How This Pecan Grower Became a Soil Health Disciple
February 20, 2024 
Troy Swift’s pecan trees at his farm in Lockhart, TX, have never looked better now that he has transitioned from conventional farming to regenerative agriculture. Photo by Kyriaki Karalis
One of the more intriguing — and somewhat ironic — stories of regenerative agriculture took flight in 1998, when an aerospace employee in central Texas decided to buy a pecan farm. At the time, Troy Swift knew little about growing pecans, let alone regenerative agriculture, the production philosophy that nurtures and restores soil health. His focus was on managing up to 600 workers at CFAN, a San Marcos-based manufacturer of fan blades and airfoils for jet engine companies.
“We built stage one fan blades for big GE engines like the GE90 that goes on the Boeing 777,” Swift says. “When you build stage one fan blades for large jet engines, and you’re the only factory in the world that builds them, that’s a world-class factory. I became the boss of the manufacturing side there.”
Swift would remain with CFAN until his retirement in 2016. Meanwhile, the 66 acres along the San Marcos River that he had purchased in 1998 were evolving into a mix of preexisting native pecan trees — some up to 300 years old — and newly planted, improved varieties.
“I did not buy it to get into pecan farming. I bought it to live on the river because I was a canoer and a kayaker,” Swift says. “Nonetheless, as you come across things you don’t expect to do, that farm did have pecan trees and an old orchard on it. So I decided I had to learn how to be pecan farmer.”
Being a farmer is one thing. Being a successful one is another. In this case, good things finally started to happen at Swift River Pecans in Lockhart, TX, when its owner with all the aerospace experience turned his attention to the soil beneath him.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE TREES?
As a first-generation grower with no agricultural experience, Swift farmed conventionally, per instruction, from the get-go in 1998.
“I’m doing what I was taught to do, and I got trees that are performing badly, and they’re going downhill. In fact, some of them died,” Swift says. “I said to myself, ‘Well, I can’t keep doing this.’”
In 2020, Swift finally called the scientists he knew and asked them to examine the trees on his farm. “Are they missing a micronutrient? Are they missing a macronutrient? What’s going on? Why are they dying?” Swift asked them.
Some of the experts finally said there must be something wrong with the soil or the rootstock. But they could not pinpoint the problem. In turn, Swift began studying soil science, which, he stresses, was not a part of regular agricultural training, “at least, not in mine.”
Eventually, Swift met Dennis Perz, a pecan grower and soil health advocate from nearby Georgetown, TX. Perz had worked for 32 years as an engineer at NASA and Dow Chemical.
“He’s older than me,” Swift, 65, says. “It was during COVID, and he didn’t want any visitors, but later on, thankfully, he called me and asked me to come visit him.”
As Swift drove onto the property, the setting struck him as odd. Perz’s orchard was not on a river. And his pecan trees, despite it being August in Texas, showed no signs of heat stress.
“Most of the time pecan trees grow on river bottoms and alluvial soils of some sort. He’s in an old cotton field out in the middle of the field, no river or creek around him,” Swift says. “I’m going, ‘Man, this is not the right place for an orchard.’”
Upon getting out of his car, Swift surveyed the landscape. “I looked at his trees, and I looked at the grass on the orchard floor, and before I ever met the man, I said, ‘There is something good going on here,’” Swift says. “The trees looked great, the ground looked great, everything looked great — in August. My trees were scorching, which is a (bacterial) leaf disorder that causes trees to defoliate and die.”
Perz, meanwhile, greets Swift with a flipchart in hand. “He’s ready to give me a presentation in his barn, and he did,” Swift says. “He told me all these things.”
Flash forward to July of 2023, and, despite drought conditions, Swift looks at the same trees that had been dying three years earlier, and “they’re beautiful green,” he says. “They’ve got a crop on them, the scorch is gone, and it’s because I took what [Perz] said, studied as hard as I could, and went into this regenerative agriculture mentality.”
BRINGING BACK THE BIOLOGY
Based on Perz’s advice, conventional growing — “putting out a lot of NPK, a lot of nitrogen, a lot of chemicals,” Swift says — no longer flies at Swift River Pecans.
“We used to put herbicide on the orchard floor because the teaching was that the other plants are competing for the water and the nutrients,” Swift says. “Well, we don’t use herbicides anymore. The whole orchard floor right now is as tall as grass can be in Texas right now, and it’s beautiful. It’s shaded. It’s cool. The dirt is probably 10 or 15 degrees cooler than it used to be.”
Swift applies organic matter, in his case wood chips that are placed in a manure spreader and spread over the orchard floor. “We’re not using it as a mulch; we’re not covering up the grass. We’re just thinly putting it out,” he says.
He builds Johnson-Su Bioreactor compost makers that create fungal-dominated compost that can be dissolved and put in a sprayer and applied to the orchard floor as “liquid biology,” according to Swift.
“You set up a really good biological system that the trees have been missing,” Swift says. “That’s why my trees were dying, in my opinion. They had run out of biology and were living on vitamins only, and they couldn’t live that way. Now that we’ve re-established the soil life, and continue to do so, we’re putting the biology back. Me and several of the other farmers in this area are on this program, and all our trees are looking a lot better, even under severe weather conditions.”
Best of all, the positive effects of regenerative ag can be immediate. For example, the money saved by no longer mowing — including labor, diesel, and mower maintenance — is “incredible,” Swift says.
“You’ll hear, ‘Well, you can’t change it very quick. It takes a lifetime to change it. No, it doesn’t,” Swift says. “It might take a lifetime to get it back to the way it was a hundred years ago, but you can make significant changes. I’m telling you I’m looking at the results right now, and I’m happy with it.”
Learn more from Troy Swift as he is a featured speaker at the 2024 BioSolutions Conference & Expo.
Subscribe Today For
