Homestead Pistachio Orchards

Homestead Pistachio orchard in Artois, CAOut in the middle of the agriculture patchwork quilt in northern California, you’ll find a 90 acre pistachio orchard nestled in a small rural town called Artois.  As you drive down the long driveway outlining this orchard, you’ll notice that pistachio shells are used to keep the dust down. 

John McGinnis, his wife Gloria, and son Mike, own and operate their farm they call Artois Nut Company.  They are a fully diversified family farm.  They grow, hull, process, and market their 90 acres of pistachios.

John is an engineer by trade, originally a city boy.  It wasn’t until 1974 that John and his wife moved to the country to his wife’s family homestead ranch and started farming.  He started with farming rice and row crops until 1986.  It was at this time that the McGinnis’s wanted their home to be surrounded by trees, instead of the low growing, annual, row crops.  So, they planted their pistachio orchard, which still stands today.

Ninety-five percent of the orchard is the Kerman variety.  The remaining five percent of the orchard is planted in two different pollinator varieties which do not produce any nuts at all.  Their sole purpose is to produce the pollen that is dispersed to the Kerman variety trees by wind.  In the spring time the two pollinator varieties bloom two weeks apart from each other, thus giving the trees a longer pollination window to help ensure a better yielding crop.

John McGinnins showing off his pistachio crop on the treeJohn is a great example of a small independent U.S. family farm.  He loves the solitude of his farming lifestyle on the farm.  He explains, “My favorite season is the early spring growing season.  It’s quiet and the orchards are clean and new”.  Farmers have to treasure these ‘quiet’ moments, as the majority of the year farming perennial tree crops takes constant monitoring, maintaining, and action to ensure healthy trees and abundant crops.  Though sometimes, all that hard work and spending capital doesn’t mean profits, as Mother Nature has a mind of her own and won’t always provide the necessary weather conditions that favor abundant crops.  When John is asked what he’d like to share with consumers, his reply is, ”before pistachios are ready for consumption thee are so many steps that have to be taken and none of them can be skipped’.  He continues on with the long list, “irrigation, weed control, insect and fungus control, mowing, harvesting, hulling, drying, hand picking, color sorting, flavoring and roasting, packaging and labeling, boxing, and finally the marketing”.

Artois Nut Company can be commended for their persistence and hard work which has led them to a healthy growth in their business.  They are continually experimenting with new flavors and are investing in more innovation roasting and packaging equipment.  In 2009 they started generating 95 percent of their own power.  John explains, “I look at it as we’re just pre-paying our electricity bill for the next eight years.”

Maisie Jane’s is happy to support this small family farm that has big ideas!  Their hard work shows by the top-quality pistachio products they produce.