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| Cracking Walnuts When German clients of Tasmanian onion exporter Peter Gilham told him that their countrymen munched several thousand tonnes of walnuts each Christmas, he heard opportunity knock and soon began laying the foundations for a Tasmanian walnut growing industry.
It was, however, a slow, painstaking process, explains Leigh Titmus, the General Manager of Webster Walnuts, the only large-scale commercial producer of quality walnuts in Australia.
“We needed the genetic material of modern lateral bearing varieties, which was only available overseas,” says Leigh, who joined Peter Gilham’s company, Vecon in the early research and development days and remained when 180-year-old Tasmanian food and agribusiness company, Webster Ltd bought the operation in the mid-90s. “That made it tricky on a number of levels.”
Scion wood – alive but dormant wood in sticks about a metre long dotted with buds - was imported from recognised walnut breeders in Europe and California. Arriving in Australia via the AQIS facility at Kingston, the scion wood was fumigated and treated to a combination of water, warmth and hormones to get the sap moving again. The buds were then transferred to potted root stocks.
“Because the wood had come from the Northern Hemisphere, and was used to reverse seasons to ours, we had to trick it into bursting buds in its autumn, our spring,” says Leigh.
After two years in quarantine and screening for diseases, the surviving plants were taken to a nursery and propagated. Bench grafting techniques – grafting straight onto rootstocks ญญ- were developed and perfected.
The next step was to source suitable land for growing the trees.
“For a large scale development, we sought an area which met specific criteria” says Leigh. “You need warmth, but an adequate chill factor during winter; you need a water supply and fertile free draining soils; and you need economies of scale.”
The Cranbrook - Swansea area was chosen, and the 540 ha orchard was planted over an eight year period using the latest and best varieties and growing techniques. Today the orchard boasts 180,000 trees, some as tall as six metres, and this season most blocks will be in production, the maturest trees each producing about 1000 nuts. One hectare of mature trees can produce four to five tonnes of dried nuts.
All of those trees are descendents of those original hardy survivors of quarantine two decades ago, as are the 30 or so varieties of English walnut mother trees at Webster’s Forthside nursery, where more than 100,000 grafted trees a year can be produced.
Webster has another 80 hectares of walnuts around Tasmania under contract with Joint Venture growers and 1,600 hectares under management in the Riverina area of NSW, which boasts more than half a million trees. In Tasmania the cool temperate climate and a longer growing season help to create a high quality, premium walnut.
The combined Australian operation will potentially produce about 10,000 tonnes of in-shell walnuts when all trees are mature.
“We need to be producing a large and reliable amount of quality nuts each season to become established in the marketplace, locally and globally” he says.
Currently about two thirds of the walnuts are exported, with Turkey taking the majority and the balance into the German market. Webster is also focussing strongly on the local market where there is an 800 tonne in-shell market and a 3,800 tonne kernel market (or 8,500 tonnes of in-shell equivalent).
With each tree having a commercial life of up to 40 years, it seems sure to be an industry with a future, and as one of the oldest foods known to man, a sound history backing it up. “It is new world technology creating an old-world flavour,” says Leigh.
The technology is indeed new world, from the sophisticated science of the nursery to the specialised harvesting and processing machinery, but the nuts are still essentially the same as those eaten by Cleopatra. Hers, however, were certainly not premium Tasmanian nuts – which was bad luck for her.
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