While the current drought is gripping most of the region and beyond, it’s business as usual at Stahmann Farms’ “Trawalla” property which is almost finished its 2018 pecan harvest.
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With the pecan farm – the biggest in the southern hemisphere, located about 35km east of Moree – operating on a high security water licence to support its drip irrigation system, Trawalla farm production manager Dave Reibel said the drought hasn’t impacted on this year’s harvest.
“It hasn’t played a big role,” he said.
“We’ve been lucky in that way. We have full allocation from Copeton Dam because it’s permanent planting; we don’t have the option not to plant.”
Trawalla’s 2018 harvest began in May this year with the first round of light shaking, before the second round got underway in early July.
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The last of this year’s crop is currently being collected, with harvest expected to finish at the end of next week according to Mr Reibel.
“We do two rounds of harvest – we did one in May with a light shake and we’re doing a second shake now,” he said.
“Not all the nuts ripen at the same stage. It’s a six-week harvest period, spread over a couple of months.”
Being the off-year in the biennial cycle of pecans, Mr Reibel said while this year’s harvest isn’t “too bad”, it won’t produce as much as last year.
This year’s harvest is expected to produce about 1,200 tonnes, compared to more than 2,000 tonnes produced last year.
“Every second year they produce more than they did the previous season,” Mr Reibel said.
The pecan harvesting process has a number of stages.
First the nuts are removed from the trees by a mobile shaker, before stick pickers come through and collect all the sticks that fall to the ground during the shaking process.
After that a sweeper comes through to sweep and blow the nuts into two windrows ready for the harvester to come through and pick the nuts off the ground.
The nuts are then transported to the cleaning plant on farm where rubbish is separated from the nuts before they’re cleaned and dried. They are then shipped to the Stahmann Farms’ Toowoomba plant for processing and packing before being distributed around Australia and internationally.
Half of the product stays in Australia where it’s sold in major supermarkets – Coles, Woolworths and Aldi – as well as manufacturers, while the other half is exported overseas to Europe, Asia, the US and New Zealand.
The Trawalla farm currently has about 105,000 trees comprising of two varieties – Wichita and Western Schley – which are cross-pollinated. Another 17,000 small trees will be planted in August.
The planting of new trees comes off the back of a $250,000 state government grant, announced in November last year, to expand the farm’s drip irrigation system.
