The Bottom Line: Delicious facts about pecans!
The Full Story:
- The Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) is a kind of hickory, generally considered to be the best-tasting of the hickories, and the most significant of the hickories as a nut crop. Texas and Georgia are the largest producers of commercial pecans in the United States. The pecan is a major agricultural tree, but not top ranked as an ornamental. Pecans are difficult to transplant, and they cannot be counted on to produce good crops of nuts when used as landscape trees.
- There are about 1,000 varieties of pecans, many of them named after Native American tribes.
- The Official State Nut of Alabama is the Pecan (since 1982).
- The Pecan Tree was designated as the Official Tree of Texas in 1919 and the Pecan was designated as the Official Health Nut of Texas in 2001.
- It takes about 78 pecans for one pecan pie.
- It would take 11,624 pecans, stacked end to end, to reach the top of the Empire State Building in New York City.
- It would take about 144-million pecans to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
- It would take a line of over 10-billion pecans to reach the moon!
- Georgia has been the top pecan producing state in the nation since the late 1800s.
- The U.S. produces roughly 90% of the world's pecans, with an annual production of over 250 million pounds.
- Pecan trees produce 25 to 45 pounds per tree in alternate years. They are an alternate-bearing tree, producing nuts every 2nd year. Researchers are working on developing a tree that will produce a large crop annually.