By Clint Thompson
The pecan harvest season is mostly in the books for Georgia producers. While market prices did not cooperate for the growers, production was good, according to Lenny Wells, University of Georgia Extension pecan specialist.
He said additional acreage coming into production offset some of the missed projections by producers at the beginning of the season.
“It wasn’t any kind of a record crop by any means, but it was a good crop. Most growers are telling me that their yields were a third off of what they thought was there. That was pretty much the case across the board talking to most of them,” Wells said. “While that may be true on an individual orchard basis, I think the projections that were put out there earlier about 120 or 130 million-pound crop, I feel like that’s going to be pretty close to right. Even with yields being a little off from what growers thought, I think we just had a lot more acreage coming into production. There’s a lot of young trees that are contributing now.
“If you look back at the 2021 crop, which if you went out in the orchard and looked in 2021, it was way off on production it looked like was going to have. Then we ended up making 80 million pounds after it looked like one of the worst years we’ve had in a long time. I think that is also attributed just to the new acreage coming into production. We’re going to have to start adjusting our mindset to what an off crop and on crop in Georgia is. What used to look like an 80 million to 100 million-pound crop is now probably 120 million to 130 million-pound crop. We’ve just got to get used to that.”