SAN ANTONIO - The effects from the current drought are being seen just about everywhere. Now it looks like it'll eat into your holiday baking plans too.
It's the time of the year that pecan growers get crackin'. The demand for pecans... whole, cracked, or shelled are rolling in.... but this year's crop was all about survival.
Don Hagans, owner of Circle H Orchards, told us simply, "Very Brutal... brutal... brutal... the drought and the heat."
He says he was fortunate this year making about a 30-40 percent crop. Many growers he knows didn't make a crop at all. The reason... after a huge crop last year, the drought began to kick in late in the year and then the big killer last February.
Hagans says the cold was devastating, "The hard, hard freeze that we had. We had three nights right here it was 10 degrees in the morning when I got up."
A number of his pecan trees are perfect examples of how stressed the pecan crop has been this year because of the weather the last several months. They've been pruned way back not only for they're survival, but also to produce a crop next year.
That cold blast left huge dead branches that had to be sliced off to conserve its energy for its living parts. In fact, he's still getting them back in shape.
Despite all this, Don says the pecan quality will still be good... there just may not be as many around.
"The taste will be very good... the size will be a little smaller because there just wasn't as much water for them to expand and grow."
With the demand high and the supply lower, you can expect to pay about three to four dollars a pound more for them than last year. So if your thinking about buying pecans, I would buy them now rather than later.
Something else that's playing into it. The Chinese have now become huge pecan fans. Last year, the U.S. exported around 100-million pounds to China. That's about a third of the total U.S. crop, and that's affected the overall supply.
