One of the most underlooked tree crops for Michigan and other northern short season areas is the pecan. The pecan has a ton of reasearch behind it. It has the mechanization. It has crackers, dryers and sorters. It has people like no tommorrow! Go ahead and buy that Costco bag of pecans. (Sure. The sugar encrusted cinnamon ones. Do it.) Look how many countries grow pecans. The U.S.D.A. has devoted resources for its improvement over a span of 100 years. Hey, it even has its own extractors for oil. After its debut almost 50 years ago as a northern crop from the University of Nebraska and the germplasm rescue from the Northern Nut Growers Association few farmers took on the challenge. The most northern forms of it are viewed as hobby like and okay for the horticulturally adventurous. This highlights the oh-so-slow acceptance of a new crop in a new environment. To me it is the poster child of an unknown known crop. The drain pipe for pecan is plugged. Right behind it is the hickory. I was unsuccessful to get it into nursery production outside of my farm. To make a northern pecan industry in Michigan possible you would need large areas devoted to it mostly in southern Michigan and a willing and able farmer based enthusiam for the crop. It requires time and patience to establish an orchard. The only thing I can think of that is a little like this is the Northern Spy apple. On a standard rootstock, Spys take 17 years to fruit. Of course, money has to be devoted specifically for this crop to kick start it into commerce. Let’s treat it as not experimental and not native to Michigan because it is neither. We should treat it like a crop and raise it to fruition under organic conditions. For the northern pecan, this is very easy. It’s a food and oil crop widespread throughout the world. It’s been done before. It’s not that hard to do.

The mature northern pecans I have at my farm were all found originally along the Mississippi River in central Illinois and Iowa. It turned out that people had a natural inclination to move the pecan inland and northward. Some say the crow did it and others say boat loads of nuts were carried in canoes long ago even into Wisconsin. The season for ripening was the limiting factor. The crows and people for generations moved the pecan. What would happen if you took a southern selection farther north is you would crack open the nut only to reveal it was in the ‘milk stage’ and had yet to form the seed fully. This limitation was the real crux of a pecan with a delicious nut and a pecan tree that looks nice with empty nuts. This was exactly what I found at my farm.

Today I am harvesting older and over planted pecan trees for my woodworking projects. My northern seed grown trees from the James and Shepherds farms in northern Missouri are being thinned in my old planting beds where the rows were once 12 inches apart. It’s bit too much to pack them in like that in the form of a red pine plantation. I was told by a fellow nut grower and a great pioneer of the northern pecan, the late John Gordon, to leave only the most vigorous of pecan trees. He was emphatic about it like he discovered cold fusion. He said that these super fast growing plants are also the most productive, precocious from seed and early ripening. He was right. This type of advice is precious because who in their right mind would grow pecans in New York? Oh wait. Me in Michigan.

Enjoy.

Kenneth Asmus