Learn How Pecans Are Grown in Texas

[Music] 300 acres 15 thousand trees in the grove and ninety thousand in the nursery pecan grove farms is a site like no farm i've seen before we drove back through hundreds of acres of pecan trees to meet stacy whitener hello nice to see you so happy to finally finally get here it's taking a while at the helm of administration and finance she does just about everything for the company they made me the chief administrative officer um if you ever google that it basically means you get to do everything and so i always tell people i basically have involvement in everything except for farming the farm but i do the business side i'm that's that's what i do so i handle all the finance i hate all of our banking our lending uh it is my job to make that whole thing go round um so i orchestrate a lot of different things right now so that's a lot of what i do so it's kind of interesting so tell me where we are like well so you're in the heart of the of the nurse of the bastion farm right now this is what we call track four this is our baby the baby of the whole farm these are four-year-old trees but they're in an interesting stage of growth because we actually don't plant our trees until they've came out of the containers at our nursery so that's a two-year two-year-old lifespan i mean the the trees typically don't start producing a nut until year five it's really at year seven when you can harvest and sell those nuts so the nuts before then are not um they're not really harvestable they're not anything we would sell to the marketplace so i didn't know what i wanted to do but i knew i wanted to help farmers and ranchers i just knew it and it was probably the first week that i took the first lending class i was like hey this is it i know i can do this so i started my lending career right after college i worked for wells fargo i worked for some community banks and then ultimately landed at farm credit but we moved to texas i made a transfer and farm credit and that's how i actually met the guys at pecan grove farms um they were looking needing a lender they were trying to buy this farm at bastrop and they asked me to come full time on and i've been kind of going non-stop since the very crazy world i live in the basis of my career is to fight for the farmer that's all i've ever wanted to do help help the farmers get their get their food and their crop to the marketplace that's all i want to do it's just so important to educate people and agricultural advocacy drives everything that i do the the trees produce leaves first before they come in and start producing their flour um and you've got to wait till they pollinate we don't pollinate with bees they self-pollinate so we've got a pollinator tree amongst all of our trees even in my very small circle of friends most of them are not farmers most of them are not in agriculture i've done like a small poll and said this is helpful and they're like we wouldn't have no idea unless you were posting this unless you were helping us see this it would have never crossed our minds so i love social media that way i think it's just it's amazing and i think it's it's the future of advocating in agriculture and showing a positive light to them this is what we call cluster and these things will grow they'll be uh you know four nuts right there that'll be a nut cluster we like five these things will grow into an actual nut that's a nut sitting in there and those things will get really big and so when they get to the point where they're they're ready to come off we'll shake so we we harvest we shake the tree a machine comes a machine comes it shakes the tree and uh and they fall that's that's how we get them off so they shake the tree the nuts go all over the place they will then have a sweeper that comes in puts them in a nice little line and then we've got another machine that just comes and picks them up this takes forever to get a harvest done so well this is beautiful i think i need to go look at how these trees are beautifully lined up i could take picture after picture of these gorgeous trees [Music] so i'm standing in the middle of a 500 acre pecan farm that used to belong to the berdaal family and this was their house and they sold to pecan grove farms and now pecan grove farms runs this massive pecan grove [Music] yeah we hold a lot of meetings in here oh yeah and of course there's pecans of course if you guys would like to try some i'll show you a trick easy way without having to have a cracker you just take them and you just squeeze them together and it'll crack a nut so yeah yeah i love pecans pecans are my absolute favorite nut if i had to pick one they always happen so the best time to eat a pecan nut is right when they come off the tree they've still got a lot of oil to them got a lot of water to them and we like to say we grow one of the best pecans in the country here pecans are funny they have a an interesting saying that they say they love water but they hate their feet wet so that means they don't like flooding they don't like to just have staining water all over them they want a whole bunch of water but then just make it go away for a little bit so um but so you really have to be careful about how you irrigate out and what they do and don't like we've got three different types of irrigation models right now going on at the farm and we're just trying to figure out what which different which trees like what all of our trees come in as seedlings and we plant 64 000 trees in here every year they'll spend a few months here and then they roll over into our into our nursery we have right about a hundred thousand holes in our container nursery right now we typically grow four to five different varieties of nursery trees um depending on what's in demand and what people want and our most popular variety is what they call pawnee tree this is actually a sizer right here so they're air the air blows the the nuts and so the top ones are the ones that are terrible pecans the nuts come in we they pick them up in bins out of the farm and it was a heck of a lot easier to bring them down and then and then have them come up this way than it was to try to get them up and over this big piece um you know this is sturdy enough that all of our tractors can drive over it yeah and they've got an attachment and just comes straight into the hole and the pecans just come down into the hole and then just come on up so this little facility right here is actually where our shelling and our cold surge facilities app are things cold stored here we we rarely cold store um in fact the only thing that's in here right now is our seedlings should be god i hope it's only our seedlings it's not even we don't even have the seedlings in here anymore they we had seedlings in here and the seedlings are all in the greenhouse so there is no reason to cold sore to turn it on so last year we only did 130 but this this farm can um this farm can produce over 600 thousand pounds so which is what we anticipate this year so um we'll use it for seedlings we'll use it every once in a while i think they use it once in 13 for like two months we we can shell if we need to so nobody knows how to work it we'll have to have hal come in here and explain it but we could shell the product and that's what this is for so yeah it's our little mini shelling plant 200 and 280 acres all in of producing pecan trees right now so and this is an 80 acre tract so it is what we call our baby farm it's not a big farm uh relatively speaking when you think of the other nuts in the in the nut industry as a whole we are very very small every woman that i've ever met that's involved in agriculture is a very strong person very very strong with a gift of some sort and you know it just motivates you to be that kind of a person so you be fearless that's a lot of what i take from from women like that is just to be fearless it's the gift that women have i believe is is the fact that you know we are we're out of that stigma we're not the old farmer we're not farmer joe we are women that are coming into a into an industry and you know what we are very smart and we're very powerful and we get things done and we just do if you guys liked that be sure to hit subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss another farmhouse story now go check out all those other great stories we've got right here on our channel [Music] you

Channel: FarmHer

Views: 996

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: FarmHer, Marji Guyler-Alaniz, Women in Agriculture, Shining Bright, RFD-TV, farmer, tractor, farming, farm, food, urban farming, produce, grain, vegetable farming, sustainability, women, women empowerment, pecan, pecan farm, woman farmer, ag lending

Id: 171EMtdFY1c

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020