What does it mean to be a Sustainably Grown Pecan Farm?
At King Springs Pecans, LLC, we think “Sustainably Grown” is a modern understanding of what we call Stewardship - protecting the land and the animals and folks on it for the future, as if we will have to give an account for what we have done. The farm is an environmental operating system that produces healthy food for people but also requires us to put back more into the land and our employees and community than we take from it to grow food. In this way we are totally different from “extraction or industrial farming” where the land is depleted and communities are weakened in order to grow food.
The SCS Global Services certification process is a very high standard and looks at all facets of our farm operation. A few of the main areas we are certified on are:
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How we have improved the soil health on our farm including soil regeneration, erosion protection, soil nutrition, cover cropping, humus layer soil development and mulching to strengthen our soil.
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How we are treating our employees and their families and making a path for them to be successful in their lives through fair pay, benefits and employment opportunities. How we are involved in our farm community and the surrounding communities.
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How are we caring for our main crop, 26,000 pecan trees on our farms. There are a broad range of criteria that are measured that range from efficient water use to weekly “scouting” of the trees to insure tree health and vitality. How are we protecting our farm’s ecological habitat that is home to dozens of different species of fauna and flora on this unique and beautiful piece of land.
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How we are evaluating and adopting new agricultural practices and technology to improve the farm systems. Paradoxically, some of the “new” agricultural practices we have evaluated and adopted are centuries old and had just been ignored for several generations of industrial farming.
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SCS Global Services (SCS) has been providing global leadership in third-part quality, environmental and sustainability verification, certification, auditing, testing, and standards development for almost four decades. Its programs span a cross-section of industries, recognizing achievements in green building, product manufacturing, food and agriculture, forestry, power generation, retail, and more. SCS is accredited to provide services under a wide range of nationally and internationally recognized certification programs. Consistent with its mission, SCS is a chartered benefit corporation, reflecting its commitment to socially and environmentally responsible business practices.
“What is most conspicuously absent from the industrial economy and industrial culture is this idea of return. Industrial humans relate themselves to the world and its creatures by fairly direct acts of violence. Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give nothing in return. Our economy’s most voluminous product is waste - valuable materials irrecoverably misplaced or randomly discharged as poisons.
To perceive the world and our life in it as gifts originating in sanctity is to see our human economy as a continuing moral crisis. Our life of need and work forces us inescapably to use in time things belonging to eternity, and to assign finite values to things already recognized as infinitely valuable. This is a fearful predicament. It calls for prudence, humility, good work, propriety of scale. It calls for the complex responsibilities of caretaking and giving-back that we mean by ‘stewardship.’ To all of this the idea of the immeasurable value of the resource is central. ”