ould have insured the success had we done it that way,
we would certainly like to hear from you, or we have some nice machinery
that we will sell cheap in case you want to experiment with it yourself.
I would be the last one to condemn the future possibility of producing a
commercial nut butter, and yet it is strange that the only successful
nut butter is not a nut butter at all. Peanut butter is not a nut butter
because peanuts are a legume like a pea or bean. To my knowledge, we do
not have any nut butters on the market today with the exception of the
cashew nut butter, which recently had a distribution in our locality,
but which seems now to have run its course much as our products did. We
bought the cashew butter and tried to interest everybody to use it, just
to see whether it was any different than our product in its popularity.
In our meager tests we found that the filbert butter was slightly more
popular than the cashew, since the cashew reminded people too much of
peanuts again. It was also very expensive. However, there must be a way
to make a satisfactory butter out of filberts or hybrid nuts, as they
carry the hope of the cheapest nut product, which is fundamentally
necessary to manufacture a popular food item.

The method of propagation of the Hazilbert is by layers instead of
grafting--layering is a cheaper and more satisfactory method. Also, the
nuts are the most satisfactory to crack as they have no inner partitions
which would require intricate machinery to extract the kernel. Their
keeping quality is excellent; we have tested this out over a number of
years, and filbert butter properly processed will easily keep a year
without turning rancid or having an unfavorable flavor. The tonnage of
nuts that can be produced on an acre of land is unbelievably high. I
have measured individual plants and their production, and the area that
they covered, and it is safe to say that we can expect to produce a ton
of nuts in the shell per acre in favorable locations on good deep soil.
Even at 10c per pound for the nuts this is a good return. New methods
of gathering the nuts after they fall from the involucre or husk are
being discovered and improved by the western growers from time to time,
so that the old expensive method of hand-picking is being eliminated.
This should make the filbert even cheaper to harvest.

It is not my intention here to discourage the manufacture of filbert
butter, but to point out the difficul