Which state has the most acres of pecan trees grown from a nut?
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USDA keeps pecan trees on two separate lines. Improved pecans are grafted — a piece of a chosen tree joined onto another tree’s roots, so the nuts come out the same every time. Native & seedling pecans are the other kind: trees that grew from a nut. That is the only difference USDA is recording here — not whether anybody planted the tree. A nut a person pushed into the ground counts on this line too. This quiz measures the acres of that second kind that are old enough to bear. USDA printed a figure for 12 states in the 2022 Census of Agriculture; two more are hidden behind the withheld mark, and the remaining 36 states have no line here at all. Put these three in order, most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→3 in order
Pecan pie. Pecans. Georgia. Everyone knows this one. I am putting Georgia first and I would like my prize now, please. 🐾
Answer
The real order is…
Oklahoma — 82,287 acres, about 1.71× second-place Texas, and more than half of the 149,666 acres counted in the whole country. Here is the strange part. Georgia has no line in this table at all. In the very same 2022 census, Georgia has the country’s largest area of grafted pecan trees — 144,482 bearing acres, about 1.8× Oklahoma’s entire grown-from-a-nut figure. New Mexico and Arizona come third and fourth in grafted acres, behind Texas. Not one of those three — Georgia, New Mexico, Arizona — has a line in this one. And inside Oklahoma the balance tips the other way round: 15,534 acres of grafted pecans against 82,287 acres of trees that nobody grafted — more than five times as much of the ungrafted kind as of the grafted kind. Then the honest complication, and it comes from Oklahoma State University’s own 2020 fact sheet on the state’s pecans: by weight, it reports, Oklahoma is “usually second for native pecan production.” Both things are true, because they are different questions. Oklahoma has the most land under ungrafted pecan trees; the fact sheet explains why the harvest does not follow — “much of the crop is not harvested consistently. This is because many of the native groves are unmanaged, and pecans are only harvested if the prices are high and the yield makes harvesting profitable.” A forest is not an orchard. Biscuit’s Field Note is about who actually planted these trees, which is the best part of the whole story.
📚 Background USDA’s two pecan lines separate grafted trees from trees grown from a nut. They do not separate planted trees from unplanted ones — a nut somebody pushed into the ground grows into a seedling too, and Oklahoma State University’s extension fact sheet on the state’s pecans notes that “many tribes probably planted and tended pecan groves.” What that same fact sheet explains is something else: why so many pecan trees were left standing on land that people were busy using for other things. They were useless for everything else anyone wanted that land for. Cotton could not use the low ground by the water — “Even when cotton was planted widely across the southern U.S., pecans were left along riverbanks, which often flooded and were not good cotton-growing areas. By 1925, the pecan’s ability to withstand flooding was appreciated by farmers in Oklahoma.” The timber trade did not want them either: when Texas forests were being cut, “pine trees were the trees harvested and pecan trees were left in place, since the pecan wood is inferior to other woods for most uses and takes too long to dry.” And the people living among them treated the groves as a harvest rather than a crop — “Settlers in the native pecan regions of what is now the U.S. would harvest the nuts and even thin native pecan groves to leave the trees with the best crops, but made no attempt to farm them.” The same fact sheet adds one more thing, and it is a warning about the table below: by weight, it reports, Oklahoma is “usually second for native pecan production.” Land and pounds are two different questions. This quiz asks only the first one. (Oklahoma State University Extension, fact sheet HLA-6261, “Plants in the Classroom: The Story of Oklahoma Pecans” by Shelley Mitchell (published September 2020), sections “Pecans and Native Americans”, “Pecans (Finally) Get Appreciated Outside Their Native Range” and “Oklahoma’s Pecan Industry”. Quotations unchanged) (opens in a new tab)
🔍 Explore more: 🐿️『Who plants a pecan tree?』→ Pecan pie. Pecans. Georgia. Everyone knows this one. I am putting Georgia first and I would like my prize now, please. 🐾
Compare
Bearing native & seedling pecan trees (acres, 2022)
Most: Oklahoma (82,287 acres). Only 12 states have a printed figure here, and the national total is 149,666 acres — one state holds more than half of it.
Note: acres of native & seedling (non-grafted) pecan trees old enough to bear, in 2022, from USDA’s five-yearly Census of Agriculture. Grafted “improved” pecans are a separate USDA line and are not counted here. This line counts land, not pounds of nuts. The United States bar is USDA’s own national figure. USDA NASS. USDA printed a native & seedling pecan acreage for 12 states. Two — Iowa and Ohio — carry the withheld mark (D), which USDA uses when printing a state’s number would give away information about individual farms. The other 36 states have no line in this table at all, among them Georgia, New Mexico, Arizona and Florida. Everything USDA did not print for a state adds up to 25 acres, less than every figure printed here, so all 12 places in this ranking are national places. A state with no line is not the same as a state with no pecan trees. This site re-runs those checks on every build.
Half the country’s ungrafted pecan land, in one state 🐾
Recap
🏅 Today's discovery
🏅 Oklahoma is the USA's #1!
🐕 States in Numbers
Quiz a friend!
📋 See the ranking table (top 12)
| Rank | State | Value | Share of U.S. total |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Oklahoma | 82,287 acres | 55% |
| #2 | Texas | 47,999 acres | 32.1% |
| #3 | Missouri | 5,129 acres | 3.4% |
| #4 | Arkansas | 3,739 acres | 2.5% |
| #5 | Louisiana | 3,361 acres | 2.2% |
| #6 | Alabama | 2,586 acres | 1.7% |
| #7 | Kansas | 2,469 acres | 1.6% |
| #8 | Mississippi | 1,613 acres | 1.1% |
| #9 | Kentucky | 140 acres | 0.1% |
| #10 | Illinois | 121 acres | 0.1% |
| #10 | Indiana | 121 acres | 0.1% |
| #12 | Tennessee | 76 acres | 0.1% |
| 🇺🇸 USA (total) | 149,666 acres | 100% |
USDA printed a native & seedling pecan acreage for 12 states. Two — Iowa and Ohio — carry the withheld mark (D), which USDA uses when printing a state’s number would give away information about individual farms. The other 36 states have no line in this table at all, among them Georgia, New Mexico, Arizona and Florida. Everything USDA did not print for a state adds up to 25 acres, less than every figure printed here, so all 12 places in this ranking are national places. A state with no line is not the same as a state with no pecan trees. This site re-runs those checks on every build.
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2022)
Sources
Data as of: 2022
USDA NASS Quick Stats: PECANS, NATIVE & SEEDLING - ACRES BEARING, 2022 Census of Agriculture, by state (opens in a new tab) (2026-09-09) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). USDA printed a native & seedling pecan acreage for 12 states. Two more — Iowa and Ohio — carry the withheld mark (D), which USDA uses when printing a state’s number would give away information about individual farms. The other 36 states have no line in this table at all, among them Georgia, New Mexico and Arizona — three of the four states with the most grafted (“improved”) pecan acres in the country. Everything USDA did not print for a state adds up to 25 acres, less than every figure printed here, so all 12 places in this ranking are national places. A state with no line is not the same as a state with no pecan trees. This site re-runs those checks on every build.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick CENSUS / Census of Agriculture, year 2022, commodity PECANS, short description PECANS, NATIVE & SEEDLING - ACRES BEARING, Total domain, and compare states.