make allowances for such anxieties. Throughout the twentieth century, as the food industry became more and more automated, the improved varieties, with their standard size, thinner shells, and higher yields, prevailed. They entered shelling machines with no trouble and were transformed into nut flavoring for countless processed foods. Texas, however, straddled the divide between the wild and the sown. We cultivated improved pecans for the ingredient market while reserving ample native fare for our Thanksgiving gift baskets. It was a compromise that, for a while, made sense. 

Then came the Chinese.  

Mike Adams, president of the Texas Pecan Board, recently spent a week in China, trying to better understand his industry’s newest and largest market. Chinese pecan importers buy mostly improved nuts, and until Adams went there himself, he didn’t fully appreciate why. Then he learned how Chinese processors make a hairline fracture in the shell (by hand), roast them, and soak them, often in a flavored brine. This process demands, as Adams explained, “uniform size and uniform variety.” Different varieties roast at different temperatures, and Chinese processors prefer to fill gas station vending machines with pecans that are all the same size. A native nut would be a stick in the spokes of the system. 

Adams, who owns Royalty Pecan Farms, in Caldwell, is quick to acknowledge the challenges Texas growers face when it comes to capitalizing on the China connection. Roughly 30 percent of Texas’s harvest is composed of native nuts, and owing to climatic factors, in West Texas even the improved pecans mature later than those in Georgia, denying many Texas growers first crack at the “gift-pack market” sparked by mid-autumn festivals and the Chinese New Year. That said, Adams believes that increased production of improved nuts would raise Texas’s chances of dominating the China market. No state is in a better position to ramp up its production.

Consider some numbers. Every year Texas harvests improved pecans from about 70,000 acres of land. But unlike Georgia and New Mexico, Texas is sitting on a gold mine of more than 600,000 acres of land, all lining the state’s waterways, where native pecans thrive. If future growers cleared this land of native stock and planted field after field of improved orchards, Texas would likely leave Georgia and New Mexico behind. 

Of course, there’s a catch, and Texas’s pecan growers are well aware of it. Native pecans beautify our rivers, their genetic variation fosters biodiversity, and they represent perhaps the only edible native flora of the Texan landscape to survive hundreds of years of environmental change. What a shame it would be, as Texas A&M entomologist (and global authority on pecan pests) Marvin Harris has noted, if all these trees were removed and the only place future Texans could see a native pecan tree was in a botanical garden. 

Andy Sherrod, a horticulturist who manages Royalty Pecan Farms, suggests a more heartening version of this scenario. Checking up on their five-hundred-acre orchard in the Brazos river bottom, Sherrod, a thin man in worn Wranglers, proudly highlights the environmentally sustainable methods he uses. Royalty Pecan preserves water through cutting-edge slow-drip irrigation, relies on beneficial insects to control aphids, fosters native grasses to sequester carbon and aerate soil, and uses sonar devices to deter crows instead of dousing trees with buckshot. That’s fine stewardship of nature—as well as a smart way to market to Chinese consumers, who have a growing interest in agricultural sustainability—and it’s stewardship that is not incompatible with commerce. 

But it’s a delicate balance, to say the least. After all, the orchard’s 14,000 trees are clumps of clones that wouldn’t thrive without Sherrod’s gentle management. As he heads down the hill from the farm’s welcome center, delving into the grid of the orchard, Sherrod stops and points to a majestic lone pecan. It’s a native holdout, a giant among dwarfs, thick and gnarled and displaying every knock and scar accumulated over its one-hundred-year history. As Sherrod, who almost looks wistful, declares his love for this noble tree, it’s hard not to notice that it looms and sways over the orchard like a big question mark. 

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Adapted from The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut, by James McWilliams. Copyright © 2013 by the University of Texas Press. To be published in October 2013.