MADE in Downstate Illinois

Voss Pecans

CARLYLE

This story starts with a young boy from Clinton County who loved to be outside on his family farm, collecting pecans and keeping a few at a time in his pockets.

“As a kid I loved pecans,” admits Ralph Voss. “I loved picking them up, cracking them and eating them. That’s why with our property when we cleaned up the trees that we wouldn’t farm, I left the pecan trees. They were just a passion, I worked with pecan trees in the groves, cleaning the groves in hundred-degree and come home like it’s another day. When you enjoy something it’s easy to do.”

Decades later, Voss is still cracking those nuts – but on a much larger scale. Ralph and his wife Karen started Voss Pecans in 1985 with the native pecan trees they had on their land, and they are now the LARGEST producer of pecans in the entire state of Illinois.

“We were picking up native pecans by hand, but we had so many that we didn’t know what to do with them,” Ralph explains. “So, we found a cracker to crack them, we started selling pecans and our business grew from there. We now have about 160 acres of pecan trees ourselves, and I manage another 100 acres for another family.”

So how exactly do you harvest pecans? Voss says he had most of the equipment on hand from his row crop operation, but one of the most important things he had to buy was an attachment that is used to shake the nuts out of the tree.

“We shake the nuts to the ground, and then we have a mechanical harvester pulled with a small tractor that picks up a five-foot swath, and it’s like a mini combine. It scrapes through the grass and picks up everything, all of the pecans get conveyed into a hopper, and that hopper I dump into a wagon which comes to our farm which continues to go through a cleaning process to come up with a perfectly clean, intact pecan ready for sale as a full pecan or with further processing to sell as a cracked or made-out pecan.”

One thing is certain, the pecan industry is not a get rich quick scheme. Voss planted many of his trees in 1989, but they didn’t yield enough pecans for him to break even until 2002!

“When you lose money for 13 years, that’s a passion,” Voss admits. “When you lose money for that long and you’re still out there doing it – that’s why not a lot of people just jump into pecans because it takes a long time to make money. But if you’re patient, it is a moneymaking crop.”

Luckily, the pecans have gained enough of a following that the Voss family does indeed turn a profit on them. Not too shabby for a boy who once collected them in his pockets for fun. For more information on Voss Pecans, head to their website at vosspecans.com. There you can get more information about their hours of operation, and you can also place an online order if you’d like some pecans shipped to your house!