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After a quarter of a century of development, the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry made a significant step toward a long-term goal of furthering the black walnut industry in Missouri with a recent patent for its first black walnut cultivar — The UMCA® “Hickman” Walnut.
“One of our goals is to generate a regional tree nut industry for Missouri,” said MU Center for Agroforestry Interim Director Ron Revord. “We are really well-positioned to do this with our River Hills soils and favorable climate, especially in comparison to the broader Midwest.”
Development of the UMCA® “Hickman” began with Dr. Mark Coggeshall, former faculty in the Center for Agroforestry. Coggeshall led the Black Walnut Improvement Program from the early 2000s until Revord took over the project in 2019. UMCA® “Hickman” was chosen as the first cultivar to be patented within the species for kernel production — for food production as opposed to timber production — because its characteristics make it uniquely suited to tree nut orchard production. In particular, this cultivar showed high rates of spur-bearing. Ultimately, this means that the tree produces more nuts for harvest, especially earlier in its life, giving producers opportunity for improved return on investment.
“The Center for Agroforestry invested in these tree nut species (i.e., black walnut, chestnut, hazelnut, pecan) and their improvement because they are a vehicle for novel agroforestry design,” Revord said. “Producing these tree nuts in mixed species agroforestry system configurations, like alley cropping, creates greater realized value from selling tree nuts annually, say as opposed to deferred value from a timber-base system, which is many decades delayed. This can make a strong economic case for grower adoption of agroforestry.”
The patent on the UMCA® “Hickman” Walnut, according to Revord, is a major milestone in creating that opportunity for growers as it allows for licensing the cultivar to be sold at nurseries.
Achieving that milestone inspired its name. The Hickman House, built in 1819, sits on the property of the Horticulture and Agroforestry Research Farm (HARF) in New Franklin that the Center for Agroforestry calls home. It is one of the state’s oldest, intact brick houses.
“The Hickman House was a milestone in the settlement of these river hills, similar to the milestone the UMCA® ‘Hickman’ cultivar represents for our program, so we felt this cultivar was worthy of the name Hickman,” Revord said.
Since receiving the patent, Revord and the team at the Center for Agroforestry have been working hard to bring it to commercial availability. Licensing to sell the cultivar is already in place, and faculty and staff are working to increase nursery supplies using micropropagation in a tissue culture lab on campus. While tissue culture holds promise, it will require research to develop efficient methods, and master’s student Jericha Hervey is beginning shoot initiation and multiplication studies this spring. Revord believes it will greatly help scale availability of UMCA® “Hickman” Walnut plants for nurseries around the state and country. For questions about this cultivar release, please email blackwalnut@missouri.edu.
The Center for Agroforestry at the University of Missouri, established in 1998, is a preeminent global center contributing to the science and practice underlying agroforestry, which combines trees and shrubs with crops or livestock.
Integrated practices of agroforestry (forest farming, alley cropping, silvopasture, riparian forest buffers, windbreaks, and urban food forests) help to protect the environment and improve biodiversity, while sustaining land resources for future generations.
Agroforestry practices help landowners create multifunctional working landscapes to provide a wide range of benefits.
HARF, located in New Franklin, Mo., encompasses more than 600 acres of scenic Missouri River Hills landscape and contains numerous varieties of fruit and nut trees and horticultural plantings. The resident Hickman House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. For more information about the historic building, visit the Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station website.