Badgersett Research

About - Swarm Breeding

Perennial Crop Breeder in Minnesota - http://www.badgersett.com/. Advisor to OSE on nut breeding.

MJ sez - Badgersett is a seminal institution in the sense that nobody else that we know of is engaging in large-scale Swarm Breeding of nut crops with an explicit mission of providing a viable perennial alternative to corn and soybeans by means of hazelnuts and chestnuts. See more about his book - http://badgersettresearch.blogspot.com/p/the-book-is-here.html

Social Media

https://www.facebook.com/badgersettresearch

Communications

9/11/23

To Parker -

Surprised you did not hear about Badgersett Research.

To me it's the most important effort in the world in perennial agriculture, and I'm not aware of anything even close in terms of ambition. From the wiki - MJ sez - Badgersett is a seminal institution in the sense that nobody else that we know of is engaging in large-scale swarm breeding of nut crops with an explicit mission of providing a viable perennial alternative to corn and soybeans by means of hazelnuts and chestnuts. See more about his book - http://badgersettresearch.blogspot.com/p/the-book-is-here.html

Summary: today, they have select, open pollinated plants that yield commercially sustainable crop levels of hazels. That is big. Translated: the possibility of hazels replacing or displacing soybeans is real, meaning 6 tons/acre erosion is displaced wherever hazelnuts are growing. Holy shit. This should be getting billions of investment today.

Here you see 10000 seedlings on the shelves in 2016:

https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/File:Aquagreenhouse1.jpg

https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Nut_Breeding

About 30 plants survived in the field, they are nearing nut age. They are the super hard core selection, immune to rabbits and 100% neglect except I did put chicken wire on them to help them about 4 years ago.

Phil has 160 acres or more with the nut experiments, but he went out of business temporarily and stopped the breeding work, and shifted to other things. His son told me that he is planning on continuing this work with his wife. Anyway, want you to be aware of this if you are serious about changing the world with nuts. This is the promise of Forest Farming. And we may want to collaborate in the future with respect to succession of Badgersett Farm, as their future does not appear to have a clear succession plan at present. This is very much in line with metacrisis. With nuts, we can solve or address erosion, food security, fuel crop - and coppiceable source of biomass that can substitute the oil industry as all oil chemistry is found in plants.