The ideas of yesterday do not fit the ideals of today. When conditions shift opinions must be adjusted accordingly and the pioneer growers are about to realize their golden dreams and reap their reward, for their orchards are coming into bearing and yielding tons of beautiful brown nuts for which they find a ready sale at prices ranging from 50 cents to 75 cents per pound and at even higher prices for extra fancy stock.
No doubt many extravagant statements have been made about the pecan industry but why exaggerate when the plain truth staggers the reason? Why draw on the imagination when reputable growers in the Albany District certify to returns to non-resident owners of $300 per acre in a single season.
This is one infant industry that will not cry for a protective tariff. Never will Capitol Hill resound with the eloquent plea of some statesman urging that the southern paper shell pecan industry be protected by a tariff wall.
The paper shell pecan is the horticultural triumph of the ages the gift of a gracious God who no doubt could but never did produce a finer nut and who in his inscrutable wisdom gave a natural monopoly in its culture to the lower cotton belt for no where else on the habitable globe does it reach the perfection attained there.
The Mississippi Valley has been called the cradle of the pecan industry and Georgia its nursery.
Almost all the standard varieties of pecans have come from the lower Mississippi Valley, Jackson county, Miss., perhaps leading the procession as she is the mother of no less than twelve of the standard varieties now fruiting in thousands of orchards making heavy the pockets and light the hearts of as many owners.
Southwest Georgia has monopolized the pecan nursery business. Given Albany, Georgia as a center and scribe a circle with a sixty mile radius and you have inclosed the area from which 90% of all pecan nursery stock has come. This circle includes Monticello, Florida, which probably is entitled to the honor of having grown a greater amount of pecan nursery stock than any other one community.
Texas produces the bulk of the pecan crop well informed men stating that nine-tenths of the pecans come from the Lone Star State. This may be correct but practically all Texas pecans are seedlings and while some are of real merit the bulk of the Texas crop goes to the crackeries.
The pecan belt roughly speaking is the lower cotton belt and includes in a general way the southern part of South Carolina, Georgia, north Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and parts of Texas and Oklahoma. The paper shell pecan grows to perfection in this limited area and nowhere else but all varieties do not thrive alike in the different sections and the growers have long since learned this and have eliminated the cumberers of the ground and replanted with those varieties adapted to that territory.
To successfully develop a pecan orchard requires money, brains and everlasting bull-dog determination for the lean years with all going out and nothing coming in try the patience and test the nerve of the stoutest man. In pecan growing even as in love-making "faint heart ne'er won fair lady."