By DEBORAH BEHRENDS
Illinois Correspondent

ROCHESTER, Ind. — Anyone who knows Roger Rose will tell you, he’s got a lot of different interests.

This Rochester-born and raised boy has an engineering degree that he used professionally before returning to the farm. His interests go well beyond that into local politics where he’s in the middle of his second four-year term as one of three Fulton County commissioners.

He worries about rooftops encroaching on valuable farmland. And he collects black walnuts for a Missouri company.

“I started collecting in 1989. I’m just the middle man, buying the walnuts from the public,” Rose said.

The company pays about 12 cents per pound for the hulled nuts. Rose said the machine that hulls the nuts is shipped to his place each year at the beginning of the season, about Oct. 1.

“It’s a short season. We start collecting about Oct. 1 through the first week of November,” Rose said.

At the end of the season, the machine is shipped back to Missouri to be maintained and stored for another year.

Rose said he takes in anywhere from 200,000-400,000 pounds of walnuts per year. He calls the process “very profitable.”

But what has “revolutionized” the collection process, according to Rose, is a little gadget called the Nut Wizard. As an engineer, Rose can appreciate the simple elegance of the tool.

A wire ball on a stick, the Nut Wizard is rolled along the ground to pick up the nuts. When the ball is full, it’s placed over a thicker wire tool placed in a 5-gallon bucket, turned to separate the ball’s wires and the nuts drop into the bucket.

“Before this was invented, you had to pick up the walnuts, literally on your hands and knees,” Rose said. “If you could get a kid to do it for five minutes, you were doing good.

“This is just so much easier, especially for older folks. It saves your back and your knees.”

In the end, with the help of a tool like the Nut Wizard, Rose said growers can get a pretty good return on their labor.

“You can make $10-$12 an hour,” he said.

And what does he do with all those hulls? He spreads them on his pasture.

“There’s not much organic matter in them, but in the 20 years I’ve been doing it, I’ve seen no adverse affects,” he said.

Rose cautioned that some plants are adversely affected by the chemical juglone contained in the hulls. He said tomatoes in particular don’t react well.