Smith grew up in North Pole and has been growing food his whole life. During his Air Force career, he was stationed in North Dakota, where he noticed farmers growing hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, apricots and pears in conditions that were not so different from Fairbanks.
"I started thinking, wow, there's so much potential in cold climates," he said.
He ended his career at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage and immediately started testing some of the crops he had seen in his travels, including hazelnuts. One of the hazelnut trees at his home in Chugiak is 7 years old. He's also growing walnuts and chestnuts.
“Hazelnuts are one of the most resilient crops you can grow,” Smith said. “They’re drought-resistant, they’re flood-resistant. They’re resistant to cold and heat and every extreme you can imagine."
Hazelnuts are low-growing, bushy trees or shrubs, topping out at about 15 feet. Although plants produce both male and female blossoms, they do not self-pollinate, so multiple trees are needed to produce nuts.
"Not only do they serve as a valuable food source, but there's biofuels, there's oils we can extract from the nuts,” he said. Hazelnuts can also be used in alley cropping, the practice of interspersing perennial crops with annual crops, which could sequester carbon, hold water and reduce erosion.
A North Dakota farmer who has been growing hazelnuts for 30 years in an area with winter temperatures of minus 40 degrees, gave Smith a bag full of hazelnuts, which he sprouted. Some are planted at the Matanuska Experiment Farm, some at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm, and others in various locations in both Southcentral and Interior Alaska.
"I've known (UAF professor emeritus) Patricia Holloway for years," Smith said. "She and I have go back and forth when it comes to talking plants. I ended up mentioning hazelnuts, and realized I had some extras." He asked if Holloway was interested in trying hazelnuts in some of the microclimates around Fairbanks to test their hardiness.
"Some of these could be reliable at Zone 2 or even Zone 1, but the only way we're going to find out is planting a large number of them across Alaska and see what sticks," he said.
Glenna Gannon, assistant professor of Sustainable Food Systems at UAF, and Katie DiCristina, manager of Georgeson Botanical Garden, agreed to plant hazelnuts in the garden, as well in the agriculture field across the railroad tracks and about 100 feet lower in elevation from the garden. Gannon planted the seedlings in late September, nestling the young plants in compost and layering with a frost cloth to protect them as much as possible.
Smith's hazelnuts in Chukiak haven't produced yet, but a friend in South Anchorage has picked ripe hazelnuts from his bushes.
"Part of this is we want to start developing new crops and part of this is we really want to hit the point home that things are changing here in Alaska and my big mission is food security," Smith said. "The fact is you guys don't hit negative 50 every year nowadays, and the fact that your growing season is getting longer, that's opening up a lot of potential that wouldn't have existed even 20 years ago. "How do you bring people into that conversation? You do something bold, and I think these hazelnuts are part of that."
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