ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — Like all nut crops, pistachios are an annual; you get one shot at it a year, said Marianne Schweers, owner along with her husband, George, of Eagle Ranch Pistachio Groves in Alamogordo.

“Our harvest month is September, so we’ve just finished,” Schweers said. “This year was not a good year.”

The trees pollinate in April. There was a frost this April for the first time in the 31 years the ranch has been producing pistachios. “Otherwise, pistachios grow very well in the desert,” Schweers said. “We can’t complain (about the frost) – that’s farming. Every once in awhile, that’s going to happen.”

Eagle Ranch Pistachio Groves consists of about 12,000, or 85 acres of, trees. Iran is the top producer of pistachios worldwide, while California’s San Joaquin Valley produces 99 percent of the pistachios grown in the United States. Arizona, New Mexico and a little bit of Texas make up the other one percent.”

“We know our place in the industry,” Schweers said. “We’re a small grower.

“What is the most different about our farm is that we’re totally self-contained, so we do everything from growing the crop, harvesting, processing and cooking it,” she said. “We salt and roast it, put on the flavors, then package and market it. Everything that is done to our pistachios is done here.”

They built a processing plant and became self-sufficient in 1986. Before that, the crop had to be shipped to Phoenix for salting and roasting, and the freight was expensive.

“After that, we were selling the nuts at the house,” Schweers said. “We had a sign in front and we just lost our privacy. All hours of the day and night people were knocking on the door wanting to buy pistachios.”

They opened a gift shop on the premises. Now they market half of their pistachios as retail through the shop and a mail order business. Customers can choose from red chile, garlic and green chile, lemon and lime flavors, and others. They also offer pistachio cookies and candies.

The other half of the crop is marketed wholesale to upscale grocers and gourmet gift shops. Pistachios nuts are a gourmet food product second only to macadamia nuts in price.

To maintain that gourmet quality, the pistachios are handled with great care. They are harvested by a machine called a shaker and fall into catcher frames – the pistachios never touch the ground. The nut meat grows inside the shell all summer long. It expands and overfills the shell, and in late summer the shells will pop open – a pistachio is the only nut that opens on the tree.

The skin has an elastic quality and expands to accommodate the nut.

The nut is still enclosed, protected from dust and dirt and insects, Schweers said.

The crop is measured in tons per acre. Between 2,500-3,000 tons of pistachios per acre is a good crop.

Pistachios are a desert crop and are native to the Far East. In Iran, there are pistachio trees that are 700 years old and still producing. The Schweers’ trees are the first planted in New Mexico.

They started the business when George retired from the Air Force at nearby Holloman Air Force Base.

They wanted to stay in the area and, coming from a Nebraska farming background, researched crops that they could grow in the desert. Pistachios kept coming to the top of the list, Schweers said. “At that point in time, we had never seen a pistachio tree,” she said. “We found a fellow who had started trees, the first planted in New Mexico.

He had 400 trees in the ground here. We bought those trees from him.”

“The trees were two years old, so we’ve been at it since 1974.” They hope to keep the farm in the family. “Nowadays it is a hard issue to be able to pass on a family farm,” Schweers said. “We would not be able to do that if we did not have the store and all of the other entities (including a recently-opened winery). American farmers are getting extinct.”