- Okay, this is good.
I'm having a goggle up,
that tells me
that it's getting real.
(ambient music)
So this is my dad
and this is his front porch.
And what do you see from your front porch?
- 18 pecan trees.
- [Destin] And why are pecan trees
important to our family?
- Because that was a punishment
that I had after I got caught
hot roddin' my daddy's is '62 Ford
and he said, "Well, what are you want?
Do you want to be grounded or do you want a whippin'?"
I said, "I'd rather have the whippin'."
And he said,
"Let me think about it,
I'll get back with you in a couple of days."
So he went to work
and asked his friend at work,
what he should do...
- At NASA? - At NASA.
- And one of those guys says,
"You've been wanting some pecan trees, Fess.
I would put that boy in your blue truck,
take him down to South Georgia,
and I'd get some pecan seedlings,
bring them back
and I'd make that boy plant pecan trees in your yard."
It took me all summer to do it.
A five-foot pecan tree
has about a five-foot taproot.
So you got to dig a deep hole.
- [Destin] So the idea
was something that you wouldn't forget.
- Yes. And it worked.
Every day when I come out
and I see these pecan limbs laying on the ground
and you have to have a burn pile,
to burn them
That punishment goes on after 1967.
- [Destin] And Granddaddy's long-gone
and you're still getting punished
for hot roddin' the Ford.
- I am, there's a pecan tree right there.
(Destin chuckles)
- So, obviously pecan trees
have had a special place
in the heart of my family for a while,
because pecans are awesome.
- [Darryl] '96 was a good year for pecans here.
- A pecan from 1996, here we go.
(crunching)
It's a pecan.
Tastes like butter pecan ice cream.
- Second one is better
than the first one.
(both laughing)
- Pecans make everything better
from pies to cakes to breads to toppings.
Seriously, if you haven't tried it yet,
your favorite flavor ice cream is Buttered Pecan.
You just don't know it yet.
Yes, I grew up in the shade of those 18 trees
my dad planted as punishment
but I've never seen how a pecan farm
goes about shaking hundreds of pounds of pecans
out of these gigantic trees.
So when I got a call,
from a local farmer named Frank
saying he was gonna be shaking
some of his pecan trees on his 400 tree orchard.
It was only appropriate
that my dad should join me on this trip out
to the pecan farm.
- How's it going?
- [Frank] Hey, good.
- Nice to meet you. - Good meeting you.
- I wanna make sure I understand correctly.
You literally grab the tree
and shake it.
- Yes, exactly.
We grab the tree...
I'm gonna show you the shaker over here.
- [Destin] Okay, yeah.
- This is a Savage Shaker.
This arm slides out, you back up
and then squeeze the tree.
- [Destin] Oh, look at that.
So the tree goes...
- Right in between here
these rubber cushion.
- [Destin] Uh-huh.
So it doesn't damage the tree?
- It does not damage the tree.
You tighten up on a tree,
so it's real tight,
so it doesn't come loose.
And then when you engage the PTO
it violently shakes the tree
and the nuts come tumbling down.
- [Destin] Really?
Oh, my goodness. It's a lobe.
Is it offset just like the...
- [Frank] Yeah, just like the...
- [Destin] It looks like a motor on a cell phone.
So I'm seeing a rotating shaft,
just like a cell phone vibration motor.
- [Frank] okay.
- [Destin] But why does the chain go that way?
I don't understand what happens that way.
- Well, it goes down to where the gearbox
or the PTO is.
- [Destin] Okay. Oh, where's the PTO?
- Seeds comes in right down at the bottom here.
- [Destin] Oh, okay, so it's driven here.
It shakes there...
- Yeah, its driven down here shakes up here.
- [Destin] And this whole thing is mechanically coupled.
So this just shakes like that.
- Yes. - Okay. That makes sense.
- [Destin] I didn't know this,
but there are over 500 different varieties of pecans.
Frank grows two different varieties on his farm.
- This is a Pawnee.
Ripens usually the end of September,
1st week of October.
And this is a Kiowa,
and it ripens the first week of November, usually.
The Pawnee is richer; it's got more oil in it.
So it's a more buttery flavor.
The Kiowa is bigger,
so if you want to make a pie with big nuts on top,
this is the ones you want to put on top.
But if you want in the meat of the pie,
you want to put Pawnee because it's rich.
It's like the butter you put in the crust.
- Can try the buttery flavor?
- That's not the buttery flavor,
this is the buttery flavor.
- Okay, so this is a Kiowa.
- It's a drier...
- And this is the Pawnee. - Yes.
- Way higher qu...
Yeah, the quality is way better.
- It is.
- [Destin] Weird!
- Pecans are all so different.
I mean, every pecan.
So whether you have
Elias, or Schley
or Pawnee or Kiowas,
there's so many different varieties.
- [Destin] Can I eat that?
- Yeah. - it was really good.
- Yeah, of course!
(Destin chuckles)
- You grow up knowing something
and then you learn something
and you get an understanding.
So we're moving from knowledge to understanding
when it comes to pecans.
This is awesome.
So it was time to see this thing in action.
Frank opened the jaws of the shaker wide
so it would fit around the trunk of the tree.
He backs in and then tightened the jaws snug
around the tree so it won't hurt the bark of the tree
when he engages the shaker.
(shaker rattling)
(sticks and pecans falling all around)
- Oh, shoot! You were right.
(Laughing)
(shaker revving, leaves fluttering)
(LOUD MECHANICAL VIBRATION)
okay, that's amazing.
Did a lot come out?
- A lot of leaves came out.
I don't know about pecans
- [Destin] Well, one donked me right on the noggin man.
All right, so post-shake,
let's look at what we got.
So one left that hull,
I still got one in this one.
So like right at the base of the pecan,
where it goes into the hull, there's a connected point,
- Right.
- [Destin] Does that have to dry out
in order for this to work?
- The husk has to be open for them to fall out.
- [Destin] Okay.
- And this year they have not been acting as normal.
The husks have not opened on time.
I don't know why. they were ripe.
They just didn't open up.
And then I couldn't shake them.
Everything is about three weeks late.
- So dad's going to be the tripod on the tracker today.
We're going to use the high speed camera like this.
And the idea is maybe we can get up
in the tops of the trees
and wherever we need to get.
So I'm so excited about
a high-speed camera mounted on a tractor.
This was admittedly a redneck move,
but it worked like a charm.
It was super convenient.
What you're about to see is without a doubt,
one of the most chaotic
and complicated mechanical systems
I have ever seen,
I was astounded at the complexity.
(Sweet happy music by "A Shell In The Pit")
(Song name "Still Some Light Left")
- So this all about like mechanical vibration.
- It is mechanical vibration.
- So I have another question then.
- Sure.
- So it seems to me that if you were
to shake the tree in this axis,
it would behave differently
than if you were to turn 90 degrees
and shake in this axis.
- We have never done that.
Shaking them from different sides, not normally,
but that's an idea that might
give you a better results
if you took the time to go to every tree,
multiple directions.
- [Destin] But when you're going, you're just going,
you don't care about that.
- We want to get as many...
We want to get nuts on the ground
so I can harvest them.
And then we've got, usually have a crew standing by
to start processing it.
- [Destin] So what effect would shaking a tree
from two different angles actually have?
I wanted to see what would happen way up in the top
of the tree, so I locked in on a branch way far up there,
and then we vibrated it at 90 degrees out of phase,
in two different shakes down at the trunk.
Here, you can see the side by side motion
of what happens at the top.
It's pretty obvious here.
These two limbs are moving in a very similar pattern,
even though they're being shaken differently
down at the trunk.
This is fascinating.
And I'm pretty sure a PhD student could easily write a
thesis on simulating the complexity of a tree.
When modeled as a vibratory system.
One thing I feel pretty confident in saying though,
is that it's probably not worth doing
a second shake at 90 degrees,
as it's clear, almost no additional nuts end up
falling from the tree.
One thing that surprised me
is you can clearly see the weight being released
from the tree during shaking.
It's almost like you can see the limbs climb up
towards the sky as the burden is lifted
from the branches
and the nuts fall to the ground.
It's time to harvest.
So this is the Harvester. Huh?
- This is the harvester.
- Okay.
- See those round fingers.
- Oh yeah.
- Those sit down and they roll,
they're a street sweeper kind of thing.
And they sweep up the nuts.
Fingers throw the leaves,
throw the stuff up here.
They get on this belt
and they go out the back.
And the nuts will go into a hopper
and there's a big screw feed in here
that feeds them up into that hopper.
So the screw feed them up to the hopper.
- [Destin ] So, somehow the nuts end up here.
- Yeah, they will get...
they get dropped off into this,
see this,
- Oh the basket!
- In that basket.
And then there's a screw feed.
They come across it into here
and then they get scooped up.
- Farmers like Augers don't they?
So the first thing Frank seems
to do is pick up all the sticks in front of the harvester,
because it's my understanding
that the harvester can be affected negatively by sticks,
rolling up into these rubber fingers right here.
So the path has to be completely clear of sticks.
(Rad music with fun vocals)
(Waaaa...waaaaa...wa wa wa wa wa wa wa wa)
- Okay, what is this Frank?
What are we doing?
- We are taking nuts that we collected in the field
in this trailer that you saw as load into.
And we're moving them from there
into the hopper of this Southern Nut and Tree
pecan cleaner. And it cleans the debris, leaves, husks... off the nuts.
- [Destin] So Frank explained to me that
the nuts are shoveled into a bin
where they're fed onto a conveyor belt
that makes its way up and then drops them down
into a machine.
Inside this machine.
There are bigger rubber fingers,
which separate the leaves from the husk, from the nuts.
And then everything passes through a massive blast of air.
All the leaves in the bad nuts,
get blown up and out of the machine
into a big pile of baddies.
The bad nuts are lighter than the good nuts,
because they've already been cracked
and they've started to dry out.
The good ones dropped down onto another conveyor belt
where humans further identify
and separate out the bad ones.
They're looking for mold or nuts with cracks in them,
which means the inside could be compromised or holes.
What is this?
- A pecan weevil.
- So that's the enemy.
- That's the enemy.
He bores in the holes in the husk,
right into the husk right into here
and then he'll live in here as a little worm. -
[Destin] So you have to be very adamant about looking for those guys.
- You have to watch out for them.
- [Destin] So the final step is cracking the nut
and I've got to say,
this machine is AWESOME.
- So this is our cracker.
It's a Quantz Rotary Cracker.
Nuts go into this hopper.
They go up this belt into the machine
where...
- [Destin] Is it grabbing one nut at a time,
- One nut goes into this little stations on the belt,
- Really?
- And what happens is they'll get pushed off here.
And then there's a little wire
that pushes them over so that
they get kicked out.
So there's only one per stage...
- Oh it indexes, it's just a single, single at one time.
Okay.
- So then this pneumatic machine,
we run compressed air into the machine here.
- [Destin] Oh, so you have to finely tune this thing.
- So what happens is nut's get picked up.
They'll be held mechanically by a stainless steel cylinder
and it's stressed, is under pressure.
And then there is a pneumatic disc
that is propelled again...
When it's under pressure propelled against the end
that shatters the shell
and that shell is...
- [Destin] I figured something out.
So the reason you're using air pressure
is you can have constant force
instead of like a spring.
You....like displacement.
It's a function of displacement,
but with air pressure,
you get constant for force.
- And we can adjust for variety of sizes of nuts
because it just squeezes whatever size nut comes through.
So if you go to a Meyer's Cracker
down at the co-op those crackers
are set for a fixed space of cracking.
So if the net is this big,
and they've got a set for a nut this size,
it will still smash it down to this small.
And you will have a smashed half.
That's hardly worth...
- [Destin] This is force constant
instead of displacement constant.
- Right.
- [Destin] That's AMAZING.
Okay. I would have never thought about that.
Okay.
- So here's the outside of the machine.
You've seen the controls.
This is what the inside looks like.
I'm open it up here so you can see it.
- [Destin] Oh okay.
- And what happens is,
and you see all the debris,
the nuts gets picked up right here
- [Destin] No way,
can you run it like this?
- Yeah, we can.
- Okay. This is good.
I'm having a Goggle up that tells me that it's getting real.
Okay, goggle up, pecans crackin's about to happen,
here we go.
- Yeah, it happens really fast.
We'll run it for just a minute,
so you can see it...
- And then we're cutting out.
- Some of these stations work better than others.
We've had some problems and we do some major work with,
here we go, you ready?
- [Destin] I'm ready.
(MOTOR WHIRRING) BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG
WHAT!?
BANG-BANG-CRACK-BANG-POP-BANG-BANG
THAT'S AMAZING!
That's awesome. (Machine Stops)
Okay, and they come out here.
- The real product, comes out on this station
and discharge chute.
And this person sorts that material out,
looking for bad nuts
and nuts that haven't cracked.
This is overflow where the machine
is a bit out of tune.
And so stuff comes out the back that shouldn't
- Got it,
- And these are all cracked.
And then we take them from here
and move them manually to her station
where she does the final checks.
Got it.
(MACHINE WORKING LOUDLY)
Look at the controls... you can see when we're workin'
- Crack changes.
Stress. Feed is pretty constant,
Eject pretty constant and then Reset.
BANG BANG BANG
And here it keeps picking up the nuts
BANG BANG BANG
Picking them up
[Destin] And it's kicking them out...
If it's two on there,
[Frank] Yeah, there's a wire that pushes them out and it indexes properly.
BANG BANG BANG CLICK BANG
- [Destin] How are they going in there?
- It's just gravity. - Got it.
-Gravity just feeds them in to the bottom
- That's a finely tuned mechanical device.
Isn't it?
[Destin] So this is the final product here.
- Yes.
- [Destin] Okay.
And what is the normal quantity
that you sell these things in.
- Three pound bags for $20.
- [Destin] Okay.
So this isn't like an industrial operation.
- No, this is a mom and pop
small farm operation.
You're not making tons of money.
If the IRS ever comes and audits us,
they're gonna say,
"You're doing this for what?
(both chuckling)
- [Destin] So why don't you do it?
- You know,
because satisfaction is when you take
Pecans to people and they say,
"These are the best pecans, I've ever had."
That makes it worthwhile.
- This episode of Smarter Every Day
is sponsored by KiwiCo.
And if you've been following Smarter Every Day,
for any length of time, you know,
that I originally reached out to KiwiCo
because we love their products.
When this little girl was a whole lot younger
than she is now.
In past episodes on Smarter Every Day,
I've told you about like the Tinker Crate
and the Doodle Crate and all these
other lines that KiwiCO has.
But today we finally have access to the Eureka crate
and the Maker crate.
The Eureka crate has to do with engineering
and design and the Maker crate
is all about art and design.
These are awesome.
And they're geared more towards older kids.
- I want to try this bottom one, macrame planters.
- So here's the deal.
If you want to support Smarter Every Day,
you can do so by getting a really cool kit
delivered to your house for your kid.
And I have a new promo code this time
because I wanted to
include the Eureka crate
and the Maker crate in the deal.
They're a little bit bigger.
They're a little bit more complicated.
You can see you actually get tools with them.
So if you would go to KiwiCo.com/smarter50.
that gets you 50% off your first crate.
You get to pick whatever you want.
And I really wanted the Eureka crate
and the maker crate to be a part of this.
So this is macrame.
Did you know how to do that?
- I do now.
- If you have younger kids,
by all means that Tinker crate is my favorite,
but there's also like the Atlas crate,
the Doodle crate.
There's all different things you can choose from.
And it's tailored specifically for your kid,
wherever they're at in life.
Anyway, big thanks to you
for supporting sponsor because when you do
that and that supports Smarter Every Day
and lets me make videos about things like pecans
things I find interesting.
So KiwiCo.com/SMARTER50,
get a gift for someone you love... or yourself.
- So you're putting two pecans
in your hand.
- And just crack them,
- [Destin] Crack them together.
You make them do the work.
- Yeah. You have to have two.
- All right.
So we need to talk about something, Frank.
- Yes.
- You're saying PEE-KAHN
and it's everybody knows it's PUH-KAHN
or PEE-CAN
- You know, I've heard is pronounced three different
ways in the two counties.
Yeah. PEE-CAN, P'-KAHN
P-CAN you hear 'em all.
- Okay so I'm going to bow to your authority.
It's P'-KAHN in my mind,
but I don't own a pecan shaker.
- P'-KAHN is fine.
- I'm okay. Good.
Okay. I'm okay.
We're okay. Dad,
- When we shake them,
I don't want to leave them nuts on the ground.
Cause they'll get moldy
- And squirrels.
- No...no... There's no squirrels here.
- Oh, you a good rifle shot?
[Silence from Frank]
[Destin Laughing, Frank's still quiet]
He doesn't say,
I bet, you're pretty good with a 22.
(Destin chuckles)
- We don't want to leave nuts on the ground.
- Okay.