July/August 2024
Georgia-based Pearson Farm offers a generational legacy in the pecan growing belt
The fifth-generation owner, Lawton Pearson, of Pearson Farm in the Fort Valley, Georgia, peach and pecan growing belt, loves walking inside any fruit orchard. He likes to say there is no better place he would like to live and work in than in the middle of an orchard.
“To me, it’s awe-inspiring,” he said. “When you see a loaded orchard of fruit, and it’s not just loaded with fruit when you pick it, it’s all year. To see those trees and what God has given us, the complexity of it, and yet the simplicity of it, trees planted in rows, square formed, pruned by hand. They’re like little pieces of art, every one of them. You see order, not chaos. You get out in an orchard, any orchard, and you’re away from all of it. It gives you a special feeling to be in and live in an orchard. It’s something you don’t get out of a bean or corn field.”
Run by fifth- and sixth-generation family members, the Pearson family farming operation started in 1885 with peaches, and added pecan trees in the 1930s.
Pecans, a native tree, were more of an afterthought for many Georgians 30 to 40 years ago, as they were easily grown. Everybody had some, Pearson recalled, and after a grower finished doing everything else, they would pick up their pecans and didn’t spray them much.
Pecan renewal
Around 2000, pecans became less profitable. Yet, a decade later, when the markets for all nuts improved, the industry invested as much attention to pecan groves as they did peach orchards through employing agronomic practices and planting more trees per acre.
“Growing pecans is more intense than it was 20 years ago,” Pearson said.
Crop production
In the past, a grower wasn’t required to do much to them, unlike other tree fruit. Like with peaches, however, “there are a lot of things that can ruin your day,” he said.
Hedging, a relatively new practice among southeastern pecan growers, is critical in sunlight management for making consistent yields of high quality nuts. When pecan trees are stronger by being balanced from roots to canopies, Extension research has shown hedged trees possess more resistance to winds during hurricanes, as demonstrated by recent storm data. Not that growers didn’t lose any trees, the hedging helped growers lose fewer trees.
“The whole thing is driven by sunlight, which in the Southeast, is limited and is a limiting factor in production,” Pearson said. “We don’t have the sunlight they have out west. If we have a week of cloudy weather in September, all the sudden the quality isn’t what it should be, and it’s because you had clouds. There’s nothing you can do about it. It just shows you the importance of managing sunlight in the orchard, and the only way to do that is to prune.”
Shaking in August to relieve overloaded crops is now a standard practice. The shaking prevents overbearing, which pecan trees are wired to do, with some varieties better about it than others. It’s a reason growers prune intensively and shake excess nuts to discourage orchards from entering alternate bearing cycles that lead to large crops of disappointing quality nuts and then no crop.
Historically important varieties are Elliots, Stewarts, Schleys and Desirables, with Stewarts, Slights and Desirabled constituting three-fourths of Georgia’s pecan acreage. Growers are slowly adding younger orchards of USDA-developed Creek, Caddo, Oconee and Kiowa varieties, as well as newer USDA varieties including Pawnees and Mohawks.
Pest, disease threats
Pecan scab, the biggest pecan threat, is all- consuming in June and July and can ruin a crop. Because varieties are susceptible, spraying is required during the heavy humid summer climate.
In August and September, an aphid complex, including yellow aphids, can enlarge and suck the juice out of trees that are experiencing the most stress. Black aphids can quickly defoliate trees.
family owners of Georgia’s Pearson Farm have been growing pecans since the 1930s.
At the same time, mites are a threat. Though insects can be kept in balance May through July, black aphids in particular must be closely monitored in September. Beneficials can be overcome during September when many pests target trees.
“There are tons of everything from pecan leaf phylloxera to fiddle bugs to pecan nut casebearers,” Pearson said. “A lot we have sidelined.”
As there aren’t as many outbreaks as in the past, Pearson said they continue to monitor those pests but the rates of infection no longer warrant intensive spray applications. Sensing the region’s level ground and fertile soil could help him join Georgia’s peach boom, Moses Winlock “Lockie” Pearson in 1885 relocated his family from a nearby county and planted peach trees.
In 1906, Lockie died at 48 years of age, which left his wife Emma to raise a dozen children and run the farm. John, the oldest son, continued farming, adding more land and increased peach plantings. Peggy, Ann and Al, the children of Lawton Pearson, Sr., one of John’s sons, worked summers in the packing shed.
After graduating college, Al joined his father in farming and in 1973 operated the farm as Big 6 Farm, which was a partnership with his sisters. Al and his wife Mary raised Mary Katherine, Lawton and Laurie. After the younger Lawton finished law school in 2008, he returned to the farm and purchased the business with his father and began farming together.
Today, Al, Mary, Lawton and his wife Lanier and their children, Adeline, Cort and Sutton, the farm’s sixth generation, as well as others, are involved in the company. The operation also includes direct to consumer retail and mail order businesses.
=Advice Lawton would give growers is to take the time to do things right, the first time. “It’s okay to wait a year to get it right before you ever set a tree,” he said. “Every time you hurry and do something not right, you know you’re limping into an orchard instead of going in strong on the right foot doing something right.”
