ARE THEY NUTS?

As if planting cotton fields and orange groves in Arizona weren't strange enough, the Walden family went even further out on the limb and planted pecan trees. Although a nut farm is the last thing you'd expect to see in the desert, the Waldens boast the largest vertically integrated facility in the U.S. and the largest irrigated pecan orchard in the world.

Every elementary school student in Arizona learns the five C's of the state's economy copper, cattle, citrus, cotton and climate but ask them about the local pecan industry and they might look at you as if you're nuts. Ditto for their parents. Most of us associate shady pecan trees with southern states such as Georgia and Texas, and while those praline-loving places surpass Arizona in overall production, they don't have one thing we do: The Green Valley Pecan Co., which boasts the largest vertically integrated facility in the U.S. meaning it does everything from growing pecans to shipping them and tends the largest irrigated pecan orchard in the world.

Located 15 miles south of Tucson in the once sleepy but rapidly growing farm community of Sahuarita, The Green Valley Pecan Co., a division of Farmers Investment Co. (FICO), might sound like a multinational conglomerate, but it is and always has been a family owned and operated business.

Its founder, R. Keith Walden, grew up in California, where he had begun farming with his father and brother at an early age. But as land prices rose there in the 1940s, Walden took the advice of Arizona businessman Kemper Marley and moved to Arizona, buying the 10,000acre Continental Farm, nestled in the Santa Cruz Valley.

Even then, the farm boasted a rich history of ownership. The Intercontinental Rubber Co., founded by legendary financiers J.P. Morgan, Joseph Kennedy and Bernard Baruch, had bought the land and established Continental at the outset of World War I, growing guayule, a latex-producing plant used to make rubber. There was fear at the time that the German navy would cut off shipping lanes, blocking rubber imports from the Far East. When the war ended, the guayule project was abandoned, and the Continental Farm was eventually sold to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who rented it to cotton farmers for 25 years. During World War II, German POWs interned in a nearby camp worked in Continental's fields. In 1948, the farm went on the market again.

Walden bought the land in 1949, continuing to grow cotton on it but also planting alfalfa, corn for silage, wheat and barley. In the early days, Walden also raised 9,000 head of sheep and 20,000 head of cattle, closing the feedlot in 1976 when its operations became incompatible with a rapidly growing roster of residents in Green Valley. At the same time, Walden continued to buy more land around the state, including the Sahuarita Farm, which lies adjacent to Continental.

Walden's son, Dick, who became the company's president and CEO in 1983, recalls how FICO got out of cotton and into pecans. “Dad was concerned that companies like Dupont and Union Carbide were heavily invested in developing synthetic fibers that might replace much of the market for cotton,” he says. “So Dad began to experiment methodically with different crops.” Walden planted stone fruits, all of the tree nuts and a dozen vari-eties of grapes. Grapes and pecans thrived equally well, but Walden settled on pecans because they have a longer harvest window and can be harvested by machine.

Keith Walden started planting pecan trees in 1965 (Dick swears people thought his dad was cracked), choosing two varieties — the Wichita and Western Schley — for their larger size, thinner shells and abundance of meat.

Pecan trees, which are native to North America, don't produce for the first five years; but unlike citrus trees, which have a production lifespan of 35 years at most, pecan trees (particularly managed ones) can bear quality pecans for centuries. FICO's first trees started producing pecans in 1970; they're still quite young in the scheme of things. To the uninformed, it might appear that pecan farming is as easy as... well, pie. But the process is a bit more involved than just watching trees grow. FICO manages 5,900 acres of orchard and approximately 106,000 trees, which must be pruned, fed and irrigated every two weeks and kept pest-free.

Although Arizona's dry soil and abundant sunshine keep fungus at bay, a minimal amount of fungicides and pesticides is used on the farm's conventional crops. Nevertheless, Dick - who is as progressive a farmer as his dad was - uses biological controls as much as possible, maintaining that it's better for the trees and the land. “You get super-insects by using pesticides,” he asserts. “We let nature balance itself out rather than trying to manipulate nature.” Dick's wife, Nan, the company's vice president and general counsel - she holds an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and a law degree from Stanford - explains their practices this way: “Agriculture is the art of observation. We are super-observers.” The Waldens have long been major players in the organic move-ment, beginning the stringent, three-year process of converting a portion of their conventional orchards to certified organic orchards in 2000. As of 2011, their organic orchards (certified by Oregon Tilth) span 1,200 acres. Additionally, Dick and crew work hand in hand with state universities, doing field research on nut varieties, soil and water use - clearly, a job for brainiacs who don't mind getting their hands dirty.

But if all this sounds scientific and methodical, consider harvest time a frantically paced seven weeks falling between December and February. Ideally, temperatures are cool, and the orchard floors are dry, not muddy from winter rains.

When the conditions are right, the pecans are mechanically shaken from the trees, machine-swept into windrows, picked up by a harvester, then trucked to FICO's 120,000-square-foot processing plant

Ton O THE UNINFORMED, IT MIGHT SEEM THAT PECAN FARMING IS AS EASY AS... WELL. PIE. BUT THE PROCESS IS A BIT MORE INVOLVED THAN JUST WATCHING TREES GROW.

nearby, where they're immediately stored at 24 degrees.

After chilling out in cold storage, the nuts go through a series of baths to raise their moisture content, making it easier to separate the meat from the shell. Then they're sent to an automated cracking machine, an automated shelling machine, a gravity table (which further separates pecan pieces from shells), a dryer and then various electronic sorters and belt machines, which separate the pieces by size, color and quality.

The final step requires the eagle eyes and quick hands of human sorters, who remove any pieces with sprouts or other flaws. After that, the pecans are bagged in various sizes (1and 2-pound cello bags for grocery stores and 30-pound boxes for bakeries, candy companies, ice cream manufacturers and a gigantic European market that's interested almost exclusively in the organic line). The 30-pound boxes carry the name Green Valley Pecan Co., but Green Valley pecans are also sold at Bashas' and AJ's Fine Foods, as well as at Costco, under the Kirkland brand.The plant operates 24 hours a day, five days a week, shutting down for cleaning every weekend and for repairs two weeks out of the year. The rest of the time, it hums with three and four generations of modern equipment and two to three generations of employees, turning out a dozen 2-pound bags of pecans per minute and processing more than 20 million pounds of in-shell pecans per year.

To the side and front of the processing plant stands a cute little pecan store, filled with Arizona-made jams, jellies, honeys, hot sauces and the like, as well as every imaginable permutation of the pecan. Besides natural pecan halves and pieces, there are chocolate-covered pecans, turtles, pecan pralines, cinnamon pecans, hot and spicy pecans, pecan brittle and even pecan meal, which is quite popular in Europe and makes a yummy addition to pancake, waffle or cookie batter. Pecan gift baskets are available in-store and online at www. thepecanstore.com.

Deborah Walden-Ralls, Dick's daughter and the company's director of marketing, points out that it's the imaginative little extras (such as Green Valley Pecan Co's pecan festival in November) that keep the business viable. Nan agrees, adding that every successful family farm in Arizona has learned to adapt in order to survive.

Nan is also quick to point out that the modern farmer is a far cry from the stereotypical hayseed in overalls. Today's farmer must find new markets and become something of a PR wizard, all the while remaining a botanist, biologist, accountant, engineer and steward of the land.

Agriculture has gone global, and nuts are an important export crop in many far-flung countries. As a result of their nutty business, the Waldens have traveled the world, attending meetings in Istanbulbul, Beijing and Buenos Aires, sitting on various national and global food councils and routinely visiting annual food shows that alternate between Paris and Cologne.

Sounds pretty glamorous, doesn't it? But Dick happily admits that when he was a boy, his makeshift schoolhouse boasted three rooms and an outhouse, the school bus was a pickup truck with rows of benches in the back, and driving to Nogales meant bumping along a narrow, two-lane dirt road.

The world has changed, farming has changed and, yes, Dick Walden has surely changed, too. But for the hardworking, entrepreneurial Waldens, two principles are timeless: family and working hard at being the best. And there's nothing nutty about that.