In 2018, Baurs Corner Farm owners Rob Baur and Sue Marshall opted to switch their crop from pears to hazelnuts to the tune of 3,200 trees on the 30-acre family farm. Now in 2024, the pair are completing their first commercial harvest.
After waiting nearly six full years for the first big harvest, Baur and his daughter Kelly have been hard at work gathering the nuts. Kelly Baur first drives a blower through the rows of hazelnut trees to move the nuts to the row for her father to collect with the “Getzumall” Orchard Sweeper.
On Thursday, Sept. 26, a total of nine bins full of hazelnuts and counting were ready to be sent off to the next phase of the process, which includes sending them to the George Packing Company in Newburg, Oregon.
“They’ll go to Aurora [Oregon] and then George Packing. They’ll be dried, cracked, and then they separate them out into whole nuts and part nuts,” Rob Baur said. “These are basically for candy. They’re not sold with the shell. The Chinese market is for in-the-shell with big nuts. These are smaller nuts because the nuts are more expensive than the chocolate, so when you have a hazelnut on top of a chocolate, they want a smaller one.”