It's raining pecans at Bullard farm in high

BY ADAM RUSSELL

BULLARD — It literally rains pecans when "Big Shaky" grabs hold of a tree at Martin's Pecanville and starts shaking. Leaves and pecans rattle and fall in a cartoonish dark swarm that descends with a rapid thump, thump, thump of fruit hitting ground.

Julian Amaya smiles and hunkers underneath his tractor's roof as the trunk shaker attachment fills the ground with pecans.

It's been a bumper year for pecans around East Texas and Amaya has been busy harvesting his own and cracking and shelling pecans for area residents.

"This is a high-yield year," he said, standing near a stack of 50 pound bags of pecans. "They’ve finally come back from the (2011) drought."

The ages and types of pecan trees on his 500-tree orchard vary, he said. There are smaller but tasty native pecans, Stewarts and the most desirable pecan — Desirables.

Desirables are called this because they taste the closest to natives but are much larger.

Amaya's older trees, around 90 years old, produce about 200 pounds of pecans per season, he said.

Residents with a few trees also are seeing high quantity and quality pecans. Amaya said the cracking and shelling part of his business is up a hundredfold from last year.

John Thompson, of Bullard, brings the pecans he and his wife gather from their seven trees to Amaya for cracking and shelling each year. Thompson said they have picked up around 400 pounds of pecans this year themselves. He estimates they have about 100 pounds of "meat," the edible portion, stored away to give to friends and family and use in various recipes.

"They’ve all been picked up," he said. "Well, as many as we’re going to pick up have been anyway."

Pecans are the No. 1 fruit crop in Texas in terms of acreage, said Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Pecan/Fruit/Citrus Program Specialist Monte Nesbitt.

Nesbitt broke down the photosynthesis math for what it takes to produce good sized, quality pecans, which require enormous amounts of energy to create. A good pecan is 80 percent oil and requires sunlight and water at the right times to fill out inside its shell.

It takes about eight leaves to produce one pecan, he said. It takes 50 typical non-native pecans to make one pound, meaning 100 pounds of pecans takes 40,000 leaves.

The USDA's October report estimated Texas producers would harvest 60 million pounds of pecans this fall. That's up from the 50 million pounds to 55 million pounds estimated by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension after an April freeze was expected to damage spring flowers.

Texas pecan production is up from the 28 million pounds reported by the USDA for 2013, and 55 million pounds in 2012.

Pecan production is triggered over a two-year cycle, Nesbitt said. A bumper crop one year likely means a decline the next year because so much of the tree's energy is expended. It takes two additional leaves to ready the tree for next year, Nesbitt said.

"We can get close to determining the crop for next year based on the leaves and production," he said. "The leaves pull double duty and put a lot of energy into crops."

That's why leaf care is so important, he said. Aphids, caterpillars and a tree fungus, scab, can reduce leaves’ ability to feed trees’ needed energy from the sun.

Predators such as crows and squirrels also can reduce harvests dramatically, Nesbitt said.

One crow can consume 44 pounds of pecans in a season, he said. Squirrels can consume or bury 56 pounds.

The high competition among predators has made pecans one of the most prolific fruit/seed bearing trees, Nesbitt said.

Rains in early summer and September came at the right time for East Texas’ pecans, Nesbitt said.

Blair Krebs, the Texas Pecan Growers Association's associate director of sales and marketing, said the yield is up but that so too is demand.

The Chinese have developed a taste for pecans in recent years and created a new market that has driven prices up, she said. Plantings around the country have increased due to higher demands, she said, but Mother Nature doesn't always cooperate.

Ms. Krebs said the national overview for pecan production shows lower than usual yields, which means pecan consumers could see higher prices. She said the biggest issue this year has been nut sizes, which has been relatively smaller.

"East Texas should be good because there was enough water to let the nuts fill out," she said. "So as long as trees were managed properly, there should be plenty of quality pecans."

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