Why I Am Not Going To Mow My Orchards Until June

I was bouncing slowly along on the tractor beneath sun dappled shade on a May morning, killing weeds in a narrow strip along the base of pecan trees that marched in succession across the land. A brown flurry of movement to my right revealed a turkey hen leaping up from the shaggy mix of herbage growing between the tree rows. She didn’t run away, but lingered a few feet outside the reach of the mechanical beast upon which I was perched. This has happened before. When it does, I stop and scan the area from my tractor seat, in search of that subtle depression in the grassy weeds upon which speckled turkey eggs may be found. Suddenly, to my great pleasure, four tortoise shell-patterned turkey poults darted from beneath and between the vegetation, falling in line behind the hen.

This is a common scene each spring. A joyful surprise that brightens my day and makes the workload seem lighter. Sometimes its turkeys. Just as often its bobwhite quail. Other times, rabbits. Occasionally it’s a deer fawn, which if really young, will just lie there waiting on its mother. When these encounters happen, I am filled with as much satisfaction as I find in my trees bearing a heavy nut crop. These are the signposts by which the land communicates back to me that I am doing this right. That the land is healthy.

               This time of year my orchard looks a lot different than most. In my travels, I see a lot of orchards that would make an industrialist proud. But mine is not one of them. Such orchards are perfectly groomed with close-cut grass between the tree rows. A picture of man’s mastery over nature. This tendency to keep an orchard neatly manicured throughout the entire year is, to a large extent, a result of the Western mind’s proclivity for neatness and order coupled with the desire for industrial efficiency.

               No one pays pecan farmers to pattern the orderliness of their orchards after the greens and fairways of Augusta National Golf Course. Neither does uniformity bordering on the machine precision of a Tesla manufacturing plant produce more pecans. The common justifications for this obsession with frequent mowing include the following:  “all the tall grass and weeds foul up my sprayer.” You see, to spray a large pecan tree, you need an air-blast sprayer, which has a large fan on the back to blow the material up into the canopy of the trees. The fan’s suction can suck grassy material up against the fan’s screen. My trees are sprayed too and I’ve never had a problem with it. “The grass seeds clog the tractor or sprayer’s radiator.” But, that’s why you wash out the radiator every day or even a couple times a day, depending on how much ground you cover.

Or they may say, “we can’t get through the orchard to work on the irrigation”. Pecan trees generally use drip or microsprinkler irrigation and when you first get it going in the spring, you have to go tree to tree doing a lot of repairing and unclogging. If it is ease of access that is the primary desire, one could just mow a path down the side of each row, leaving a healthy strip of lush undergrowth in the center of the alley. Truth be told, these are just excuses for giving in to that age-old human desire to simply exert control.

I am not advocating for slovenliness or neglect. There is a method to my madness. One focused on natural order rather than industrial order. It may not be superficially pleasing to the eye, especially to one focused on symmetry and neatness, but I do not mow my orchards until June arrives. For one thing, mowing is expensive and reducing one’s mowing saves a lot of money, fuel, and wear & tear on the equipment. But, there is more to it than that.

I plant crimson clover between the tree rows of all my orchards. Usually, I do this once, 7-10 months after planting the trees. With delayed mowing, the clover re-seeds itself and comes back on its own year after year. During years in which winter and spring bring good rainfall, April finds the orchard floor red with a thick blanket of blooming clover and the buzzing of bees. As a legume, the clover and its symbiotic bacteria fix nitrogen from the air that is then stored in the plant’s roots and tissues, which eventually decompose, increasing the soil’s organic matter and releasing the nitrogen slowly for use by the trees.

The seed is further dispersed with the annual mowing and soon clover creeps out of the bounds of the orchard into the field edges and roadside. To varying degrees, the clover competes with the wild Italian ryegrass (to which I am puffy-eyed and hive inducingly allergic), wild radish, purple vetch, and white vetch, among other plants, that move into the orchards on the wind and carve out their niche in the scheme of things. In the past I attempted to try to keep down the clover’s competition, but I soon realized this was a fool’s errand, and that these plants have their merit too.

I sell pecans but I am growing more here than pecans. The decisions I make about how this land is managed matter to the life that exists here. The trees, the birds, the understory of the nearby woods, the creek that flows through it, the pollinators that propagate its bounty, all the little critters that walk, run, creep, or crawl upon it, affect this place and my neighbor’s place. This land belongs to me on paper but it belongs to all those other things in the actual living. The goal here for healthy land, is diversity. There’s a common narrative that you have to sacrifice biological diversity in a landscape for agricultural production. But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

In 2019 scientists at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology reported that since 1970, bird populations in North America have declined by 2.9 billion birds, or 29% of the total bird population. That is a staggering figure. Such figures are often translated into economic terms to show the economic impact of biodiversity loss. This is often done in a desperate attempt by scientists to curry the favor of decision makers with an appeal to the only thing that seems to matter to most of them—money. I don’t know what the loss of 29% of North America’s bird population translates into in economic terms. I don’t care about that. At all. What I do care about is that many of these birds, even the ones that we consider common, play important roles in the healthy functioning of the planet we live on (seed dispersal, pollination, insect population control, etc). What I do care about is that the lives we live on this planet are significantly impoverished without them. I don’t need a dollar figure to tell me that.

By a large margin, grassland birds took the biggest hit (74% loss) in the 50 year population decline, driven primarily by loss of habitat. Another study showed that 74% of North American bird species associated with farmland decreased during the period 1966 to 2013. These include aerial insectivores, grassland, and shrubland birds. Orchards are essentially a grassland or prairie with trees scattered about. Ground dwelling birds like turkey and quail, as well as grassland birds like the Eastern meadowlark and blue grosbeak, just to name a couple, need the type of landscape I am encouraging here. To raise their young, these birds need a blend of open ground for movement, lush low-growing vegetation for cover and insect-rich foraging, and access to nesting areas. The orchard and its edges provide all of this when managed accordingly.

The good news is that population declines in wildlife like those we see in birds can be reversed. I am convinced that the ways in which we manage farmlands and their associated woodlands are a key component of righting such wrongs. The thing that makes the most difference on my farm is to delay the mowing. Let the grasses and clover and vetch grow just a little longer. This is why I do not mow my orchards until June. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. As a matter of fact, it takes less effort, less money, to just leave it —the dried clover and wild radish stalks, the long stems of Italian ryegrass—for the birds to have a little cover for a time. In June, I’ll give the orchards a mowing when most of the year’s young are a little larger, a little more mobile. I’ll give the orchards another cut in July and another in August. In between each, the grass will grow tall again. Insects will come to feed on the grass. Birds will come to feed on the insects. None of this will impact my pecans in a negative way. Not until the harvest approaches, will I try to maintain the orchard floor with a close cut. By that time the year’s young will be old enough to make it on their own. It’s not much, but it’s having a positive effect and its easy.

The latest tally shows that the United States has 876 million acres of farmland. That’s approximately 39% of the entire U.S. land acreage. Think for a moment about what it would do for the health and beauty of the land, for the richness of life that lives upon it, if every farmer made some small, benign change to their farmland management. This could come in the form of delayed mowing. It could also take the shape of monitoring soil moisture for irrigation decisions, planting a new pest-resistant crop variety, leaving a little more room for wild things along the field edges. It may be found in deciding not to clear that wooded finger of land just for a few more acres of sub-standard soil to cultivate. One could leave eroded, sloped land in grass, plant a strip of wildflowers along the field edge for pollinators, etc. These are just a few of the decisions that will determine what the health and beauty of the natural landscape of our country will be like in the next 10, 25, or 50 years. It’s not placing some arbitrary economic value on ecosystem services, it’s not carbon credits that will make the difference. It’s what we choose to do with the land we can control that will determine how rich our national landscape will truly be. Nature is resilient. She just needs a chance and a willingness on our part to stop saying “more, more, more”.  

What looks good from the roadside in the form of manufactured sterility is not always best for the life of the land. To the human eye, mother nature is often very messy, herself. She’s complicated, terrible, and lovely all at the same time. I like the look of a neatly mown orchard as much as anyone but I am willing to sacrifice what others perceive the appearance of my orchards to say about me for the health of the land. It is that health through which I take a quiet satisfaction.  One day, I will be gone. What people said about the tall, brown grass and weeds and clover stems growing brushy and matted in my orchards won’t matter. But, having helped the land to be healthy, making a place for all the little live things that keep the world running, that add beauty and joy and wonder to life, will.

Caring for land is never cheap. When I think about it, a large part of the reason I grow pecans is to be able to afford to care for the land and to be out here on it. As a farmer, of course I value producing a good crop of pecans and keeping my trees healthy. But before I was a farmer, I grew to love wild and natural things. I also value the presence of turkey and quail poults, blue grosbeaks, the buzzing sound of honeybees upon the clover and the wildflowers, the colorful wings of butterflies, the sound of cuckoos, chuck-will’s-widows, ospreys and red-tailed hawks, the creek running clear and full of life, great crested flycatchers, eastern kingbirds, summer tanagers, white eyed vireos, palm warblers, and eastern bluebirds. I want my orchards and the land to be full of life. This is why I am not going to mow my orchards until June.