Equally critical to the pecan industry’s rise to the vaunted power of national producer was the ongoing, and increasingly refined, process of matching developed pecan varieties to particular geographical regions and conditions. This initially decentralized and often haphazard process was ultimately rationalized by the rise of commercial nurseries, relevant USDA agencies, and a variety of state pecan growers’ associations, all of which came of age during this period. The emergence of these institutions, however, was ultimately dependent on the work of hundreds of lone pecan pioneers—men working in the fields, experimenting, experimenting some more, and building, through trial and error, on the success of Antoine’s graft to decide which varieties worked best in which locations.
It is impossible to say how many cultivars were developed, grown, and then abandoned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theoretically, since every tree reproduced from seed is genetically unique, billions would have been possible. We do know, though, that pecan farmers were constantly tinkering with new stock and that, over time, a few breeders were able to lay claim to cultivars that had staying power. These were named and tracked into the future. One year before the Centennial pecan made its debut at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a retired New Orleans cotton trader and horticulture enthusiast named Colonel W. R. Stuart bought a plot of land in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and began experimenting systematically with pecan grafting. The fruits of his labor were unusually abundant. Starting with a hundred seedlings obtained from Mobile and New Orleans, Stuart developed several cultivars so hardy and productive that they continue to be planted widely to this day. These varieties include the Russell, the Pabst, and, most appropriately, the Stuart, which constitutes a quarter of all contemporary orchard trees. The Stuart’s popularity derives primarily from its high yields, large nut size, and relatively impressive resistance to disease.10
Other pecan entrepreneurs quickly followed. One of Colonel Stuart’s employees at Ocean Springs was Theodore Bechtel. A clear natural when it came to developing hearty cultivars, Bechtel, who began working for Stuart in 1899, soon purchased land and started a small nursery of his own. From it emerged the Success in 1903 and soon thereafter the Candy, a variety designed for use by confectionaries. In Texas, an English immigrant named Edmond E. Risien began propagating pecans at the confluence of the San Saba and Colorado Rivers. Risien experimented with thousands of nuts taken from a single tree located on the east bank of the San Saba. He went on to be called the “Johnny Appleseed of pecans.” His goal was to develop varieties conducive to drier, western climates. “He was sold on pecans,” his great-granddaughter later explained, “and he wanted everyone to be sold on them.” From his efforts emerged the San Saba, San Saba Improved, Onliwon, Texas Prolific, and Western. All these varieties made the expansion of commercial pecan orchards into west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California a viable commercial possibility. Risien eventually established his own profitable nursery as well.11
Many Texan growers followed in Risien’s footsteps to pioneer varieties that became best sellers among orchardists ranging from California to Florida. In Coleman, Texas, Herbert Halbert developed the self-styled Halbert, a variety that—when crossed with a Mahan cultivar—led to the Wichita, which constitutes 10 percent of today’s pecan market (because it is prone to pecan scab in humid environments, it’s mostly grown west of the Balcones Escarpment). Halbert himself was an aggressive top-budder—mainly because his land flooded so often. Sadly, he died at the age of seventy-eight after falling from high up in a pecan tree. In Burnet County, Texas, J. H. Burkett helped to push the pecan industry even farther west with the development of drought-tolerant cultivars, most notably the Burkett, a variety so successful that it earned Burkett, armed with his third-grade education, a position as head of Texas’s Division of Edible Nuts. This office, the only one of its kind in the world, became a fertile spot of ingenuity, with breeders acquiring experimental land in Brownwood, Texas, and pioneering dozens of new varieties. One identifying feature of the Brownwood cultivars is that they were almost all named after Native American groups, including the Caddo, the Mohawk, the Apache, the Cheyenne, the Cherokee, the Pawnee, the Sioux, and the Wichita. Each variety remains popular to this day.12
In time, however, pecan growers were experiencing too much of a good thing. There is no doubt that in many cases improved varieties were living up to their potential. In some respects, though, the chaos of experimentation led more to chaos than experimentation. By the 1920s, many orchardists decided that a surplus of varieties was on the market and that most of them were of mediocre quality at best and not worth tracking. So saturated was the market in a clutter of cultivars that the National Pecan Growers Association, declaring that “a confusing number of varieties was being grown,” developed a task force to categorize the 620 known varieties in existence into the following designations: “standard,” “promising,” “on trial,” “doubtful,” “unworthy,” and “unpropagated.” In the end, 31 of those varieties were deemed standard. Another 66 were categorized as promising. This rating would narrow the planters’ options considerably, which most planters considered to be a good thing.13
Of equal, and related, importance was the fact that the National Pecan Growers Association made significant progress in dividing pecan growers into eleven geographical regions and matching relevant varieties to those eleven landscape types. This effort proved to be invaluable, especially for new planters entering the industry who were unfamiliar with the range of available cultivars. To cite just a few examples, growers in southern Oklahoma and Arkansas were advised to adopt the Alley, Burkett, Moneymaker, Stuart, Success, Schley, and Pabst. Orchardists in Arizona, New Mexico, and California were directed to the San Saba, Western, Onliwon, Halbert, and Kincaid. Central and northeast Texas favored the Bradley, Burkett, Curtis, Stuart, San Saba Improved, Western, and the (regrettably named) Boggus. Varieties dismissed as “doubtful” included the Zink, Pearl, Forester, and Stringfellow. Those that were still unpropagated, and thus untested, included the San Marcos, Lady Finger, Kidney, and, in a depressing sign of the Jim Crow times, the Nigger. C. A. Reed, a USDA pomologist, reminded pecan farmers that “not a single variety now known is without its drawbacks.” At the same time, he told them that it would not be long before “the question of varieties [would] be settled.” It was an ongoing process, one that continues to this day as pecan orchardists seek the best varieties for the often changing conditions of agricultural life.14
As the developing and slowly consolidating industry cohered around increasingly standardized planting practices and cultivars, and as nurserymen and farmers began to match pecan varieties with specific geographical conditions (however imperfectly), pecan trees were becoming carefully managed commodities rather than natural aspects of the southern landscape. The wild was being cultivated and rationalized, the chaos of experimentation was yielding to a semblance of order, and the pecan industry was cohering into something unified and potentially global in scope. As this transition took place, farmers began to accomplish something both indicative of American agribusiness as a whole and suggestive of its profitable future: they began to churn out higher yields. Matching different varieties to different climates ensured some level of predictability with respect to how much a tree could produce and what an external market might receive. This ability to project an estimated yield was something that passive cultivation never allowed, but it should not be overstated. Because of the pecan’s inconsistent bearing schedule, boom and bust cycles can overwhelm collective increases in production. Still, more-predictable yields—even if only slightly more predictable—allowed farmers to think about pecans much as they did other staple crops. Greater predictability also enabled them to think about their product in strictly commercial terms. By the 1930s there were full-fledged pecan farmers doing little else than growing as many pecans as they could coax the land to yield.
Yield increases could reach dramatic numbers once a tree survived
the infant stage. The numbers, while perpetually inconsistent as a result of the pecan’s alternate masting schedule, were nevertheless, on balance, impressive. A planter who set out an orchard of San Sabas in 1908 would have seen an average yield of 5.52 pounds per tree in 1915, 17.95 in 1918, and a whopping 47 pounds in 1921. A planter who chose Frotschers in 1908 would have seen average tree yields go from 5.9 pounds in 1918, to 34.5 pounds in 1918, to 63.35 pounds in 1921. As for a Moneymaker planted in 1908, it could be expected to yield 11.23 pounds in 1915, 33.92 pounds in 1918, and 52 pounds in 1921. Once mature, these trees could live into old age—80 years or so—and continue to produce 50-plus pounds at least once every three years. It was thought that if one had enough land to stagger production—because masting did not occur annually—he could build a viable business on the back of these figures. In fact, for reasons that are poorly understood, trees planted in even and odd years would eventually fall into a synchronous bearing pattern.15
For all the fluctuations in yield figures, by the end of the 1930s southern pecan farmers had formed themselves into a loosely organized industry capable of producing enough pecans to collectively and consistently reach national markets. No crop, however, rises to an industrial scale on the basis of productive cultivars and relatively standardized practices alone. Ushering the industry into larger markets was a broader network of supporting factors. Three of them stand out: (a) the pecan industry began to benefit from federal policies; (b) the industry began to aggressively market itself to potential consumers, many of whom were unfamiliar with the subtle pleasures of the pecan; and (c) shelling machines emerged to keep up with burgeoning rates of production.
The 1930s were a time of unusually active federal involvement in the economy of the United States as a whole. Nowhere was this participation more significant than in the agricultural sector. Corn and other cash crops accounted for the bulk of federal largesse as price supports, protective tariffs, and subsidies cushioned the agricultural economy from inevitable declines. Pecans came in for their share of help as well. In 1937 the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, after intense lobbying by the Pecan Stabilization Association, designed a program intended to assist the export of both shelled and unshelled pecans. The goal of this program, according to the New York Times, was “to aid the industry to establish permanent foreign markets.” Basically, if a pecan farmer could ship a minimum of 2,000 pounds of pecans, the government guaranteed him a payment of 12 cents per pound. In 1938, the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation spent $54 million to purchase crop surpluses, part of which went to buy 3.6 million pounds of pecans. By 1942, the Commodity Credit Corporation was providing low-interest and easily acquired loans to the American Pecan Growers Association. These programs foreshadowed others to come. For now, the fact that the government “insured a market for everything that farmers could produce” was a boon to the pecan industry at the very moment when pecans were on the cusp of becoming an industrialized product. To a very significant extent, the pecan industry became an industry by virtue of the generosity of federal support.16
A related factor underscoring the industrialization of pecan production involved direct-marketing efforts. As late as 1926, a USDA official could accurately explain how “pecans are among many of the high class food products grown in the United States which have not yet become essential in the food supply of the world.” Both private trade associations and state departments of agriculture worked hard to shift this perception. Motivation for doing so was strong. As indicated, pecan growers were in an enviable position: they were limited to a relatively narrow growing range, had access to improved varieties that were consistently producing high-quality nuts, and were looking into the face of a global market that was completely untapped. As one report noted, “The possibility of building up an export market is almost unlimited,” adding, “pecans are grown commercially almost nowhere else in the world outside the United States.” The California Department of Agriculture began to promote the pecan as a “distinctively American nut” in an appeal to nationalistic consumption. In 1930, the Federal Farm Board approved the formation of the National Pecan Marketing Association, a commodity cooperative that worked as a merchandising agency. The association’s seventeen local cooperative units were expected “to operate through the central agency for the stabilizing of pecan prices.” This was something quite necessary, given the “increased output in recent years of about 2000 percent.”17
The final factor contributing to the industrialization of pecans centered on the emergence of large-scale shelling machines. Before the rise of mechanical shellers, commercial pecans were sent to large cities such as San Antonio and New Orleans to be shelled by hand—mostly by Mexican immigrants—in hundreds of small shelling plants. By 1930, San Antonio—the undisputed center of pecan shelling—boasted more than four hundred shelling plants. Even small cities supported a few modest shelling operations of their own. Okmulgee, Oklahoma, for example, had four in 1925. Matters changed abruptly and somewhat dramatically, however, in 1938. That was the year that FDR’s administration set the wage of pecan shellers at 25 cents an hour. The pecan industry—led by the mammoth Southern Pecan Shelling Company—erupted in protest. It claimed that any wage over 15 cents an hour would cripple the processing business. The company did everything in its power to find loopholes to avoid paying workers the 25-cent wage, including classifying shellers as “learners,” a designation that allowed a lower-than-mandated wage. None of the tactics worked. Matters came to a head in October 1938 when the pecan shellers shut their doors and left 50,000 angry workers milling about in the streets of San Antonio.
The fight that dragged on between management and employees proved to be intense.18 The upshot, however, was all too familiar in the annals of labor history. The dismissal of human workers opened the door for a development that would eventually make human shellers obsolete while allowing the shelling industry to consolidate: mechanical shellers. Mechanical shellers led the way to a highly concentrated industry that could shell and sell as many nuts as planters could grow. By the 1950s, hundreds of shellers had been reduced to about eighty, and about eight of the eighty—located in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis—bought almost half of all pecans produced annually.
A typical shelling plant processed millions of pounds of nuts a year. First they were fed into a large cylindrical drum and spun to clean out dirt and debris. Next, the nuts were fed into a grading machine with ten slots for ten different size categories (most shelling machines used private grades, although federal grades were available). After the nuts were sorted, they were sterilized to “reduce the bacteria and E. Coli count usually present in newly harvested pecans.” The nuts were then “soaked in vats of or tanks of chlorinated water” to soften the shell, making it easier to crack and remove. From there they went into giant hoppers, which guided them on conveyor belts into the cracking machines, after which the meat was separated from the shells, and sent to the respective market destinations.19
It was a long journey from the grafted variety growing on a pecan plantation in Georgia, Texas, or Louisiana to the conveyor belt of a shelling plant in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, or Chicago. And even after the pecans were cracked, sorted, and bagged, the journey was still not complete. Pecans now had to make their way to American consumers, and American consumers had to eat them. As we shall see, the consumers were more than ready to do their part.
CHAPTER 7
“In Almost Any Recipe . . . Pecans May Be Used”
AMERICAN CONSUMERS EMBRACE THE PECAN, 1940–1960
The methods and advancements described in the last two chapters consolidated and industrialized pecan production. This development, in turn, resulted in a consistent abundance of domestic pecans. Comments on the crop’s explosive production appeared repeatedly in midcentury agricultural discussions. In 1942, the New York Times noted that there was a “bumper crop” of pecans. By 1947, the Department of Agriculture reported that “there are 13,000 tons more pecans than in 1946.�
� Georgia alone increased production from 27.5 million pounds to 42 million pounds between those two years. In 1948, the Times referred to “this year’s record pecan crop,” adding, “162,722,000 pounds of pecans are being harvested this fall.” The following year brought the same news, with the Times referring to “this year’s nut harvest, the largest ever to be harvested in the country.” Consistent with the upward trend, the year 1951 saw “the second largest crop on record.” Reforms initiated to promote pecan production had clearly established an industry whose collective mission was to produce greater amounts of pecans every year. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the industry accomplished this task with remarkable regularity, leaving in its wake a vast heap of pecans.1
Without an export market for pecans, something had to be done with them at home. Production increases were worthless without corresponding domestic demand. Pecan producers could rationalize the process of growing choice varieties of nuts until they approached the ultimate apex of modern efficiency, but it meant nothing if American consumers did not do their part. Bottom line: Americans had to buy and eat pecans. Unfortunately for producers, such an expectation could not be taken for granted. Unlike sugar, wheat, or corn, pecans were not a standard feedstock for a variety of processed foods. There were as yet no large industrial buyers ready to gobble up loads of pecans to be used in that way. Throughout the history of the pecan up to this point, consumers had primarily cracked and eaten the nut as a rich and healthy snack during holiday seasons. Additionally, because they were generally more expensive than other nuts, pecans were long considered “the aristocrat among nuts,” best reserved for special occasions. It was a reputation that would prove hard to shake, one that persistently kept pecans from reaching their potential as an industrial food product.
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