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RINGOES — The first time Ozgur Tunceli planted hazelnut saplings on her Hunterdon County farm, deer came through and ate them to the ground.

The next time, her goats did the same.

“Imagine me sitting there and crying and regretting everything that I did,” she said. “I said, ‘I should sell this farm and just go back to my suburban life.’”

Instead, she got an electric fence. Now, four years after she set out to become a hazelnut farmer, Tunceli has close to 1,000 trees planted on her hilly, sprawling property in Ringoes. She’s part of a small but widening group of pioneers who are working to make hazelnuts as much of a signature New Jersey crop as tomatoes, blueberries, corn, and cranberries.

“We are really trying to build an entire industry here,” Tunceli said.

The state wants to help, said Ed Wengryn, the state’s agriculture secretary.

Officials are eyeing incentives to offset high startup costs and entice more farmers into growing the trees, Wengryn said.

And Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex), whose district office is just up the road from a hazelnut farm in Hillsborough, is seeking $6.5 million in state funding to help growers buy equipment to sort, shell, and package nuts for sale and secure a processing site. He envisions hazelnuts at every Garden State farm stand and a New Jersey version of Nutella on supermarket shelves someday.

“The potential for New Jersey to become a major player in hazelnut production is enormous,” Zwicker said. “I don’t think New Jersey peaches, blueberries, and tomatoes are going away, but I think if we get this right, we will be known worldwide as a hazelnut producer.”

Some hazelnut history

Turkey produces about 70% of the world’s hazelnuts, and until recently, Oregon’s Willamette Valley was the only place in the U.S. to grow the nutrient-rich, round nuts also known as filberts.

The seeds for New Jersey’s fledgling filbert industry were first planted, literally, by Rutgers University.

Tom Molnar was a Rutgers student about 30 years ago hunting for a Ph.D. topic when he decided to focus on hazelnuts, which are native to New Jersey but had been decimated by disease decades ago. Molnar’s mentor was the late C. Reed Funk, Rutgers’ famed turfgrass breeder whose work made the school millions in royalties and a global powerhouse in grass development. Funk saw better breeding as key to growing nuts in the Northeast, Molnar said.

“We had land, we had funding, and he knew how to run a breeding program,” said Molnar, who’s now a professor of plant biology at Rutgers.

Molnar rejected nut trees like walnut, pistachio, and pecan, not wanting to compete with big U.S. producers like California and Georgia. He picked hazelnuts because, besides being native to New Jersey, they need less water, are more compact, and produce faster than other nut trees, he said.

He started by collecting hazelnut seeds from around the world and eventually planted tens of thousands of trees at Rutgers’ research farm in East Brunswick, observing and experimenting to create disease-resistant, higher-yield trees.

By 2020, his research had progressed enough that he wanted to see how his trees would do around the Garden State. He partnered with several farmers to plant Rutgers-bred varieties whose names honor their Jersey roots: Raritan, Somerset, Monmouth, and Hunterdon. Those farms still serve as living laboratories, with new growers adding to their ranks since Rutgers licensed a Columbus nursery to sell their cultivars.

“This has been a dream to grow hazelnuts in the eastern U.S. for 200 years,” Molnar said.

Ed Clerico was one of the “early adopters,” as Molnar puts it.

Clerico is a third-generation farmer whose family ran a dairy farm in Hillsborough (the one near Zwicker’s office), but who pivoted in retirement to perennial crops that don’t require annual tillage and planting.

He also had a career in water resource management, an experience that has deepened his dedication to filbert farming.

His 38-acre farm sits along Royce Brook, which feeds the Millstone and Raritan rivers, two waterways that flow through nearby Manville and Bound Brook and that sometimes catastrophically flood. He regards hazelnut trees, as well as thirstier breeds like the persimmons and pawpaws he’s planting in a floodplain beside the brook, as pulling double duty.

“There’s just a lot of benefits to agroforestry. Growing trees sequester a lot of carbon, so there’s greenhouse gas benefits. And they help with water quality and flood mitigation,” Clerico said. “This could be one of the best stormwater management and water quality advancements. When you hear about stormwater management, people are very oriented towards man-made infrastructure, but we could be using the environment as infrastructure too.”

Wengryn already is a convert, for the trees’ ecological benefits alone.

“They create a shade canopy, reducing ambient air temperatures in and around the orchard area. When we get these intense storms that drop a quarter to a half inch of rain in 15 minutes, the leaf canopy breaks that up, so it actually falls more gently to the soil and we get less soil erosion from this kind of agriculture,” Wengryn said.

Molnar ticks off a long list of other perks he hopes will persuade more farmers to plant Rutgers’ hazelnuts. They don’t require as many fungicides or insecticides, or as much pruning, as the peach, apple, and other fruit trees more commonly grown in New Jersey. They’re harvested by machine so don’t need as much labor as hand-picked crops. The trees are more climate-resistant and can live for over 50 years, making them both less susceptible to weather extremes that can destroy less-hardy crops and a good long-term investment. And hazelnuts aren’t as perishable as other crops; harvested unshelled nuts can be stored and stay fresh for over a year.

“That means you could sell them throughout the winter into the spring,” Molnar said.

But several hurdles have kept the industry small so far.

The high land costs that can make farming a pricey profession in New Jersey have hindered hazelnut expansion, farmers agreed.

The costs and logistics of processing are another barrier, Molnar added.

With most filbert farming occurring on other continents, U.S. growers must look to Europe and beyond for the machinery to harvest, sort, and get the nuts to market. Tunceli, Clerico, and two other farmers formed an agroforestry cooperative to process, promote, and sell their nuts. The co-op recently bought some equipment, funded by a federal grant, that they’ll house at Tunceli’s 89-acre farm until they find funding to open a separate processing facility.

At the same time, it takes five years for young hazelnut trees to produce their first nuts and seven to eight years for them to come into significant production, Molnar said. That means farmers see little to no return on their investment for years.

“Younger farmers don’t really have that much money to invest, while older farmers don’t have that much time,” Tunceli said.

Tunceli, who’s 56 and has kept her job in the healthcare insurance industry, hopes her orchards will thrive enough for her to live wholly off her land, but she expects that could take another five years.

Because hazelnuts have not been a U.S. crop outside of Oregon, some local farmers also see challenges in who to sell them to, fretting that a market might not exist here.

Tuncheli is not one whit worried about that.

She grew up in Turkey and immigrated here for college about 30 years ago. In Turkey, every bit of hazelnut trees gets used, she said. The kernels become nut butters, oils, flour, milk, candies, desserts, and other foods; the trees’ leaves can make herbal teas; their limbs can be used to weave baskets; and nutshells can be used for exfoliating scrubs, cosmetics, and even clean-burning fuels.

“That part is really easy,” she grinned.

Wengryn doesn’t see that as a problem either, noting a “global craze” for treats like Italian company Ferrero’s Nutella and Ferrero Rocher chocolate-hazelnut bonbons.

“People love this product,” he said of hazelnuts. “There’s very little domestic production of it, and this is an opportunity to enter that market.”

The future of filberts

Zwicker has submitted two budget resolutions that, if approved, would provide $298,200 in state funding to the agroforestry cooperative to support hazelnut automation, cold storage, food safety compliance, and commercial-scale infrastructure and nearly $6.3 million for the cooperative to build a processing facility and establish grower incentives.

Wengryn said he aims to work with the state Economic Development Authority to tailor more “business builder” funding to sustainable agriculture like hazelnut farming. He also thinks New Jersey could designate money collected under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate effort to reduce the power sector’s emissions that worsen climate change, for agroforestry.

“This type of agriculture really complements that carbon sequestration and really does improve our air quality and our water quality,” he said.

Whether or not New Jersey becomes a hub for hazelnuts, Rutgers’ cultivars now grow beyond the Garden State. Their trees are planted on about 300 acres across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio, Molnar said.

His work has made him somewhat of a celebrity in agriculture, at least elsewhere, in places where hazelnuts are a major, prized crop.

“In New Jersey, I’m an anonymous nobody, and like, nobody cares what I do,” he said with a laugh. “I guess agriculture isn’t really cool.”

But Clerico expects Molnar’s research, like the trees on his own Hillsborough farm, will outlive them both.

“Rutgers’ work isn’t just leading-edge in terms of New Jersey. What they’ve done in their breeding programs to produce trees that have multiple gene resistance to diseases could benefit everywhere in the world,” Clerico said.

Some state legislators clearly agree and aren’t waiting on the industry to scale up to brag about New Jersey’s role in the hazelnut tree’s return to the region’s soils.

They want hazelnuts to be the official state nut.

The Assembly passed the proposal Thursday, despite opposition from most of the chamber’s Republicans that drove some to voice their objections for the record.

Assemblywoman Aura Dunn (R-Morris) said anointing hazelnuts the state nut was a few decades premature, Assemblyman Gregory Myhre (R-Ocean) said the American chestnut should get the honor, and Brian Bergen (R-Morris) blasted the the bill as a “moronic, awful, stupid, crazy, nutty piece of legislation.”

“Why on earth do we need a state nut?” Bergen said, before imploring Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin: “I just really wish that, Mr. Speaker, you would do a better job selecting the bills that come to the floor, because this is useless.”

Bill sponsor Assemblyman Sterley Stanley (D-Middlesex), whose district includes Rutgers’ research farm, remained undeterred.

In a sweeping statement on the Assembly floor with Molnar standing at his side, Stanley hailed hazelnuts as “the most promising engine for economic development offered to rural communities in decades.”

“These trees represent a monumental achievement for our state, a true breakthrough in science that reinforces why we are known as the Garden State,” he said. “These hazelnuts are testament to the balanced spirit of innovation and resilience that lies at the heart of what it means to be a New Jerseyan.”

This story originally appeared on New Jersey Monitor.