A Farmer's Daughter

For the most part, people know (or assume) what it's like to be a farmer's daughter. However, when I tell people that my father is a pecan farmer. I get a lot of interesting looks. Questions like, "How do pecans grow?", "How do you harvest pecans?" and "What time of year do pecans grow?" I decided a good do a quick "farmer's daughter" version of how the whole process works. Of course, if you ask my dad the process... his version would be a lot longer and more detailed :)
The pecans begin growing in the spring of the year and are ready for harvest in late October as the pecans fall to the ground. Pecans are everywhere you step!

Sometimes the pecans aren't ready to fall off the trees at the timing my dad wants them to fall. So he will use a piece of machinery called a Shaker, which will shake the tree so the pecans will fall off to the ground so they can be picked up. There are a lot of trees to shake!

Then he drives the tractor and pushes all the pecans that are on the ground into wind rows.

Blowing the leaves and pecans into wind rows.

As you can imagine, dirt and leaves fly everywhere!

Now the pecans get picked up.

And the machinery differentiates the weight between leaves and pecans. The pecans are kept. (You can see them shooting through the machine).

Then you load all the pecans into a big red wagon.

The red wagon full of pecans gets dumped into a big bin in the cleaning plant. The pecans are then picked up by the conveyor belt and processed through the cleaning plant.

After a series of steps in the cleaning plant, he has employees pick out the bad ones. Then the process is repeated.

But really .. the reason my dad is a pecan farmer .... is so we can all have really fun photo shoots ;)