04/29/2025
Many folks in Clay County know Art Sanders as the man who brought an abandoned pecan orchard back to life!It was not until after he signed the deed on the 46-acre parcel 5 miles south of West Point in 1999 that Sanders learned what he had acquired. Aerial property photos revealed rows of trees, showing the previous owner had planned the orchard and planted pecan trees there in the mid-1980s—even augmenting it with an irrigation system and a well—before walking away from it.“I didn’t realize it was a pecan orchard because there were so many other cedars and pines everywhere,” Sanders recalls. “I had no notion of being a pecan farmer at all. I just wanted to have some land to give me a purpose after I retired.”
He moved back to Mississippi in 2013 after a 30-plus year career in Chicago, Illinois as a firefighter. He didn't waste any time and began clearing land, ripping up bad trees, and nursing the surviving ones to health until they began to bear fruit.
The orchard—nearly 800 trees—is now the official home of Lindy’s Pecans, named after Sanders’s wife, and boasts 10 pecan varieties, including Desirable, Pawnee, and Lakota.
Along the way, he has used a variety of resources offered by the Mississippi State University Extension Service to his benefit—and he still does. He’s a regular attendee of Extension’s field day events, and he often uses the MSU Extension soil testing lab, which provides analyses and nutrient management recommendations for different soils and plant tissues.
