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Overnight, his pecan pride was shattered

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published August 30, 2006

CARLYLE, Ill. - Ralph Voss took years and great pride in sculpting 63 acres of weed-infested timberland into Illinois' only remaining commercial pecan grove. It was so artfully manicured it could have doubled as a park.

Then one day last month all that work was tossed to the wind.

Storms that tore through southern Illinois on July 21 left much of the Clinton County grove in ruins. Roughly one-third of the property's 900 pecan trees, many nine stories tall, were toppled by winds said to have exceeded 70 mph. A couple of hundred other trees were damaged so badly they'll either fall in the next big storm or simply rot, their health compromised by cracks vulnerable to insects and rain.

"It was just a disaster," Voss said of the grove, which last year produced about 60,000 pounds of in-shell pecans. "It's a mess. It's sickening."

Voss estimates the damage will cost him $30,000 a year in pecan sales for each of the next 15 years, until the 500 to 600 new trees he plans to plant at $25 to $30 apiece could be harvest-ready.

So it goes for a 52-year-old who, as a grower of soybeans, corn and wheat, admits that "I guess I'm used to assaults by Mother Nature." But seeing something he spent so long nurturing get battered so badly and so quickly is a tough thing to take.

Voss bought the tract along the rich Kaskaskia River bottom 8 miles from his home a decade ago and spent several years of his spare time ridding it by hand of the thick, tangled brush, scrawny trees and gobs of poison ivy that choked it.

He winnowed the tract's roughly 1,300 trees to about 900, each identified by a metal tag he nailed onto its trunk so he could log its yearly production.

"By clearing the timber, the trees were starting to fill out just beautiful," said Voss' wife, Karen.

"Production would have kept going up over the years, because the limbs were filling out more."

Voss' pecans make up a fairly small part of the total production in the United States, which produces more than 80 percent of the world's pecan supply. Last year's crop nationally weighed in at 259.6-million pounds, with Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma leading the way, according to the Agriculture Department.

But Voss soon became the only commercial pecan grower in Illinois. A previous large-scale producer, with 100 or so acres near Kampsville in west-central Illinois, was done in by the Great Flood of 1993 after an Illinois River levee broke.

Over the years, the Vosses amassed about $100,000 worth of pecan-harvesting machinery - much of it bought used - and became pros at the routine. A mechanical "tree shaker" uses its rubber-padded arms to rattle each tree for a couple of seconds, dislodging the nuts. A tractor-powered harvester is driven around the tree, where 500 of the machinery's rubber fingers pick up the pecans.

Much of the pecan harvest are processed 500 miles away in southeastern Arkansas, then sold by the Vosses at farmer's markets, bakeries and restaurants in Illinois and the St. Louis area. The Vosses fetch $1.25 a pound with the shell, $6 a pound without.

Since the storm, Voss has scrambled to rip out the ruins, using a tractor to haul the toppled trees to a mound he has been burning. He hopes to have the debris cleared by mid September to give him room for harvesting.

"I spent 10 years making it look like a park and it was gone in 30 minutes," Voss says. "One section was just lush, solid green. Now when you look at it, it's just a barren wasteland."

[Last modified August 29, 2006, 22:53:07]