The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  It is important, however, to recall that the relatively short history of commercial pecan production has always been marked by a healthy mixture of the wild and the domesticated. Traditionally, states where pecan production was the highest were states endowed with millions upon millions of wild pecan trees. These states, armed with such an ample sampling of wild stock, were also the states where the earliest cultivars were developed (Texas and Louisiana). It is easy to lose sight of the point that the coexistence of wild and cultivated pecans had a quiet way of tempering the drive toward industrialization, highlighting respect for the native landscape, and encouraging the use of integrated pest management rather than systematic spraying. The opening of the Chinese market, however, threatens to make even vestiges of the wild/cultivated coexistence obsolete. It provides a powerful push in the already intensifying trend toward the exclusive production of improved varieties through methods that are entirely and rigidly mechanized, regrettably intolerant of the diverse vagaries marking wild pecans.

  The result, as my visit to Berdoll Farms suggested, was an approach to agricultural production predicated on minimizing the impact of natural processes—weed growth, insect proliferation, fungal outbreaks, declines in soil quality—and maximizing the efficiency of domesticated pecan production. Put differently, the result was the rapid evolution of orchards that stood in the starkest possible contrast to the earliest passively cultivated orchards—orchards where weeds, diseases, and insects were, with few exceptions, left to interact on their own terms, or managed through cultural controls that mimicked the actions of the natural world. Humans, rather than nature, now micro-manage every stage of production. Production, moreover, has become an almost exclusively chemically saturated activity. The kind of monoculture practiced by mammoth orchards producing hundreds of thousands of pounds of nuts a year opened unprecedented opportunities for disease, insect, and weed outbreaks. These potential outbreaks were consistently met with, as they have been throughout contemporary agriculture, chemical agents that when applied injudiciously exact damages on human health and the environment.

  I’m speaking generally, but consider what pecan growers typically spray for the purposes of weed control alone. Before planting saplings, growers broadcast a mitosis inhibitor to prevent the sprouting of grasses and small-seeded broadleaf weeds. Before the emergence of pecans, up to eight different kind of “preemergence” herbicides are sprayed, most of them photosynthesis and cellulose inhibitors designed to suffocate succulent weed seedlings. Then comes the “postemergence” onslaught, which could include a dozen agents (paraquat, glyphosate) notable not only for their effectiveness but also for the warnings they elicit. “DO NOT allow livestock to graze treated areas,” “DO NOT harvest within 30 days of treatment,” and “DO NOT apply within two weeks of budbreak” are labels affirming the cost of minimizing the rhythms of nature to achieve maximum levels of production. Herbicides with muscular names such as Goal, Rage, Fusilade, and Firestorm were adopted in an effort to combat weeds such as goosegrass, ragweed, pigweed, nutsedge, lamb’s-quarter, crabgrass, and morning glory.15

  Orchardists can do many things to minimize pest infestations—prune low-hanging stems, clear debris, keep weeds down, plant vetches to promote beneficial insects. Many do these things as part of a larger integrated pest-management approach. Chemicals will always have the most appeal to most growers, especially as the cost of control stabilizes while pecan prices increase. The pecan is under constant threat from the pecan weevil, the pecan nut casebearer, stinkbugs, spittlebugs, aphids, webworms, walnut caterpillars, spider mites, pecan phylloxera, Asian ambrosia beetles, and the red imported fire ant. While concerted efforts have been under way for decades to employ the less chemically reliant methods of integrated pest management, orchardists who are typically attuned to annual economic cycles find it most convenient and effective to reach for the big guns. Malathion, Sevin, and a number of pyrethroids and organophosphates are routinely used to fight major pests in pecan orchards. These agents might protect nuts well, but they threaten bees, birds, fish, and other wildlife that are unfortunate enough to wander into the insecticide fog. Committing to the industrial production of a handful of improved cultivars for markets demanding high volume and consistent quality has, for most pecan orchardists, entailed the adaptation of an intricate and systematically pursued spraying schedule.16

  The process of minimizing the impact of natural processes on orchards extends to the ongoing effort to control the spread of plant diseases as well. Pathogens that have a tendency to attack dense groves of cultivated pecans are highly adaptive to fungicides, thus forcing farmers to rely on an array of agents to outwit, however temporarily, an array of specific diseases. Diseases to be controlled include leaf scab, nut scab, downy spot, and vein spot. Doing so requires up to a dozen applications every season—and more if rains are frequent—of several acetates and organotin compounds. These agents work well, but only when intricate spraying schedules, designed to avoid resistance, are adhered to. Instructions can be maddeningly complex. For example, “Note also that for resistance management, growers planning to use combination products like Stratego, Quilt or Absolute later in the season should limit their use of Sovran or any stand-alone triazole since the combinations contain both of those chemistries. These pre-pollination options fit best where other chemistries like Tin or Elast are used post-pollination.” Such is the language of most commercial pecan farming today.17

  A final area of pecan production requiring constant chemical monitoring involves the soil. Pecans do a relatively good job, largely as a result of an extensive root system, of acquiring ample amounts of phosphorous and potassium on their own. They are less effective, however, when it comes to nitrogen, zinc, calcium, and magnesium, mainly because these nutrients do not exist in the proper ratio in the soil. Fertilization is therefore essential to commercial-scale production. Pecan nuts are dependent on pecan leaves, because the leaves provide the shoots upon which pecan clusters are born. Nutrients make their way into leaves, nine to thirteen of which are required to produce a single cluster of nuts. What makes the process of fertilizing so time-consuming and labor-intensive is the fact that the trees need different nutrients at different stages of their seasonal growth cycle. Thus in one season a farmer will typically apply nitrogen twice in July and August, zinc four times in the spring, potassium whenever soil testing reveals a deficiency, and phosphorous once before planting. Several cover crops such as barley, legumes, and clover could improve soil quality and enhance the absorption of these nutrients. Many pecan farmers employ this technique.

  This overview of the complexity of the modern cultivated pecan orchard overlooks more than it captures. Farmers also have to clean and store harvest equipment, deal with irrigation and drainage, monitor insect appearances, graft, keep orchard floors free of debris, do battle with squirrels and crows and raccoons, stay in touch with wholesale and retail buyers, sort through the harvest to cull flawed nuts, winterize engines, sprayers, and irrigation pumps, and—yes—even stand guard against post-harvest pecan poachers. Nuts at $11 a pound have been known to inspire criminality.

  Pecans had been leading up to this industrialized point for some time. From the initial transition to improved varieties in the 1920s, to the spike in production during World War II, to the demand generated by candy and cereal companies in postwar America, producers of pecans, perhaps inevitably, steadily manipulated every aspect of the crop’s growth to consistently produce more nuts on less land. If the march toward the industrial production of what would become a global commodity took decades, the last five years of Chinese demand have sealed the pecan’s fate as a thoroughly industrialized crop. Pecans are now more manufactured than grown, or allowed to grow. There is little doubt that the productive mechanical and chemical technologies driving orchards today have allowed growers in thirteen American states to make pecans available throughout the world. The cost, however (for those who care to dwell on it), is the removal of more and more
pecans from the ecosystems that we tend to think of as natural, the kind of environments in which wild pecan groves once thrived, yielding trees of the kind that so enthralled the likes of Gilbert White and the kind that grows through my backyard deck.

  Reflecting the commercial perspective on the transition of pecans from a wild to a domesticated crop was Lisa Berdoll, who was introduced at the beginning of this chapter. At one point in my tour, after driving through row after row of neatly aligned, intensively managed pecan trees, we came to the Colorado River, on the banks of which sat a grove of stunning wild pecans. I commented on how beautiful they were—so different-looking, so much more free-form and, well, wild-looking than the carefully situated and manicured cultivars. Lisa agreed. Then she explained that they were getting ready to clear them in order to plant a new field of domestic trees.

  EPILOGUE

  The Future of Pecans

  From the moment of Antoine’s graft to this day, the pecan has moved in time and space along a continuum ranging from wild to cultivated. The benefit of this continuum, especially the middle portions of it, is that it allowed pecan growers to make available to consumers a delicious product of nature at an accessible price while at the same time preserving the tree’s genetic diversity and general resistance to disease and infestation. Over a hundred-year period, as a result of this balance, the pecan industry generally benefited from the productive coexistence of wild and cultivated pecan trees. The cultivated pecans were marked by consistency and traits tailored to enhance yields in specific environments. The wild ones were correspondingly marked by genetic diversity and a relationship with natural surroundings that allowed them to produce tasty nuts without systematic chemical intervention. Several factors—the emergence of extensive foreign demand, the availability of an ever-specializing chemical arsenal, the expansion of pecan production into regions without native stock, and the land-use threat to native stock—have helped rapidly push the pecan toward the domesticated end of the continuum. The consequences of this shift warrant a brief reflection of what the future holds for the pecan tree in the United States.

  It’s not a happy prospect. Not to overstate matters, but we could be looking into the face of a perfect storm, one that threatens the pecan’s very existence. There are three parts to this scenario that, if they ever converge, may mean that the pecan’s only future home will indeed be in a seed bank.

  First, consider the current status of wild pecans. In 1919 virtually all of Texas’s pecans came from native trees. At some point in the 1990s, after decades of the development of cultivars, the percentage of Texas pecans coming from wild trees dipped below 50 percent—and that figure is still declining today. Although these trees are still productive, it is important to note that wild ecosystems are as fragile as they have ever been. Native groves, moreover, have a limited life span (a typical wild tree might live for 250 years). The wild pecan groves that remain in Texas exist on land that could easily—and one might say will assuredly—be put to more “productive” uses. History pretty much dictates that such a transition is inevitable. There is, therefore, good reason to hypothesize the virtual elimination of wild pecans from Texas, not to mention from the entire United States, in the not too distant future. At best, these trees currently exist in a kind of purgatory, thinned to the point that they can no longer reproduce at the rate at which they need to in order to live long enough to die a natural death. Think about how many times you’ve seen a lone pecan tree sitting in the middle of a pasture providing shade for cattle. That’s a living fossil.

  The second part of the scenario involves the cultivars. We can certainly take some solace, as wild stocks decline, in the proliferation of cultivated pecans across the American South and West. Indeed, as long as humans choose to propagate the pecan, it will reliably thrive in American orchards. But these are essentially commercial products, not integral aspects of a natural ecosystem. We therefore have to ask a troubling question: what would happen if the cost of preserving this commercial product began to outweigh the economic return that it provided? In this sense, the future of the cultivated pecan depends on nothing so fickle and precarious as economics. With competition for the global palate coming from related products such as walnuts, almonds, and pistachios, there is good reason to view the current Chinese boom in demand, and the potential India market, as just another trend, nothing more.

  Finally, and closely related to the second concern, the heavily chemical-driven approach to disease and insect control that has dominated pecan orchard keeping is leading to increasing levels of insect and disease resistance. This resistance, in turn, is becoming harder and—key point—more expensive to evade, making it more costly to grow pecans. The danger is most evident in the yellow aphid menace. The yellow aphid is generally not a threat to wild pecans, primarily because its presence is countered by spiders and other natural enemies alerted to the aphid’s arrival by the conspicuous sap it produces. The overuse of pesticides on cultivated varieties of pecans, however, has led to a decline in natural enemies and the emergence of aphid resistance soon thereafter. Resistance will have to be met with new and often more expensive chemicals. This cycle has been spinning for a long time. In the 1980s, for example, the head of the Federated Pecan Growers predicted that the entire industry was in trouble if pesticide-resistant aphids continued to proliferate. Industry responded by adopting a more potent aphicide. However, within the last few years, this pesticide has started to fail. Aphids have figured out how to get around this one as well. And thus the cost of growing pecans is likely to increase even more, edging growers imperceptibly closer to that fateful tipping point that drives them out of the business, consigning the cultivated pecan to the same fate as the wild one, ending the symbiosis they long enjoyed.

  As the invisible hand of nature has yielded to the aggressive hand of humanity, the prospect of this convergence taking place has become that much more likely. In this respect, the pecan, a tree that has lived a truly unique life, one marked by remarkable individuality, may take a depressingly conventional path into obscurity. As the genetic diversity of this remarkable specimen declines, as it becomes increasingly vulnerable to an attack that no chemical can repel, we may very well lose yet another natural thread to the past, one that binds us to native American foragers, Jeffersonian tinkerers, slave gardeners, and, more important than all these, our own sense of place in the natural world that Gilbert White so deeply understood. It is for this reason that I no longer ignore the beautiful tree that grows through my deck.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Richard W. Wrangham, W.C. McGrew, Frans B.M. de Waal, and Paul Heltne, eds., Chimpanzee Cultures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  2. L. J. Grauke and Tommy E. Thompson, “Pecans and Hickories,” in Fruit Breeding, vol. 3, Nuts, ed. Jules Janick and James N. Moore (New York: Wiley, 1996); http://www.enotes.com/food-encyclopedia/nuts.

  3. For a general discussion of the human-plant relationship, see Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002); for a more in-depth treatment, see Noel Kings-bury, Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

  4. Matt Warnock Turner, Remarkable Plants of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 11.

  5. Stuart Pecan Company, The Pecan and How to Grow It (Chicago: Women’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1893), 180–183; Turner, Remarkable Plants of Texas, 11; Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to Eastern Forests (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 107.

  6. Luther Burbank, “Pecans,” in How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man, vol. 11 (New York: F. F. Collier and Son, 1914), 144.

  7. Darrell Sparks, “Adaptability of Pecan to Its Native Range,” Horticultural Science 40: 1175–1189; Jean Richardson Flack, “The Spread and Domestication of the Pecan (Carya illinoensis) in the United States” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1970).

  8. Flack, “The Spread and
Domestication of the Pecan,” 23.

  9. Grant D. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential in Prehistoric North America,” Economic Botany 54, no. 1 (2000): 104.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Marc D. Abrams and Gregory J. Nowacki, “Native Americans as Active and Passive Promoters of Mast and Fruit Trees in the Eastern USA,” The Holocene 18, no. 7 (November 2008): 1123–1137.

  2. Elias Yanovsky, Food Plants of the North American Indians, usda Miscellaneous Publication 237 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), 137.

  3. Modern Americans, one might note, similarly benefit. Current medical research highlights the health advantages of eating pecans in moderation. The Journal of Nutrition explains that switching to a diet in which 40 percent of fat comes from pecans can lead to significantly reduced levels of both “bad” and overall cholesterol. The journal Nutrition Research adds that even a handful of pecans daily can reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. According to the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, pecans contain more antioxidants that any other nut on the market. For vegans and vegetarians, pecans are an invaluable resource. One serving contains roughly the same protein as an ounce of meat. http://www.ilovepecans.org/nutrition.html#protectmind; http://happy nutritionist.com/pecans.html; James A. Duke, Handbook of Nuts (New York: CRC Press, 1988), 69.