Mexico Ledger from Mexico, Missouri • Page 11

MEXICO (MO.) LEDGER Page "I I Wednesday I I December 15, 1971 Money Grows On Trees Mtiney grows on trees, headlines the Kansas City Times, over a story by Margaret Olwine on the pecan confer of Missouri. Ffom the center of the northern Missouri area at Brunswick, she writes: Even with three inches of show on the ground pecan customers still turned off U. S. 24 to patronize the Nut Hut, the retail outlet of James Pecan Farm, Inc. "Idon't know where all the people come from, but they come," Mrs.

George James said. Among the morning's customers was the secretary of Edward V. Long, former U. S. senator.

Mrs. Dolores Tinsley of Bowling Green, confided that she had driven 125 miles to pick up Long's annual consignment of the full- kerneled northern Missouri nuts. "Senator Long always gets around 360 pounds of the cracked pecans," she said. "He likes to pick them out himself and give them to friends and employees for Christmas. It's a hobby.

Others who came in to pick up orders of 100 or more pounds included an officer of an Illinois electrical company, a retired Army colonel from Iowa and an extension agent from northern Missouri. All said Brunswick pecans are superior to varieties from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama and other Southern states. James, a 62-year-old double for Harry S. Truman of 15 or 20 years ago, said the popularity of 1-70 as the main east-west tourist route across the state had in no way cut down pecan sales in the Brunswick area. "Some of the dealers are already sold out and closed up," he said.

James, the first "president of the recently organized Mid- Missouri Nut Growers Association, is largely responsible for the emergence of this picturesque old steamboat town of 1,500 population as "The Pecan Capital of Missouri." James got his start 24 years ago on 40 acres when a farmer was lucky to sell a truckload of small native nuts wholesale at two or three cents a pound. Now he has 1,000 acres, all in the low flood plains of the Missouri River east of town, and his various groves of native and grafted tree add up to between 5,000 and 10,000. "My lucky break came 16 years ago when I discovered the Starking Hardy Giant," he explained. The tree was one of several in a thicket he was clearing. He just happened to notice that its nuts were far larger than those of the trees around it and its shells were thin.

James sold propagation rights to the tree to Stark Brothers Nurseries of Louisiana, and the new variety, a lucky gift of nature, has been grafted or budded into native trees in many groves along the Missouri River from Glasgow to Brunswick and north along the Grand River to Sumner. Today, in the many nut shops on the east outskirts of Brunswick and in service stations and sundry shops, cracked native pecans are selling at 63 cents a pound and Hardy Giants or Hardy Giant crosses sell for 70 cents a pound. The going rate for native nuts brought in by sideline nut farmers has been 40 cents a pound. James buys all he can get and so do a half dozen others. means," an old-timer af Brandt's Pecans in the former railway express office said "that a farmer can bring in a'2-ton truckload of nuts and get $1,600.

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