Texas Pecan Farmer: 'All the Trees are Dead or Dying'

It's a frigid 35 degrees in central Texas (that's cold for Texas), and I'm going to visit Harvey Hayek, a former pecan farmer in the small town of Ellinger.

I say "former" pecan farmer because his livelihood has been nearly wiped out due to sulfur dioxide pollution from the Fayette coal plant, only a couple miles away, which provides a third of the city of Austin's power.

We drive onto his orchards, and he's going to point out the dead and dying trees. "I don't even know where to begin, they're all dead, it's everywhere. Here, there, there, there...," he says. One after another, in rows, in piles, there are oaks, elms, willows, and, of course, pecan trees. All look like they will turn into dust at a single touch.

"They're saying that it's drought, but that doesn't make any sense. They have survived drought before, they're made to do that. It's not a water issue."  We walk to a pond and he shows me the willow trees around the water.  They have a constant source of water, they take directly from the pond, and yet, they too are disintegrating.

Further evidence that it couldn't be drought? All of the orchards were irrigated. He points out piles of rusted pipes. "Those piles of irrigation pipes, they would take days of work to install," he pauses, then reflects, "I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore."

Moss, like frogs in forests or mollusks in the sea or canaries in a coal mine, is an early indicator of trouble on the pecan orchard. And there is no moss here. There should be moss growing all over the trees, but there isn't any. None.

Hayek explains pecan farming cycles: There will be a good year, and two off years, and then it'll repeat. In good years, there would be a crop of 200,00 pounds of pecans. In off years, there might be 100,000.  This year, he's produced 8,000 pounds—and within the past several years, the crops has been close to zero. "This used to be our life, our whole life.  We used to come out about the second week of October until the end of February and pick pecans seven days a week. Now, we're lucky if we get a couple days in."

Just a few months ago, Hayek's father-in-law, Leonard Baca, the prior owner of the farm, took his own life.

"It's like your wife or kid is sick and dying. That's how my father-in-law felt about these trees. He saw death coming to these trees, and he couldn't understand what it was. I guess he decided to bow out of it."

The response from environmental regulators has been negligent. Letters written by Hayek yielded frosty responses from Rick Perry's TCEQ, stating that no study was needed, since they already had the appropriate data on the area. But there are no air monitors on Hayek's orchards (which are substantial). "The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality let us down. They were going to investigate, and they turned tail on us."

Hayek manages a sense of humor in light of his situation: "I'll bet you a steak dinner, that in four years, they'll all be dead. The ones that aren't dead already, they're sick and dying. So come back in a couple years, and I know a real good place we can have some barbeque."

The word has spread far and wide, and a rancher in Victoria, Texas, Charlie Faupel, has noticed similar problems with his pecan trees and filed a complaint with the TCEQ against the Coleto Creek coal plant in the vicinity. "I have noticed for over 20 years how the Coleto Creek power plant's sulfur dioxide has been damaging hundreds of the trees on our property — live oaks, white oaks and pecans."

So what's in store for Hayek's future, and the future of pecan farmers in central Texas? "We would like to put new trees, but I'm not going to plant them if they won't grow. You can't do young trees, even if the coal plant puts on scrubbers." He and other pecan farmers in the area are turning their sights elsewhere—namely, to the sun. "We're thinking about those solar fields. We're doin' some figurin'," he states.

"We've thought about selling everything to get away from the coal plant, but there are little kids who live around here. I hate to think what they're growing up with."

Please sign the petition asking the City of Austin to phase out the Fayette coal plant.  For the sake of honest farmers in central Texas, the pollution has got to end.

Please also visit the Texas Pecan Alliance for more information, and a full study by the Sierra Club's in-house scientist, Dr. Neil Carman.

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