What Future For Nuts ?
pp. 63-65 · Read in the full issue
Dr. Goto prefaced his coffee visit to New Guinea with a look at Northern NSW. His interest there was in Macadamia units —called also Queensland or Australian hush-nuts. However, the professor’s interest wasn’t botanical as most people assumed; he was trying to track down something about the mysterious John Macadam who is alleged to have given his name to the nuts that are a quarter-million dollar industry in Hawaii these days.
IT seems that the people who grow and package these nuts in Hawaii want to put a bit of historical blurb in the packages, and had asked Dr. Goto to look into the origins of this Macadam. When we caught the professor, mid-way between arriving from New Guinea and going on to New Zealand and home, there wasn’t much time to discuss his discoveries about Mac adam except to find that he hadn’t learned very much and discounted most of that. J We did find out, hpwever, that Hawaii’s present planting of 3,000 acres of Macadamias all came from six seedling trees that were taken
there from Queensland years ago.
From these six, the University of Hawaii developed seven superior strains but most of the plantings in Hawaii today are from only two or three of these. A soft-shelled variety has not been developed, although means have been per fected in Hawaii for dealing with the very hard shell.
Shelled Macadamia nuts bring the highest prices of any nuts—about $2 88 per lb in Hawaii, where about 75 per cent, of the crop is sold; and an average of about $4 per lb in the US to where the rest is
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exported. As these prices indicate, it is strictly a luxury trade.
Little interest has been shown in commercial exploitation of Macadamias on their home ground or in the South Pacific Islands where they could also be cultiva ted—probably because Australia has not the market potential for a high-cost product of this sort A long article in PIM in April, 1954. discussed potential Macadamia nut culture at length and also suggested
that there should be more exploita the gali P (or narli) nut of the SW Pacific.
As a result of this article, there was a prompt inquiry from Hawaii information on the galip nut. lhat letter was passed on to the New Guinea Director of Agriculture who immediately airmailed 2 lbs of gahp “seed nuts” to the potential Hawaiian producer (PIM, October 1954, p. 98).
It would be interesting to know how these trees are coming along or whether they have survived at all. Maybe they have become the basis of another Hawaiian industry which has received the thumbs, down signal south of the Line.