Philip Rutter
Woody agriculture — breeding hazels and chestnuts as staple crops rather than orchard novelties.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Badgersett Research Corporation · Canton, Minnesota
- Home ground
- 160 acres of silt-loam on hilly uplands in the south-eastern corner of Minnesota, about eight miles north of Iowa.
- The programme
- Inter-species NeoHybrid crosses of hazels, chestnuts and hickory-pecans, selected for productivity, blight resistance, cold hardiness and low maintenance. Roots going back to 1978.
- The goal
- Woody agriculture — main-crop food staples produced from woody plants, with the plants, tools and techniques needed to make it profitable.
- Also
- Founding President of The American Chestnut Foundation and a past President of the Northern Nut Growers Association.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Rutter’s distinction is between a nut orchard and a staple crop. An orchard produces a garnish sold by the pound; a staple crop produces bulk calories, on a field scale, harvested mechanically. Woody agriculture is the argument that hazel and chestnut can do the second thing, and Badgersett is the fifty-year attempt to breed the plants that would.
The breeding is deliberately hybrid and deliberately broad — inter-species crosses selected in large populations for the traits a field crop needs rather than the traits a nursery catalogue sells. That means uniformity is sacrificed for resilience, which is a defensible choice and an unusual one.
He was also the founding president of The American Chestnut Foundation, which is a separate and substantial line of work on the same genus.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.