The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  Eventually, inspiring stories of commercial success percolated into the mainstream media, making it all the more difficult for prospective orchardists to avoid at least contemplating improved techniques and varieties. A 1930 Texas Monthly article highlighted the extraordinary accomplishments of several ordinary farmers who decided to pursue advanced methods of pecan improvement. One woman, Emma B. Klingeman, stood out for her accomplishments. The article explained how “with true pioneer spirit,” Mrs. Klingeman “beheaded hundreds of large native trees growing on her [New Braunfels] ranch, and budded them.” Five years later, her efforts bore an abundance of fruit, earning Klingeman the honor of owning the largest and most productive grove of top-worked pecans in the world. “Her work,” exclaimed the Monthly, “has revolutionized pecan growing in Texas and other States.” To boot, she had become wealthy from the endeavor.8

  Klingeman’s rise to pecan stardom typified what many agricultural publications were attempting to do between 1900 and 1925. They were hoping to show how everyday planters, in this case a woman with no background in growing pecans, were making the leap toward improved varieties and, as a result, experiencing tangible rewards. Central to these narratives was an underlying emphasis on do-it-yourself simplicity and rugged individualism. Anyone, went the message, could make this change. The Texas Monthly piece editorialized: “What this woman has done, others can do.” As far as formal training went, the article quoted the head of the state’s “Nut Division,” who explained, “Some people have the idea that a person has to attend some school or work with some expert a year as an apprentice before he can bud a pecan tree.” “This,” he declared, “is absurd.” Indeed, he went on to note that one could learn to be an effective bud grafter over a short afternoon spent with an experienced orchardist or extension agent. No expertise was required, a factor that would have been especially appealing to farmers who lacked formal agricultural education and were averse to becoming dependent on nurserymen for scion and stock.9

  Judging by the number of pecan orchardists who adopted improved methods of pecan propagation in the opening decades of the twentieth century, it appears that these messages cajoling farmers to do it themselves were not implausible. The USDA took note of the popular transition to improved varieties, which was well under way by 1912. “Comparatively few orchards of grafted trees were planted before 1900,” it wrote. However, “since that time . . . the planting of pecan orchards in the Southern States has been taking place at a rapidly accelerating rate.” “Most unusual interest,” it added, “is being manifested in pecan culture.” For this most unusual interest it could thank the efforts of agricultural scientists and other experts who had learned that how they communicated with farmers was just as important as the content that they hoped to communicate. After a quarter century of trying to persuade pecan growers to embrace the virtues of grafting, the USDA and the extension agents that followed its lead finally triumphed in winning over farmers to the cause that Landrum, back in 1822, had, however inadvertently, foreseen as crucial to the future of pecan trees.10

  The second major reason that farmers came to appreciate and embrace the advice doled out by USDA experts had to do with insects—specifically, the relative success that the USDA had in the national quest to fight insects with insecticides. Although this factor might seem unrelated to the cause of pecans, it is anything but. Between 1870 and 1900 the United States was hit hard with wave after wave of insect attacks on its most precious and valued cash crops. Virtual plagues of locusts, cinch bugs, potato beetles, gypsy moths, and corn borers—among other insidious six-legged invaders—reduced millions of dollars’ worth of grain, potatoes, and vegetables to costly piles of agricultural waste. As these pests did their work, desperate farmers looked to anyone capable of offering viable and—even better—immediate solutions. The USDA, armed with chemistry, stepped up to do battle.

  These massive insect outbreaks were, in essence, the USDA’s first major test of its legitimacy since its inception in 1862. USDA scientists dithered for a while among biological, cultural, and chemical responses. Eventually, however, they put their weight behind the chemical option. “Let us spray!” declared one acolyte of the chemical path. That is precisely what farmers did, with something of a rage. For a solid two decades agents spanned the country and advised farmers to essentially douse their fields with two solutions in particular—Paris green and London purple. Putting aside for now the long-term health consequences of these mixtures (the active agents are arsenic and lead, respectively), and putting aside for now the long-term environmental consequences wrought by the concoctions (both severely damage aquatic ecosystems and human nervous systems), the short-term consequences among early adopters were undeniable: the insecticides, lo and behold, worked.11

  Paris green and London purple eventually posed such a potent health threat that European importers of American grain and dried fruit declared a boycott on American products until these agents were replaced with safer alternatives. European health concerns mattered little, however, to the nineteenth-century farmers who were seeing these agents salvage their crops, or at least significantly reduce the damage caused to them. This precedent was set just as the grafting question was coming to the fore, and it was an important one for pecan producers to witness. The USDA pushed a new solution, desperate farmers accepted it, and—again, relatively speaking (and speaking in the short term)—the solution was effective. The upshot was a notable boost in reputation for a federal agency that since its inception in 1862 had been looked at askance by farmers accustomed to keeping their own collective council on matters entomological. Surely this qualified success had the side effect of predisposing more pecan growers to at least prick up a curious ear when the outside experts began singing the praises of grafting a crop that had for so long been valued for its status as a low-maintenance fruit. The US DA was no oracle, but as pecan farmers recognized, history showed it could make life much easier for those who tilled the soil for a living. So long as they would listen.

  Another beneficial aspect of the USDA’s insecticide program—at least when it came to encouraging farmers to accept advanced pecan-growing methods—centered again on the farmer-scientist relationship. The branch of the USDA most directly involved in promoting insecticide sprays was the Division of Entomology. For whatever reason, the nation’s earliest federal entomologists were men who brought to their job considerable agricultural experience. The leading federal entomologists had worked the land. They understood farms, farming, and farmers; they grasped how the agricultural mind worked, and appreciated how farmers could be appealed to and, with any luck, convinced to undertake what were advertised to be beneficial changes. As a result, they established an effective working relationship with average farmers. As we have seen, pecan agents emulated this relationship with considerable success.12

  The point here might require a little elaboration. Given that we are trying to understand exactly how and why many pecan growers were willing, over a modest twenty-year period, to essentially rethink the basic meaning of the pecan tree, it would seem most logical to focus on the technology itself—grafting—and the benefits that it conveyed. However, again, to focus on the technology alone is to overlook one of the more elusive but important aspects of any sort of technology transfer: the social context in which that shift in knowledge takes place. Agricultural scientists and nurserymen had been promoting the virtues of grafted varieties for many decades before they were accepted en masse by southern orchardists who had previously been wedded to passively cultivated groves and the obvious convenience of seedlings. What eventually pushed most skeptical growers over the technological brink was not the “truth” of grafting’s possible effectiveness—that information had been out there for a while. Instead, it was the nature of the context in which they adopted it. It is on this point that entomologists, perhaps more than any other group of scientific experts within the rapidly expanding USDA, proved to be the most diplomatic and effective agents of pecan modernizatio
n.

  Given their agricultural background, entomologists were very attuned to the often idiosyncratic ways in which farmers pursued agricultural change. Growers preferred to arrive at their own conclusions through a process that one historian has called a “chaos of experimentation.” They were, at heart, experts in the game of trial and error. Agricultural entomologists, whose singular goal it was to kill the animals they studied, thus solicited input from farmers at the outset, as it was the farmer alone who could report on the destruction his crops were experiencing. Entomologists hired farmers to collect and, in some cases, analyze data on insect populations and life cycles, and when a critical mass of information had been accumulated, they worked closely with farmers to arrive at a realistic solution. More often than not, this was done with deference to the farmer’s on-the-ground authority, which both parties knew was more useful than any sort of laboratory investigation. As a result, the resulting working relationship was in most respects a healthy one, one that ensured that a bond of trust and mutual respect would form between farmers and agricultural authorities with fancy credentials.13

  Furthermore, entomologists themselves were valuable friends for the pecan orchardist to have. The more pecan farmers moved in the direction of cultivated varieties, the more vulnerable their trees became to insect depredations. As we have seen, one commonly recognized benefit of passively cultivating wild trees, or planting seedlings, was that broad genetic diversity precluded the uniformity that insect species quickly evolved to consume. Pecan groves were commonly (and accurately) seen to be relatively free from insect pest problems, as Bacon himself fully recognized when he wrote, “Of all the valuable food producing trees, the pecan is attacked by fewer insects or fungal diseases than almost any other tree.” This was, of course, true only while the trees were in their wild, or passively cultivated, state.14

  Bacon, for all his love of cultivars, had to admit that “persons who say that the Pecan is entirely free from insect enemies are in error.” The pecan nut casebearer, the pecan weevil, the hickory shuck worm, the pecan leaf casebearer, the spittlebug, the fall webworm, and the pecan budmoth were just a few of the insects that were becoming household words for pecan orchardists. The common recommendation was to spray with inorganic pesticides—calcium arsenate, nicotine sulfate, and mineral oil emulsions were common. The problem before the advent of DDT in the 1940s and the concomitant air blast sprayers was the lack of machinery to spray with any sort of effectiveness. Very few pecan orchardists invested in the two-man hydraulic sprayer. Farmers instead often resorted to methods of cultural control, such as planting cowpeas to lure insects away from pecans, or discerning what levels of fertilizer and soil moisture might keep insects at bay. Whatever methods were used, it is important to note that insect infestations were a direct result of farmers’ choosing to narrow the genetic variation of the pecans by planting uniform cultivars.15

  As a result, pecan orchardists would have no choice but to work on some level with entomological experts. That was part of the trade-off when it came to controlling, rather than striking a balance with, nature. The Division of Entomology’s impressive track record with respect to both working with farmers and providing effective solutions proved to be pivotal in nudging farmers toward more standardized and improved practices in the fertile opening decades of the twentieth century.16

  If these two social factors were critical in perpetuating the onset of improved pecan varieties, another, much more tangible factor also played an influential role in making the years from 1900 to 1925 such an important transitional period for the pecan tree. This was the recognition that improved varieties of pecans could, if properly adopted, profitably move into many southern locations where pecans rarely, if ever, grew naturally. They could, as we have seen, make appearances in non-native locales. With cotton crops increasingly suffering attacks from the boll weevil, pecans began to have more appeal as an alternative crop in inland areas, as well as in places such as California, Florida, and South Carolina. This expansion into virgin territory was the simplest and probably the most critical prerequisite for substantial long-term change, the kind that would make places like Georgia and New Mexico global centers of pecan production. Through this potential, the recognition gradually emerged that as the pecan industry took off, pecans that were uniform and of consistent high quality could make the orchardist a decent living, if not more than that. “Money,” declared one popular magazine article on the pecan, “really does grow on trees.”17

  The one pest that had defied the efforts of extension agents to achieve clear results with insecticides was the boll weevil. The weevil entered Texas in 1892 from Mexico, and by the early 1900s it had achieved a notorious status as one of the most devastating pests that ever entered the United States. This insect was so voracious in its quest to destroy cotton, and exacted so much actual damage, that it encouraged many southern growers to switch their horticultural efforts to pecans.18 Growing pecans away from riverbanks, however, was best done with the improved varieties. The chief of the Texas Department of Agriculture was the first to advocate this transition, explaining, “If a farmer spends only two or three days labor on a pecan tree, that tree will make more clear profit than an acre of cotton per year.” He added, “The cotton . . . requires as much time each year as it would take to complete a new top on a pecan tree.” Texas Monthly echoed that advice, calling the improved pecan “a potentially great product that may shove King Cotton from his throne.” Even from the scholarly trenches, a Texas A&M professor opined in 1922 that “the time is probably not very remote when the South will boast as loudly of her pecan industry as she now does her cotton.” Cultivars made this kind of thinking possible.19

  This was heady promotional talk, of course. However, the science of pecan improvement lent it some ballast. Enough pecan growers had, throughout the nineteenth century, passively cultivated enough wild inland varieties that there was plenty of established inland stock for farmers to improve upon. The great benefit of working with these preexisting trees was that they had developed the “hardiness” required to both survive and produce fruit under drier conditions. As the grafting pioneer E. E. Risien wrote in 1909, “In our western and southwestern pecans we see so many varieties improve by mere chance that there certainly is reason to believe that the reward must someday be great to the pecan breeder.” The plan to “preserve and intensify the desirable qualities of those [pecan trees] we already have” ensured that improvements would be consistent with the vagaries of geographical reality. For example, the pecan trees already adapted to this environment shared the quality of maintaining their enormously long taproots. Pecan trees growing closer to riverbanks relied more on lateral roots and, as a result, allowed their taproots to eventually rot and fall off. It was through the improvement of these well-adapted inland varieties that one grower could remark, without exaggeration, that “the finest and most productive trees I have seen have been raised on well drained upland.”20

  The proliferation of the boll weevil also helps explain why, between 1900 and 1920, Georgia temporarily edged out Texas as the emerging center of commercial pecan production. As we have seen, production rose in Georgia from 30,000 to more than 2 million pounds of pecans in just over two decades. With the advent of commercial varieties it became common for northern land development companies to purchase large tracts of land in Georgia and Florida and rent the land to growers. When more planters in Georgia decided to grow pecans instead of cotton they had no choice but to commit themselves to higher-yielding, improved varieties. The risk would have been too high otherwise. Pecans, after all, didn’t grow wild in Georgia, and we have seen what happened when farmers held to the idea of growing from seed. Nurserymen and breeders thus worked incessantly to make improvements consistent with the soil quality and climate of central and southern Georgia. In Texas, by contrast, orchardists could drag their feet a bit, mainly because the abundance of wild specimens allowed them to do so. The McIntosh County Democrat chastised state peca
n growers in 1927: “The farmers of this county have overlooked their best bet when they failed to put our improved pecans on their land or to have the mature trees budded.”21

  Indeed, in Texas this process of domestication evolved more slowly. The desire to improve varieties was always somewhat hampered by the fact that the state was generously endowed with so many wild pecan trees—about 80 million in 1926. So as the pecan became more attractive in light of the cotton boll weevil outbreak, there was always a built-in incentive to exploit preexisting wild groves and, yet again, rely on passive cultivation. As Texas Monthly reported, “the vast majority of these eighty million trees are growing in the wilderness, crowded out by other timber and sapped by undergrowth. Millions of them never bear a pecan.” (This was not quite the case, as many of the trees bore heavy crops, despite being barren most years. The comment is more a reflection of how nature’s cycles did not conform to man’s economic cycles.) If Texas farmers did anything in terms of improvement during the first decades of the twentieth century, they would top-work trees. As one report noted, “Farmers are drawing dividends on papershell pecans that were [top] budded a few years ago to better varieties.” With Georgia leaping ahead in the game of pecan improvement by bringing millions of improved varieties to land that never supported a wild pecan, Texans, according to the Monthly, were justified in doing only one thing: “We should hang our heads in shame about it.”22