Pecan Farming in TN, USA

hi my name is Kirk Daniel I'm here on our farm daniel farm and it's good to have you all with us our family's been on this land since the 1930s sometime around the Great Depression my grand my great-grandfather co-signed a a man's note person couldn't pay for it so my grand grandfather had to take possession of it and try to figure a way to to to by itself or pay for yourself and so someone in our family has has farmed or operated this farm ever since that time oh we're standing by a Stuart pecan tree Stuart is the variety of the pecan tree the here's a here's a cluster of two pecans on this immature pecans you know we're it's early July we've got we've got good dark green leaves if you've got more pecans on here they may not fill out or get its big so that's we're looking pretty good so far we've got good color we've got good growth here for the line me it's it's about 100 acres in this cornfield it's one of the things that's grown here on the farm so the grain that is we're all here on the farm is usually will will sell it granary and Memphis or or over here in the other county where there's a granary and then it will be barge down the Mississippi River and more than likely export it I'm standing here with my son Alex Daniel and nephew Tommy Flanagan they they are working they help with the pecan harvest and they help with the day-to-day chores whenever they can that's pretty much every day so it's nice to have of them here behind me we've got our orchard and was planted in the 60s back in the 50s and 60s the Extension Service was promoting diversification and so pecan trees was one thing they recommended farmers do to have extra diversification and income and these trees we in part in certain times a year we we can run cows up until probably about 75 days before harvest and then we take them off and get ready for to harvest the pecans also here we've got a couple of machines that are pecan harvesters and they've got a brush in the bottom of them and they also they they've got a fan that blows a lot of the lightweight stuff out the back and they will do a certain amount of the separation in the harvest of the pecan crop we've got some new ones out here we've made some mistakes but we've also learned a lot where I get my information is I talk with my local extension and we also you know they JoEllen she helps me out a lot with the with my tree she's real good with a spotting disease and things like that we also go to conferences I'm going to a conference next week in Texas to learn a little bit so I've got a field days in Mississippi I've been to Georgia if you're thinking about starting a pecan orchard just just be ready to make some mistakes and learn from your mistakes and don't give up it's a long-term proposition these trees won't make look that they'll just start producing pecans when they're 10 years old or maybe a little earlier than that but they really won't produce a lot of volume these trays are 50 or 60 years old over here behind us and they're they're somewhat in peak production but my grandfather planted them but hey I'm the ones enjoying them I'm standing beside were bought with diversification funds from the Tennessee Department Agriculture which is really going to help me move forward in our pecan business is a pecan cleaning machine after we harvest the pecans with the pecan harvester that's that's pulled behind the tractor we put them in the back of the machine and there might be six people on this table or seven and you know just as many as you can get around this table as long as you've got enough pecans coming down through here you can probably keep them pretty busy but we will hand handpick the bad ones out they will come down here and either you can hang in that sack on the end of the cleaning machine or you can put a conveyor around here and run it up into a thousand pound sack which we do quite often we come in on this end this is a small bar so it'll drop the smallest pecan down into the pits spot these are these are 12 and 13 s is what you call this size it'll drop down a little bit bigger kind of a medium sized pecan and then your your larger pecans everything bigger than that will come out the end we're one of the few around here that actually does anything with our pecans as far as the markets goes for about the last ten years pecans have really been a big demand for pecans and even with with the high tariffs there's still a big demand for pecans so everybody's trying to increase production right now I'm a tending ut-martin this fall and I'm gonna major in a natural resource management and I'm attending to UT Martin too and I'm majoring in turf grass management family farm I've decided to choose an agriculture major and just having this agriculture background it's really helped me choose a career path so the agriculture background that I have is really helping me decide what I want to be in the future and why I want to go to college [Music]

Channel: suraj adhikari

Views: 1,817

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: mJSJst-i8Ps

Length: 6min 31sec (391 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 07 2018