Art and Linda Sanders turned an abandoned tree orchard into a thriving business
WEST POINT – When Art Sanders bought 46 acres for approximately $75,000 in January 1999 in preparation for retirement, he planned to grow row crops—rice, soybeans, and cotton.
Two years later, when Sanders registered the land, a farm service agent asked if he realized what he had, pointing to a satellite photo showing a planned orchard of nearly 800 pecan trees on 38 acres.
“I was so surprised,” recalled Sanders. “I’d seen a few pecan trees, but there was so much overgrowth. It really was a jungle.”
Through much work, Sanders turned the abandoned pecan orchard into trees producing pecans that he sells as Lindy’s Pecans.
For Sanders, farming pecans as a retiree brought him full circle from his youth. Born in the Delta in the early 1950s into a sharecropping family of 10, farm owners in Tallahatchie and Leflore counties allowed him to gather pecans and sell them for 10 to 15 cents a pound for pocket change.
As a young man, Sanders served three years in the U.S. Army, spent time in St. Louis, Mo., before relocating north, where he spent 31 years fighting fires as a lieutenant with the Chicago Fire Department. By the time he moved south with his wife, Linda, it was 2012.
“I couldn’t talk to the man who originally planted the pecan orchard … I believe his last name was Sullivan,” lamented Sanders, noting there was another landowner in between land sales. “This guy ended up planting acres of pecan trees in 1983, with an irrigation system and a 450-foot deep well for a drip system. He had a vision once for this land but for some reason, had to walk away from it. The orchard was overgrown with invasive grasses, cedars, and pine trees, and the well had been highly neglected.”
Sanders busied himself studying pecan farming and taking steps for the pecan trees to produce.
“I’ve been from Arizona to the Carolinas learning about pecans,” he said. “I even took a course at Texas A&M to grow pecans from seedlings to harvest. I’ve been to Georgia more than once, Louisiana, Tennessee, and the southern part of Missouri that grows pecans.”
To evaluate proper water drainage, Sanders dug a hole 12 inches in diameter and three feet deep. He filled the hole with water and returned the next day. “If the water drains out, then you’ve got good loamy soil,” he was told. “But if you have water in that hole, the soil isn’t great for growing pecans.”
The following day, the water had drained. Next, Sanders determined the quality of the soil.
“Professor Jeff Wilson from Mississippi State, who’s a state master gardener, came down to look over the land and said, ‘I’m going to tell you, Mr. Sanders, from looking at the numbers, it’s going to be hard for you to grow pecans. You don’t have an irrigation system.’ The trees had been nutrient-deprived, and the irrigation system had been damaged beyond repair.”
A soil analysis showed the soil was depleted of lime.
“The professor said I needed to put down three tons of lime per acre,” said Sanders. “I said, ‘what?!’ So, he suggested we start off slowly, with a ton of lime a year per acre. That cost about $700. He also said I needed a pH level of about 6.0 to 6.5. I reached that goal a couple of years ago.”
Sanders trimmed limbs in the pecan trees to allow 50 percent sunlight at the top and at the bottom “to open up the canopy so the trees can breathe and grow,” he said, and trimmed limbs at the bottom to allow farm equipment to move freely underneath.
“I pruned six trailer loads of branches,” he said. “I’d have five and six pecan trees coming out of one shoot, and I had to determine which one was the straightest. And that would be the tree I worked on. I cut all the rest of them off.
“But I was wearing myself out. I met this young fellow who had a skid steer and a hatchet on the front of his little bobcat. In about three hours, he’d taken care of four rows of pecan trees. I’d been out there for a whole month, barely taking care of one row. So, I let him finish the job.”
Next, Sanders needed leaf samples from three different areas to determine exactly which nutrients the trees needed to produce pecans.
“I’ve used fungicides, insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides,” he rattled off. “I put down 4,000 pounds of nitrogen, and ant killer so those fire ants wouldn’t multiply. It was a lot of hard work. Now friends tell me it looks like a golf course.”
Finally, during the harvest season of mid-October to December 2016, the trees produced a harvest: three bad pecans. “I opened up the nut and it was all dried out,” he lamented. His second harvest: 50 pecans.
Then he had his greatest harvest: 2,000 pounds of pecans, in varieties from the popular Desirables to the early harvest Pawnees. The Elliot variety has a paper-thin shell with great flavor. All pecans are packaged under Lindy’s Pecans, named after his wife, Linda.
“Linda’s a seamstress and this (spring) is her busy season,” said Sanders. “When she has time, she’ll come help me pick up limbs and pecans.”
Now, he’s getting calls from pecan orchard owners who want to hire him to make their pecan trees productive. “One lady wanted me to take over 3,000 pecan trees on 120 acres. I’m going on 72 years old, and I’m hanging it up in two years. I said no, but I thanked her for trusting me.”
Sanders was part of the movement of improving pecan orchards across the state. Since 2018, Mississippi’s pecan acreage has doubled to 823 improved pecan orchards, making it the nation’s eighth largest pecan grower of 15 pecan-producing states.
Pecan theft has emerged as a major challenge, usually on properties where the farmer doesn’t live onsite. Sanders lives five miles from his pecan tree orchard. ln 2023, as a four-year board member of the Mississippi Pecan Growers Association, he supported Senate Bill 2523 that state lawmakers passed to increase penalties associated with pecan theft.
“If you get caught stealing somebody’s pecans, you can get fined $100,” said Sanders. “And the fine can go up and could possibly mean jail time.”
Sanders is an advocate for Genuine MS, Mississippi’s agricultural branding program. “I put the Genuine Mississippi seal on all my pecans,” he said.
Sanders has yet to put in an irrigation system. “To do it the right way, you’ve got to run electricity and water, and you’ve got to have pumps. The well probably needs to be serviced. You’re looking at about $100,000,” he said.
Because of an absence of an irrigation system, recent drought conditions have minimized pecan production.
“I don’t do mass shipping. I don’t have a storefront. I sell Lindy’s Pecans at gas stations and farmer’s markets,” said Sanders. “Nothing national. Yet.”
Sanders marvels at his fortune.
“I was an accidental pecan farmer,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without Lindy by my side.”