Kootingal Pecan farm

Follow the process from the tree to the shelf with the Kootingal Pecan Company's Mark Banning-Taylor.

Transcript

00:00It's about a six-month growing cycle to produce these nuts.

00:06The trees come back into leaf in October and we harvest around May.

00:11When we pick them up, we then run them over the belt to sort and bring out any cracked,

00:18broken ones, you know, material that shouldn't be in there.

00:23And then we basically drop them into these cages and then we take them outside.

00:27And they stay in the barn with the very dry, you know, this area, it's like being in Texas.

00:34It's a very dry, cooling wind that runs over these pecans for about eight weeks.

00:41And we get down to a moisture level of less than four percent, and then we bring them

00:46into here, back into the shed, and we reload them on the belt and we re-inspect and take

00:53out the last of the, hopefully the last of the cracked ones and anything else that's

00:57damaged.

00:58Run up through the elevator and then we go into the cracker, which is like a Gatling

01:04gun.

01:05It does 400 nuts per minute.

01:07And then those nuts run down, once they're cracked and the kernels are there, they then

01:11run down into a sheller, which then separates the shell from the pecans, so we end up with

01:19the halves.

01:20The process is to then put them through the colour sorter.

01:23That machine will run at a tonne an hour, we don't get close to that, but we run them

01:28through the colour sorter three times, looking, you know, we start off running in the front

01:34bin and then we move to the back bin and then we move back to the front bin and then final

01:38sort is on the back bin.

01:41And then we put them through an aerator, which just blows off the last of the dust.

01:46And then we'll run them one more time through the colour sorter.

01:48And once we've done that, we've pretty much got something which we then hand pick.

01:55And last year we were hand picking, we were literally cascading the nuts onto a stainless

01:59steel bench and picking out the last of the shell.

02:02We've now upgraded it and we have a food grade belt and we run everything down there.

02:08And then we vacuum pack into 3kg bags and straight into the fridge.

02:16And then from there, we're either selling into the hospitality industry or we're then

02:24adding value to those pecans.

02:26So they may be dry roasted, they may be activated, they may be after they're dry roasted, then

02:32smoked using wood chip from the pecan trees.

02:35And then we're adding various flavours to them like chilli or chipotle.

02:39We're making our own butters, we're making, as you saw before, we're making our own oil

02:43here and some paste and pecan flour and pecan meal.