Well, you can say that 2012 is over....and good riddance!

What happened to the prices, Scott? Just the basic law of supply and demand? Cheap imports? How can the prices have dropped like this?

Dawn

Combination of a few things. Oklahoma drought combined with possible sheller manipulation of the market combined with overall US and Mexico supply.

Our pecans are good sized and very good quality, but there are no buyers, period. This crop last year would have brought $30,000-40,000. This year we will be lucky to get $5,000. The rest of our crop will never get harvested. Much of the Oklahoma native industry could vanish after this season.

That is just crazy, and I am sorry it has happened. I just don't understand it, but I've seen it happen all around me too, and not just with pecans.

In our county, farming used to be huge....we had melon growers, pecan growers and lots and lots of peanut growers. There's very little of any of that left. The peanut growers tried to keep growing peanuts, but once they lost the price supports, that seemed like a hopeless cause. There's a few small melon growers left, but they mostly just sell out of the back of their trucks. The pecan orchards remain but you don't hear much about them anymore. Everything here now is about cattle and horses, and the hay to feed them.

Some of the people who had very mature, very healthy and very well-maintained pecan orchards in the river bottom lands when we moved here in 1999 don't even pay to have those big pecan shakers come shake the pecans off their trees any more, so I assume they aren't even attempting to sell the pecans. I used to see shakers going up and down our road regularly during harvest season, but it has been years since I've seen a single one driving past our house.

It seems incomprehensible that the Oklahoma native pecan industry is struggling like this.

I thought I would check the Farmers Co-op in Ft. Smith, they had about 2 lbs. , Van Buren had none. That seems strange because pecans are our favorite nut.

The pecan industry has had a MAJOR boom since 2004. A lot of money has been made, even with native pecans. Growers responded with increasing acreage to meet the growing demand from overseas (mostly China). We are now entering a period of having a large supply in the US, but natives are possibly not going to be of much value.

The size of the native nuts here in drought areas is very small so it is very costly for shellers to get the meats out, not to mention the added cost of doing business due to regulation and artificially inflated labor cost. (It is a fact that you cannot find much good unskilled labor because the government provides significant income for doing nothing.) On top of this there are games being played by some of those who shell out the meats and sell to retailers. It all adds up to huge losses for people like me, and therefore to the people like the dozer guys that I was going to pay to clear land and build ponds for irrigation.

I have 17,000 lbs sitting on trailers waiting and another 10,000-12,000 lbs that I will likely not harvest at all. The quality is great but this crop may never make it to a human's mouth.

Scott,

Forgive my chiming in here, but...I have a large pecan tree in my backyard and I got not quite a dozen nuts off of it this year - good quality, but that's all the squirrels left me :(

So..I don't know where you are located, and I'm sure we wouldn't make much of a dent in your store of nuts, but
1) Are you coming to pick up onions, and 2) could people buy bags of nuts from you and pick them up then (same deal - place an order for so many lbs, and get you the money ahead of time)??

Random thoughts on this Wednesday afternoon...Sharon

Scott, are you selling to us?

Moni

If I was going to be in the same place as you I would just give you small quantities. The problem is that it costs more in gas than the nuts are worth, plus it's almost impossible to find time to mess with small amounts. We just need to find buyers for the big loads that are ready.

Next year there will likely be very little native pecans in Oklahoma, but I expect price will rebound.

I'm feeling a little better about the outlook, but best case scenario is just under half of the price seen over the last 8 years. If anyone wants large quantities of shelled pecan meats, I can find some for you at half of what the price was in retail stores this past two months.

Scott,
Whaat quantity is a "large" quantity?.
Thanks,
mo

They come back in 30lb boxes ready for retail sale. 30 lbs is a lot but they can be frozen with no loss of quality for at least 3 years. 30 lbs is what I call a large quantity, but I could probably find some in smaller sizes. 10lbs is probably the minimum size. By the end of this month everything should be worked out and I suspect there will be a lot of pecans to be found at prices not seen in a decade.

(When I referred to the large quantities of in-shell pecans I have waiting to be bought wholesale, I am talking about a few thousand lbs minimum. These are the types of loads that will end up being shelled out and sold local very cheap soon if out-of-state buyers are not found.)

Scott if you knew of somewhere that would ship 30 lbs I would be interested. I have been calling several on Craig's list in the OKC and Tulsa areas. Most don't want to ship. I know I will be paying shipping on top of the purchase price. I'm willing to do that for fresh pecans. Thanks Jay

I doubt that I will be buying this year, but I normally buy 100 pounds in the shell, then take them to the 'crack house' myself. It requires going through them at home and removing the remainder of the shell which is a little time consuming. I then put the nut meats in freezer zip bags, then several bags into a brown paper grocery bag. That quantity of pecans will stay fresh in the freezer until I use them all. If you have a place to freeze a 30 pound box then I wouldn't be afraid of buying that quantity.

Jay, I don't have any halves right now myself or I would ship you some. All I have is pieces, and only about 40 lbs left of those.

There is a really good chance I will have a large quantity shelled out again by mid-Feb. If they are finished and I end up coming through your area the week of Feb 6 like I am hoping, I will bring you some.

Natives are interesting in that 100 lbs of in-shell pecans could yield you anywhere from about 35 lbs of finished meats to 50 lbs of finished meats depending on the tree they came from. Some cultivars (called papershells) yield about 60% and come out of the shell easily making the processing cost very low. That is why natives are not worth near as much as most cultivars: up to 1.5 times the resulting nutmeat and half the cost to shell them!

I have always liked the taste of the native pecans best, but they are a little harder to deal with.