To cultivar or not to cultivar?

I am prompted to write this post because I recently received a form inviting me to list the cultivars I grow on a web-based North American inventory of nut tree cultivars. If I grew any, I’d be delighted to do so. However, I don’t, and if it’s not clear anywhere else in this blog why not, here goes…

A ‘cultivar’ is short form for cultivated variety, and is standard speak among those who’ve bred something new by crossing plants, or who’ve identified something in the wild they’d like to put a name to because of some useful characteristic – in the case of black walnuts it is so far the latter, generally related to kernel content or crackability of the nut, and because maintenance of that cultivar is wholly dependent on grafting (black walnut cuttings will not root). In such a case, the name gives that particular genotype an identity, e.g. Emma K.

Now, let me be unkind here and say that I believe the naming of black walnut cultivars has only been of benefit to the horticultural nursery industry. It has resulted in the sale of young trees at about $20-30, whereas a forest nursery will sell common (i.e. non-cultivar or unnamed) seedlings for $1-2 apiece if you buy them in bulk. The lads in Missouri* have roughly calculated that planting cultivars can bring a nine-fold advantage in nut yield over nut production from plantations of the best common trees (if you knew which they were). My response to this is that the planting stock will still be cheaper if you plant nine times as many common trees. There may still, of course be a yield disadvantage because the potential productivity of the common trees won’t be known for some years, but then again I could say the same of any cultivar, if it is planted at a site far removed from its point of origin, where growing conditions may be significantly different.

Why do I make that unkind statement? Because, and unlike the cases of the pecan and Persian (aka Californian) walnut ‘industries’, fully based on named cultivars, there is no farm-based equivalent in the black walnut. The only commercial equivalent (i.e. black walnut example) is Hammons, also based in Missouri, that survives on the annual US wild harvest (thousands of tons) . The reasons for this lack of a farm-based equivalent are various, and I shan’t go into them here and now, but one good one is that nursery stock is too expensive for the return on investment when the principal nut-buyer (already mentioned) buys at or near to equivalent-to-wild prices.

So, no cultivars, just 2,500 common trees, building the natural capital to let me exploit various income streams, and at least $45,000 of avoided-costs in the bank.

As a footnote, in 2007 I made my first selections from the trees that nutted, and am now growing 25 F1 lines from seed. These will not be clones of the mother trees, as grafted cuttings would be, but until someone has done the science that convinces me that $18 ($20-$2: I could have said $29, or $30-$1) will make up for the reduction in heritability of the productive characteristics important to me as a grower in an industry which does not yet put value on any key trait of named cultivars, I prefer to select for traits which I have observed as useful here at the farm, rather than risk capital on Emma K, when it could turn out to be Humpty Dumpty

Actually, I have some F1 Emma K also…..

*Jones, J., J.Haines, G.E. Garrett, and E. F. Loewenstein, 1993. Genetic Selection and Fertilization Provide Increased Nut Production under Walnut-Agroforestry Management. Proc. Third North American Agroforestry Conf., 16-18 Aug 1993.

Carbon tax

Such is the ubiquity of CNN that I was able to see, quite by chance, Jonathan Mann’s post-Nobel Oslo interview with Al Gore and Rajendra Pauchari, from the northern Ghanaian savanna. Now there is a bleak landscape, already so ravaged by human action that it is already almost the post-apocalyptic climate change scenario predicted for later this century.

Of the many things they said, one stood out: carbon tax. The way it was mentioned it came across as a functional alternative to an income tax. The carbon tax would operate as a consumption tax, a tool appropriate, I think, to the unsustainable use of natural resources driving most economies at the beginning of the 21^st century. There is a lot of hype about the concept of a consumption tax, with many commentators expressing their objection to the idea. Perhaps, were it just a political alternative to current tax systems, and unlinked to the coming carbon crisis, their arguments might hold more weight. Unfortunately, this is just a rich people’s argument. Looking out the window towards the interior of an Africa which has already given them much of that wealth I see no alternative. Starvation is not far away, and a carbon tax is probably the only mechanism whose outcome on consumption could keep it at bay. You can be sure CNN will show Africans their starvation in all its glory. Hello, again, Ethiopia.