The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  There was also more than technology to consider. There were thornier and more personal matters—matters of pride, control, and independence. Farmers did not necessarily trust someone else’s idea of”improvement.” They wanted to know, for starters, if grafting was a procedure they could do themselves or if it would force them into dependence on nurseries and outside “experts.” They had specific questions, very different questions from the ones asked by passive cultivators: Did one buy improved seeds and graft them himself or did he purchase grafted seedlings? Did one plant improved seeds where he wanted them to grow or start them in one place and transplant them to another? If one did transplant, did the entire taproot have to be removed? How far apart should one space orchard pecans? What variety of seed should one use? Could one plant improved varieties away from rivers? Before a pecan industry could emerge around Antoine’s discovery, these questions would have to be answered. Farmers, moreover, would have to be the ones providing the answers.

  These barriers to change were substantial—but not insurmountable. What happened in the upcoming decades (between 1900 and 1925) was the transformation of pecan growing into a consolidated industry with global reach. This consolidation was probably bound to occur, because with the advent of the Centennial a fundamentally new way of thinking about pecan cultivation had, however tentatively, taken root. As the Texan pecan farmer George Tyng put it in 1896: “No more costly mistakes have I made than in trying to follow nature in raising the pecan. Every agricultural success has been achieved by overcoming nature’s effort to defeat it.”33 It would be on this ideology—an ideology that determined it was the human’s job to direct nature as aggressively and authoritatively as possible—that the pecan industry would come to embrace the ethic of “improvement” during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

  CHAPTER 5

  “To Make These Little Trees”

  THE CULTURE OF PECAN IMPROVEMENT, 1900–1925

  Any doubts one might have had that grafting did not fundamentally change the pecan industry during the first quarter of the twentieth century would have been silenced by the numbers. The southern states that were the most aggressive in adopting improved—grafted, budded, or topped—varieties saw their share of cultivated pecan trees shoot skyward. Between 1900 and 1925 Alabama went from 25,000 orchard trees to 170,000; Mississippi from 40,000 to 710,000; South Carolina from 10,000 to 200,000; Florida from 39,000 to 524,000; Texas from 359,000 to 2,419,000; and, most dramatically, Georgia, from a mere 30,000 trees in 1900 to 2,368,000 in 1925. Overall, twelve southern states saw the production of improved pecans rise from 567,000 to 8,733,000 in just over two decades. It might have taken a while, but the logic of Antoine’s graft had finally been embraced.1

  During these years pecan production reached a tipping point. Eight decades of decentralized experimentation and pervasive doubt regarding systematic orchard keeping finally crystallized into a set of standardized procedures that provided the technological foundation for a powerful agricultural industry. Pecan grafting inched into mainstream commercial agriculture and, as it did, growers began “making trees” rather than passively cultivating them or planting them from seed. This chapter explores the intricacies of how and why this transition happened when and where it did.

  If there was a single year that marked a decisive turning point from the systematic planting of pecan seedlings to the systematic propagation of improved pecan varieties, it was 1902. It is hard to say why that was such a critical year, but it assuredly had something to do with the convergence of several factors critical to convincing once and future pecan growers that it made little sense to repeat the same experiment without achieving measurable results. Indeed, there was little reason, despite episodic success with wild plantings, to plant orchards with seedlings that were bound to fail in producing consistent yields of high-quality, meaty, thin-shelled pecans. The point was now driven home by a chorus of powerful voices in the field of agricultural science: planting seeds and waiting until harvest season was a waste of time and agricultural space—a tired anachronistic behavior emblematic of a dark age long past—if one wanted to get into the pecan business in a real way. This was, of course, a belief framed by the concerns of high productivity rather than those of preserving genetic diversity.

  Examples of this decisive shift in tone are confirmed in the three most popular pecan reports published that year—two of them government publications, the other from a prominent nurseryman. The first came from the Louisiana State University Extension Service, a publication that every pecan grower in the region would at least have heard about, even if he had not had direct access to it. This missive lamented that the habit of building orchards from seed had persisted far too long. “Men who desire the best pecans today,” it declared, “do not follow this custom.” Instead, they “bud or graft upon them the best varieties available.” They undertook this procedure because, the report explained, “there is no other sure way of obtaining nuts which are known to be the most desirable.” This message had certainly been outlined before, but never so bluntly, with such insistence and with such little tolerance for passive cultivation. It went on: “A person should not put any confidence in the statement of any nurseryman or tree agent who offers seedling trees of desirable pecans, for he cannot guarantee them to produce fine varieties, or even as good as the seed planted to produce them.” The word was now made official. The Extension Service could no longer support in any way—not even as a last resort—planting seedlings as a viable commercial option. Grafting was the future. For anyone who hoped to make money growing and selling pecans, planting seedlings was not a workable part of the equation.2

  The second report came from the USDA’s Bureau of Plant Industry, following quickly on the heels of the LSU publication. It was even more direct in tone and less tolerant of traditional methods. In a section subtitled “Why the Pecan Should Be Budded,” the author, George W. Oliver, reminded farmers how “seedlings from nuts of the choice varieties do not come true.” In fact, “it would be remarkable were the seedling to produce nuts equal in size and flavor to those of the mother tree.” Any farmer stubborn enough to pursue such a method in the face of current conventional knowledge was doomed to experience “a good deal of disappointment” if not outright ridicule from the reality-minded agricultural community. By contrast, there was an accessible alternative that the USDA could now fully commit itself to promoting. “Necessarily,” Oliver wrote, “the only way in which the choice varieties of the pecan can with certainty be perpetuated in a manner to permit of being handled by dealers, is by budding or grafting on seedling stocks.” Once again, the implication was basic enough—if farmers, southern farmers in particular, were going to prosper by selling pecans with uniform qualities, they would have to take charge and direct the shape of both their trees and, in turn, the industry as a whole. Nature, for too long, had called the shots, but nature did not follow the logic of mass production. Now, even though it meant more work and required learning techniques unknown to past generations, the farmer could gain the upper hand over wild pecan trees, turning them into genetically uniform commodities rather than honoring their wild side.3

  The third report, a self-styled “Treatise on Pecan Culture,” came from a nurseryman in Georgia named G. M. Bacon. Like the government reports, Bacon’s treatise assured readers that improved varieties were the key to achieving industrial uniformity. He thus made his case in the strictest terms, writing, “Grafted and budded trees have advantages over seedlings because 1) they usually begin to bear much earlier than seedlings; 2) they reproduce the variety from which buds and grafts were taken; 3) uniformity in size, shape, and quality of nuts; 4) perpetuation of characteristics of parent tree; 5) greater care and attention usually given them on account of their greater value.” This was the nurseryman’s line, and there’s certainly no doubt that Bacon had a personal interest in cultivating clients for the cultivated varieties peddled by his own nursery. However, Bacon also believed so st
rongly in the virtues of improved cultivars that he advised and even instructed readers who could not afford nursery samples to bud and graft themselves—something the vast majority of farmers would do, at least for a while. “It behooves everyone,” he explained, “to have all seedlings converted into specific varieties.”4 Bacon believed in profit. But like so many others of the era, he also believed in grafting pecan trees to serve not nature’s economy but the human economy.

  These reports made something of an impact on pecan farmers. They were unique not only for the force of their opinions and the clarity of delivery, but also for the fact that they had genuine traction with readers who were in limbo on the grafting question. Keep in mind how many good reasons there were not to adopt improved varieties. A grafted orchard required a ten-year start-up period, considerable land taken out of some other form of production (usually cattle), and dependence of outside authority rather than the comfort of tradition. Understanding why growers responded so positively to the message of cultivation, in light of these drawbacks, is critical to understanding the history of the pecan tree. What was it about these reports, and the experts behind them, that suddenly made them appear trustworthy to the average farmer, a trust that could be built upon to gradually transform the pecan tree from a wild plant into a cultivated commodity? What factors tipped the scales of skepticism and encouraged common growers to pursue a strategy that would allow them to start building an industry with global reach on the back of consistent yields of uniform pecans?

  We have already seen how pecan farmers resisted external expertise throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, displaying a skepticism so persistent that most growers were still planting pecans from seed, or passively cultivating, well into the twentieth century (and the twenty-first). Similarly, we have also seen the popular appeal of maintaining groves through the techniques of passive cultivation, which involved minimal labor and could be pursued as a semi-profitable supplement to more permanent agricultural work. These were powerful mitigating factors working against the systematic adoption of cultivars. So, again, what was it about these three reports that allowed them to have such a dramatic impact on popular pecan planting? After decades of hearing about grafts, why, in the early 1900s, did pecan farmers finally turn the technological corner?

  A general explanation might go something like this: Leaders in agricultural thought—namely, agricultural scientists and nurserymen—learned something very important. They learned that social relations determined technology transfer more directly than any objective account of that technology’s effectiveness. In other words, the quality of communication between scientific expert and individual planter mattered more than the advertised objective benefits of grafting and budding. Experts learned the critical lesson that to have authentic influence on pecan farmers, they would have to work with them, rather than dictate from the high pedestal of expertise what the farmers should do to properly grow pecans. Additionally, it helped that the USDA and state extension agencies had been remarkably successful in a related endeavor, one that engendered considerable trust. This was an endeavor that also involved farmer-expert communication: controlling insect pests in other cash crops. The USDA had already achieved a big victory by 1900 on this front, and that precedent was one that farmers recognized and came to appreciate. They were ready to build upon that success and apply it to pecan cultivation.

  These factors worked together to help initiate a staggering 1,300 percent rise in pecan production between 1900 and 1925, launch an industry that continues to thrive to this day, and in the process fundamentally alter the very nature and meaning of that once natural entity known as the pecan tree.

  Farmers were fiercely independent. They were none too eager to have scientists dictate their behavior. They were none too eager to have anyone dictate their behavior. Central to the task of overcoming the suspicion that farmers instinctively harbored against outside agricultural authority, therefore, was the need to work closely with farmers themselves. They had to be empowered and emboldened. They needed a voice, especially if they were going to take the risk of becoming full-time pecan orchardists. Indeed, the necessity of including growers in the process of discovery was, scientists were coming to learn, a prerequisite for successful adaptation of any productive technology. Additionally, and perhaps more important, experts had to assure farmers that no matter how complex the transition to an orchard of improved trees might be, no matter how time-consuming, the growers would always be in the driver’s seat. On these points, pecan experts—who, it must be reiterated, had a direct professional interest in the proliferation of improved pecans—made substantial progress. Pecan improvements, in essence, came down to personal politics.

  Tactics varied. In a series of late-nineteenth-century reports explicitly intended to persuade farmers to adopt improved varieties, experts now chose to solicit firsthand information from the minority of pecan farmers who were early adopters of grafted varieties, rather than directly instructing all growers what to do. Readers of USDA bulletins could now learn from experimental but experienced pecan growers themselves just how well grafting and budding were serving their economic and agricultural interests. These testimonies, if for no other reason than that they came from real farmers, carried added weight with pecan growers who were otherwise wedded to maintaining wild stock. They also, if only implicitly, suggested to farmers that if they did not jump on the bandwagon of cultivation, their peers would quickly leave them behind. A little peer pressure in this respect could go a long way.

  The rural voices promoted by the agricultural scientists were simple, trustworthy, rooted in common sense, and, most importantly, marked by experience. A New Orleans pecan grower explained, “In June and July, when the seedlings are very sappy, we take off a ring of bark about three-fourths of an inch long from the nursery stock to be budded and replace it with a ring cut from a branch of equal size on the tree to be propagated.” He noted, “This is the best way to propagate pecans in this climate.” From Ocean Springs, Mississippi, one John Keller reported and exalted in the fact that 90 percent of his budded seedlings were expected to flourish. E. E. Risien from San Saba, Texas, testified that he had “attempted to propagate the pecan by budding small seedling trees near the ground.” “Experiments,” he concluded, “were successful to a degree.” From Kentucky, John G. Kline noted, “I have been successful in grafting on hickory [pecan] near the surface and hilling up to exclude air from the graft.” From Florida a farmer reported of his grafting experience: “quite successful . . . I have 1,000 thrifty young trees.” Such testimonies were gathered and presented to pecan farmers as meaningful evidence of progress, free of selfish ulterior motives.5

  These reports constituted the quiet hum of progress as it transpired out in the orchards. They were pivotal in that they offered powerful examples of farmers talking to farmers through channels established and monitored by USDA experts. To reiterate, when it came to accurate agricultural information, how knowledge was spread was proving to be more important than precisely what was being communicated. In listening to these agricultural voices, in witnessing farmers talking to farmers, we get closer to an understanding of how pecans were tamed into thin-shelled, high-yielding commercial gems falling onto orchard floors across the southern landscape, uniform in size and taste, ready to be processed and shipped around the world.

  Embedded in these accounts, moreover, were added assurances designed to appeal to skeptical growers. One aspect that stands out was a pervasive emphasis on flexibility. The perceptive agricultural reader would have been comforted by the wide variety of options that farmers employed to match particular solutions to particular problems. There was no rigid playbook that they were being asked to follow. Choice remained paramount. San Saba’s Risien employed “tongue grafting,” reminding readers that “root and scion must be the same size” in order “to make these little trees.” Owen Albright, from Leesburg, Florida, opted for the “wedge graft”; N. B. Howard, also from Florida, chos
e the “cleft graft”; and W. R. Stuart “whip grafted,” a process he deemed “very successful.” These techniques were carefully explained in great detail, laid out and illustrated in easily accessible language. The wide range of acceptable techniques on display would have assured fearful growers that in pursuing the new science of grafting, they would not be undermining the old art of choice.6

  Personal agrarian-based testimonies were persuasive for another reason as well. Farmers generally valued the opportunity that agriculture provided to solve unexpected problems with pragmatic and innovative solutions. This point is easily overlooked, as we tend to view farmers as laborers working from the neck down, pushing the plow more than the envelope of ideas. In many ways, though, they defined themselves as farmers through their own rugged brand of situational ingenuity. Nineteenth-century farmers were by temperament experimenters and communicators. They were tinkerers. They knew better than anyone—certainly better than scientists or tree experts—that nature was fickle and that tampering with it to grow food necessarily had some degree of unpredictability, if not an explicit possibility for fantastic failure. Confronting that unpredictability was, when you got down to it, the essential challenge and appeal of farming. It was what imbued daily grunt work with meaning. It was what rewarded creativity and skill. It was therefore highly encouraging for farmers to find in these published testimonies a clear sense that growers had ample opportunities to solve problems with their own ideas when it came to cultivating orchards with improved varieties. Grafting, farmers were assured, was anything but a formulaic or sterile procedure. It was a technique that encouraged and rewarded something we don’t give farmers enough credit for having: creativity.

  Small, self-fashioned solutions provided by everyday farmers thus delivered big messages to doubtful planters. When one Florida orchardist found, to his dismay, that only 20 percent of his grafted pecans had succeeded, he did some research and came to the conclusion that they “were sucked by the soldier bugs.” Rather than cede power to an army of militant and spiny insects, however, the innovative pecan planter was pleased to report, “I have since covered grafts with mosquito netting with success.” When J. H. Girardeau discovered that only 350 of the 1,000 splice-grafted trees that he planted had survived the ravages of wood lice, he traced the problem to his decision to fertilize the orchard with cotton seed, a product that he promptly banned from his farm. A planter named Frank White from Live Oak, Florida, ran into trouble when he used grafting wax to cover his cleft grafts. After considerable experimentation, he found that when he covered the wax with cloth his success rate rose 75 percent. He reported this improvement with evident enthusiasm and pride. Again, though these solutions might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of commercial pecan production, they are central to the story. Farmers who were able to watch their contemporaries overcome quotidian problems with grafting became farmers who were more likely to consider the technological transition to pecan improvement themselves.7