Spring Pecan Orchard

This blip is in stark contrast to how the orchard looked in January shortly after the fall harvest.  Compare the two.  Notice how the trees are trimmed.  This is to ensure peak production of the pecan crop.

FICO's (aka Farmer's Investment Co.) original cash crop, in 1948 was cotton.  In 1976, Keith Walden, owner of FICO, experimented with a number of nuts and fruits but what thrived best were grapes and pecans.  He chose pecans because they had a longer window of harvest and they could be harvested by machine.

The FICO orchard, located in Sahuarita, AZ is the largest irrigated orchard in the world. The dirt lanes next to the lines of trees are the irrigation lanes.  They are flooded with water for 21 days in the spring and fall and ten days in the summer.  Pecan orchards are water intensive. [In AZ, water priority goes to mining first, agriculture second and people third.]

The orchard spans 6,000 acres and has 106,000 trees.  Pecan trees can live for hundreds of years and are only found in the southern and southwestern parts of the United States; nowhere else in the world.

The Farm has a colorful history. Joseph Kennedy and J.P. Morgan founded it in 1915 with the plan of growing a plant that is a source of rubber.  There were fears that the Germans might cut off the sea lanes, blocking imports of rubber.  The farm changed hands a couple of times before the Walden's bought it out and experimented with the land.