There's a question we get asked at markets more than any other, usually by someone holding a bag of nuts and doing sums in their head: how long does it take?

The answer is longer than anyone expects. A pecan tree begins producing at around eight years old, and doesn't reach full production until somewhere between years twelve and fifteen.

Eight years of costs before the first cheque. Fifteen before the orchard is really an orchard.

What those first years actually involve

The temptation is to picture the waiting as passive, trees in the ground doing their thing while the farmer looks on. It isn't. The early years are the most demanding of the whole cycle, and the most unforgiving of mistakes.

Grass competition is one of the major problems facing young pecan trees, and it's preferable to keep them weed-free for at least the first two years. In a district that gets high rainfall and grows grass like the Northern Rivers does, that's not a small commitment. Everything wants to grow here. A young pecan competing with kikuyu for water and nitrogen loses.

Then there's water, staking, pruning for structure, and protecting the leader. A pecan trained badly in year three carries that shape for the rest of its life. You can't go back and fix the architecture of a twenty-five metre tree.

Getting the varieties right, once

Pecans are wind pollinated. Nut set depends on cross-pollination, so an orchard needs more than one cultivar planted together, and not just any two. Pecan varieties shed pollen and become receptive at different times, so the block has to be planned so that something is shedding when something else is ready.

Get that wrong and you find out in year eight. That's the thing about this crop that took us longest to make peace with. Almost every significant decision, variety and spacing and row direction and soil preparation, is made once in the first season and then locked in for a working lifetime. Cane you can change your mind about. Pecans you cannot.

The chill question

Pecans came from the river bottoms of North America, and they carry a winter requirement with them. The tree needs cool winters, in the order of 350 to 400 hours at or below 7 degrees, along with deep, well-drained soil.

Coastal northern NSW is not an obvious place to be delivering that. We're closer to the subtropics than the temperate zone, and our winters are mild. It's one of the real constraints on growing this crop here rather than out west at Moree, where the industry has its centre of gravity.

What we get in exchange is a growing season with genuine heat and humidity, which pecans love, and rainfall we don't have to buy. Every growing district is a trade. This is ours.

Why it's worth it

Here's the flip side of the eight-year wait. Once a pecan is producing, it produces for generations. These trees can crop for a century. The oldest ones on this farm were planted by people making a bet on a future they wouldn't fully see, and every year we harvest them is a return on that bet.

There's a particular feeling to working in a block you didn't plant, under trees that were already tall when you arrived, knowing that the block you put in last winter is for someone else in the same way. Not many jobs give you that.

We're planting more of them. Ask us again in fifteen years.