The Bottom Line: Fun facts about pecans.
The Full Story:
- Some of the larger pecan shellers process 150,000 pounds of pecans each day. That’s enough to make 300,000 pecan pies!
- It would take 11,624 pecans, stacked end to end, to reach the top of the Empire State Building in New York City.
- Pecans in space: it would take a line of over 10-billion pecans to reach the moon!
- Would you go nuts for a refreshing dip in the pool? You’d need a lot of pecans – 144 million to be exact – to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
- Albany, Georgia, which boasts more than 600,000 pecan trees, is the pecan capital of the U.S. Albany hosts the annual National Pecan Festival, which includes a race, parade, pecan-cooking contest, the crowning of the National Pecan Queen and many other activities.
- Texas adopted the pecan tree as its state tree in 1919. In fact, Texas Governor James Hogg liked pecan trees so much that he asked if a pecan tree could be planted at his gravesite when he died.
- Pecan trees usually range in height from 70 to 100 feet, but some trees grow as tall as 150 feet or higher. Native pecan trees – those over 150 years old – have trunks more than three feet in diameter.
- That’s one heavy nut: it would take 5,640 pecan halves to equal the weight of a standard watermelon.
- Pecans come in a variety of sizes – mammoth, extra large, large, medium, small and midget. They also come in several forms including whole pecans, pecan halves, pieces, granules and meal.
- There are over 1,000 varieties of pecans. Many are named for Native American Indian tribes, including Cheyenne, Mohawk, Sioux, Choctaw and Shawnee.
- The U.S. produces about 80% of the world’s pecan crop.
Source: ILovePecans.org