Farmers tried to grow hazelnuts east of the Rocky Mountains for hundreds of years with no luck — a naturally occurring fungal disease made it nearly impossible.

But that’s about to change.

After 22 years of research, Thomas Molnar, a plant biologist at Rutgers University, had a breakthrough.

Thanks to his work, hazelnuts can now survive in New Jersey, and in a few years, the crop could be growing commercially from Maine to Virginia and west to Michigan.

"It’s been a very long time since there was a new crop for agriculture, and it’s an exciting thing to actually bring something new to that world,” Molnar said.

The discovery from Molnar and his team is consequential: The current world supply for hazelnuts barely meets the demand, which continues to rise due to the popularity of products such as Nutella, a hazelnut and cocoa spread. Turkey produces 70 percent of the world’s hazelnut crop and the United States produces 5 percent, mostly in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

Ferrero Rocher, Nutella's parent company, uses 25 percent of the world's hazelnuts for its products. Hazelnuts are also being used as raw and dry-roasted nuts, other nut butters, chocolate-hazelnut spreads, ice cream, gelato and even nut milks.

Not since the 1930s has a new crop been introduced to the nation’s agriculture world. That was when farmers began cultivating soybeans, which have become one of the most-produced crops in the country.

Molnar began his hazelnut research as an 18-year-old at Rutgers, working at a plant lab under the direction of his mentor, Reed Funk, a pioneer in turf grass breeding. Funk decided to study hazelnuts because it’s a low-input, high-value crop, meaning it doesn’t need much labor to grow or harvest and the plant yields lots of nuts.

It takes only two or three people to harvest many acres of hazelnuts, Molnar said. Once the nut has matured, around the second or third week of September, the nut falls off the branches.

“That’s part of the beauty of the crop, especially in New Jersey, where it's sometimes hard to get the skilled labor you need for something like apples or vegetables,” he said.

Hazelnuts could survive in the climate of the Northeast, but they just couldn’t overcome the Eastern filbert blight disease that targets the trees.

“We started this project well before people were eating Nutella here in the United States, before people were even eating hazelnuts here,” Molnar said as he walked through the research farm that houses nearly 5,000 hazelnut trees at Rutgers.

Of those 5,000 trees, 150 remain disease-free. The resistant trees originate from 65 seed lots of the 10,000 seeds the team collected from countries where hazelnuts thrive — including Russia and Italy.

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“The big thing is that we have resistance to this disease, and we don’t just have one source of resistance — we have many,” Molnar said. “We’re not just relying on one gene — we have many genes, and we actually have different hazelnut species, so we have a really wide foundation."

Dan Richer, a Rutgers alumnus and owner of Razza Pizza Artigianale in Jersey City, has already benefited from the new, disease-free Jersey hazelnut. He uses the nuts in a pie he calls “Project Hazelnut.” Richer’s restaurant recently received acclaim from New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells.

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“Now that they’ve become really popular and the demand is very high, it’s sort of serendipitous,” Molnar said. “We have plants that can start to be grown to meet this demand.”

The Rutgers-grown trees will be ready to share with farmers for the first commercial test orchards by next fall, Molnar said.

“It’ll be really exciting once I go and see hazelnut orchards in New Jersey,” said the New Brunswick native. "It’ll be really exciting to make that impact here.”

Email: carrera@northjersey.com Twitter: @CattCarrera