It was literally a dump. Located next to the transfer station in Los Lunas, New Mexico, what was once a place where people dumped their trash, is now 4 Daughters Land and Cattle. Today it’s home to around 23,000 pecan trees and the northernmost pecan farm in the state. Deer, elk, and quail make the pecan orchard their home, living amidst the trees in what Emily Willis—one of the four daughters—calls an oasis in the desert.
How 4 Daughters Land and Cattle is Planting for the Future
The closest pecan tree to 4 Daughters is 100 miles south. Pecan trees don’t grow this far north, or at least they didn’t, until Emily’s parents Mike and Kathy Mechenbier decided to plant their first pecan tree here. Emily remembers it clearly, “I have a picture of me standing next to one of the trees when we first planted it, and knowing exactly where it is and seeing that tree today and shaking that tree and getting nuts off it.”
Tree by tree, acre by acre, the orchard grew — mostly the ‘Pawnee’ pecan cultivar which can stand up to the cold winters, and ‘Lakota’ for pollinators. “We’d talked to several people and a lot of them were doubtful pecans would make it this far north, but we decided to go ahead and try it,” Mike says. They planted 2,000 trees that first year. “They were about the size of a pencil and they did real well,” he says, “so we expanded by about 2,000 trees every year up to the present.”
There is a rhythm to the pecan farming year. Once there is a hard freeze, the pecan husks pop open and you can literally shake the pecans out of the trees. Harvesting starts in November and finishes up in January. After that, it’s time for pruning–Emily’s job for the young trees–and transplanting–the work of her brother-in-law and farm manager, Troy Richardson. Irrigation starts in March and then it’s watching out for pests like aphids and nut casebearers and making sure the trees get enough zinc to stay healthy. And then the cycle begins again.
Pecan Expertise
Pecans, a species of hickory, are the only commercially grown tree nut that is native to the United States. Our country leads pecan production, accounting for around 80% of the world’s pecans. Once harvested, 4 Daughters’ pecans make their way to Las Cruces and then across the country and globe as far away as China (China is mad for pecans). New Mexico is traditionally one of the highest-ranking growers, but in southern New Mexico, not this far north where a late season frost could destroy an entire crop.
With all of the challenges of growing nuts so far north, why does Mike do it? Aside from the weather, it takes fourteen years before you start harvesting a crop, he says. “Makes a lot of sense for an old man to plant a shade tree, doesn’t it?” he jokes. But that’s the point he says – the trees aren’t for him. “You don’t plant a pecan orchard to get rich. You plant it for your grandchildren.”
4 Daughters Farm and Cattle Works for Future Generations
Emily has a comic strip on her refrigerator. In it, an old man is planting a tree and a kid is watching him. The kid asks, “What tree is that?” The old man says, “Oh, I’m planting a pecan tree. I’m not planting it for me. I’m planting it for you, and for future generations. I won’t ever probably have any pecans off of this.” The little kid turns and says, “I don’t like pecans.”
I ask Mike if he likes pecans and he says he does if they’re fresh, and finds a ‘Pawnee’ for me to sample. “Anybody that says they don’t like pecans, if they ever ate a fresh one, they’d change their mind,” he says. He prises the meat out of the shell and hands it to me. He’s right. It’s unlike any pecan I’ve ever tasted. It has none of the bitterness you sometimes find in store-bought pecans, which he tells me could have been harvested a year or more before you pick a bag off the shelves.
Emily jokes that her dad likes to grow things that start with a ‘P’: pigs, pistachios (didn’t work – too far north), pomegranates, peaches and of course, pecans. I’d add to that two more ‘P’s’: patience and persistence.
Story by Julia Platt Leonard / Photography by Michael Benanav
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