Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN 

CANTON -- Phil Rutter is expanding his dream, looking to use nuts on a commercial scale to solve erosion problems and to help battle global warming.

He is touting his hybridized hazelnuts as a source for biodiesel. The nuts can be grown and crushed on a farm, and then used to fuel farm tractors.

He is doing his work at Badgersett Research Corp. northeast of Canton, where he and his sons, Brandon and Perry, have been working for 20 years to find the best hazelnut hybrids for commercial use.

Recently he began looking at hazelnuts as a fuel for the future, a fuel that is grown locally and that doesn't add carbon to the air. (Carbon from the burning of fossil fuels is believed to contribute to global warming.)

Many hazelnuts are used in candy and for their oil, which is expensive, but there will also be waste nuts that can be great for fuel, Rutter said.

When the candy and hazelnut oil markets are saturated, landowners could find that it's cheaper to grow hazelnuts because they don't have to be replanted each year, he said. If the hazelnut market dries up, farmers can still feed them to livestock, eat them or burn them for fuel, he said.

The hardest problem now is getting more people to grow the nuts, "to get from 'yes we can' to 'yes we are,'" he said.

Farmers can already grow and produce biodiesel on their farms, said Paul Porter, a University of Minnesota cropping system agronomist. At a recent demonstration, he had a $16,000 German machine that can crush virtually all kinds of nuts and seeds. The process moves it from straight vegetable oil to biodiesel with one chemical change. The rest of the kernel is used for animal feed.

The machine has been used for canola and can crush about 2,000 pounds a day, which is roughly the seeds from one acre. About 600 pounds of canola produces about 80 gallons of oil.

But the machine is not perfect. "There are a few issues with making this work, but it does work," Porter said.

Canola is about 40 percent oil and hazelnuts about 60 percent, but soybeans are about 20 percent, he said. Nuts are about 18.7 percent oil if the nut and shell are crushed.

A farmer could actually grow all the fuel needed for an operation, said Seth Fore, a U of M graduate student in applied plant science. One farm in northern Minnesota has about 800 acres of corn, soybeans, sunflowers and canola. The farm would need to plant and crush about 40 acres of canola to provide the 5,000 gallons of fuel it would use each year, he said.