competitions to identify the best walnuts, chestnuts and hazels.  The best of these were then propagated and put into trial plantings and compared with the best overseas varieties.

In the case of walnuts, some local selections have done extremely well and four of these (Rex, Meyric, Dublin’s Glory and Stan) were given variety names in 1998.

Some of our local hazel selections (eg Whiteheart) also compare well against Italian and American varieties.

In the case of chestnut, due to the prevalence of chestnut blight in most other countries, there was reluctance to import any new overseas material.  Some did eventually get imported, but our local selections still form the bulk of the plantings.

With the founding of NZTCA, it still took 15 – 20 years of development to get walnuts, chestnuts and hazels to an industry size.
The nut crop summary below – Walnut – Chestnut – see also Nut Crop Guides may help you decide whether your favourite nut can be grown on your patch.

Walnut Chart

Species: Juglans regia commonly known as European, English or Persian walnut.

Got to the Walnut pages

Chestnut Chart

Species or hybrids between Castanea sativa, C. mollisima and C. crenata (Spanish, Chinese and Japanese)

Go to the Chestnut pages
← Back to Nuts

Wednesday, 27 August 2003 – Updated: 2015-02-20