08/29/2026
🧡 BEHIND THE BAG: What Does It Actually Take to Crack Pecans? 🐿️
When you pick up a bag of Miller Pecan Farms pecans, there’s a whole lot more behind it than simply picking pecans up and running them through a cracker.
It all starts with Mother Nature! 🌳 ❄️
We have to wait for a good, hard freeze before the pecans are ready to fall from the trees. Once they hit the ground, that’s when the real work begins.
🚜 First, we harvest them.
We take our pecan harvester through the orchard and pick the pecans up off the ground.
🪨 Then, we clean them.
Freshly harvested pecans don’t come in nice and clean! They come in with sticks, rocks, dirt clods and plenty of other things we definitely don’t want in the bag. We run them through our cleaning process and sort all of that out.
📏 Next, they’re sized.
The cleaned pecans go through our sizer, which separates them by size. We select the larger sizes that we want to use for cracking.
💦 But they still aren’t ready for the cracker!
Before cracking, those pecans have to be washed and then dried.
🪣 Then come the buckets.
Once they’re clean and dry, we load them into big buckets and carry them into the cracking room.
Now we can finally crack them!
But cracking them still isn’t the end.
Once the pecans come through the cracker, we sit at the line and carefully pick through them, removing any bad pecans and any that didn’t crack properly.
From there, they can go a few different directions.
Some are bagged and sold cracked.
Some are collected and shaken to remove more of the shell and sold as our cracked-and-shaken pecans.
And some keep going through even more hands as we pick through them and separate out those beautiful pecan halves. Those halves can then be sold as-is or used to make some of the candy and treats you find in our store.
So the next time you see a bag of pecans sitting on our shelf, remember; that little bag has traveled from the tree, to the ground, through the harvester, cleaner, sizer, wash, drying process, cracking room and sorting line before it ever made its way to you.
There are a lot of hands, a lot of equipment and a whole lot of work behind every bag.
That’s just part of pecan season at Miller Pecan Farms. 🙂 Stop by and see the process!
