THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 285

• How easily can we breed improved varieties? 5
No one seems to have a definitive answer to these questions. Wildly different yield fig-
ures are given - Jannaway gives 31 tonnes per hectare for walnuts while Whitefield cites
7.5 tonnes and the Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon claims to be getting about the
equivalent of three tonnes per hectare from their best varieties. FAO estimates are even
more erratic with China, France, Turkey and the USA all reporting average yields of around
2.5 tonnes per hectare for walnuts in their shells in 2007, while the Czech republic re-
ports 6.6 tonnes, Azerbaijan 6.7, Pakistan 10 tonnes, Romania 22.6 tonnes and Slovenia
32 tonnes. Any advance on 32 tonnes? Yes, in 2004 Slovenia claimed to be producing 60
tonnes per hectare! Poor old Bulgaria, by contrast, only harvests 480 kilos per hectare, and
Russia just 240 - while the UK doesn't produce any at all. 6 To put these figures into con-
text, 32 tonnes is equivalent to the entire biomass that can be extracted off a reasonably
productive Sitka Spruce plantation 7 - the idea that an equivalent quantity of walnuts (plus
all the rest of the biomass on the trees that bear them) can be produced on a hectare is not
credible.
The yield of hazelnuts is more modest: the USA tops the league with an average yield
of 2.8 tonnes per hectare, and otherwise only Croatia, France, Greece and Slovenia exceed
two tonnes per hectare. As for chestnuts, Azerbaijan comes out on top with 10.6 tonnes per
hectare, followed by China with 7.1 tonnes, Romania with 6 tonnes, Peru with 4.2 tonnes
and Albania with 3.3 tonnes. Every other country produces less than 2.2 tonnes per hectare,
which is pathetic, considering that chestnuts - which, nutritionally speaking, are the potato
of the nut world - contain virtually no fat, less than a quarter as many calories as walnuts
and less than a fifth as much protein.
The problem, for Britain, is that nut trees don't perform brilliantly in northern climes.
The northern extremity of commercial chestnut production in western Europe is about 500
miles south of Paris. The English chestnut belt, across the weald of Hampshire, Sussex
and Kent has been maintained for the value of its coppice wood. Walnuts are produced
commercially in the Périgord, 250 miles south of Paris, not in Normandy or Brittany. 'The
English have long cultivated walnuts with optimism, if not with success', observes Colin
Tudge. 8 We know that 1826 was a good year for walnuts because William Cobbett, arriving
at Blunsdon in Wiltshire in September of that year, remarked: 'I saw a clump, or rather a
sort of orchard, of as fine walnuts as ever I beheld, and loaded with walnuts. Indeed I have
seen great crops of walnuts all the way from London.' But we have no way of knowing
how great the yield was; and almost in the next breath he proclaims: 'This is a cheese coun-
try'. 9 However accomplished 19th century farmers might have been at growing walnuts, it
clearly didn't seem to them to be as rewarding or as reliable as keeping cows. Hazelnuts
produce in a UK climate, but their yield is lower than that of chestnuts or walnuts, and is
frequently zero if there are grey squirrels around. Even oak trees only produce a decent