An Enslaved Gardener Transformed the Pecan into a Cash Crop

‘working by candlelight would have provided Antoine a focused, well-lit environment for the delicate dissection of two seedlings’

I think the author needs to try using a candle for light.

> If composed of two parts, there is often a scion—the upper or shoot portion of a plant—which is joined with a separate rootstock to produce, if successful, a healthy grafted plant.

And like that, I finally figured out why Toyota named their offshoot brand Scion.

Article doesn't say the "trick" - it was a technique now known as inlay grafting.

> Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson planted pecans at their plantations

At the time of Washington and Jefferson, they were known in English as Illinois nuts. And, living in Illinois, a few years ago I bought a selection of 2-3 year old seedlings of Illinois-native trees from the state department of natural resources to plant on my property. Pecan seedlings were included...

When people say that pecan trees grow slowly, they are understating reality. Mine are growing at maybe an inch a year. I get one or two small leaves at the top. No branches yet. I planted a plum tree near one at the exact same time and it has doubled in height.

Is this article missing opening context?

First line:

>Pecan nuts were already a dietary staple for Native Americans in various parts of what is now the United States before Antoine’s innovation established the basis for a commercial pecan industry

Who is "Antoine"? Is it a first name? A last name? It doesn't ever seem to say.

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We talk about slavery as if it is safely sealed in the 19th century, like a museum exhibit with good lighting and a gift shop.

But the underlying pattern never really died. It just updated its paperwork.

Today we call it “employment.” In tech we even call it “talent acquisition,” which sounds almost humane. Yet the structure is familiar: people without capital create the ideas, write the code, design the systems that generate millions or billions. The upside flows upward. The risk flows downward.

Most software engineers do not own what they build. They sign it away on day one. IP assignment. Non-competes. Stock options that vest over four years so you behave. If the company exits, founders and investors get generational wealth. The average engineer gets a redundancy package and a LinkedIn badge saying “#opentowork.”

Yes, this is not chattel slavery. No one is being whipped into compiling C++. But the economic asymmetry is hard to ignore. You sell your time because you do not own productive assets. The owners sell your output because they do.

In IT the extraction is particularly clean. Code scales infinitely. A small team builds a platform that monetises millions of users. Revenue explodes. Valuation explodes. Engineers receive salaries that look high until you compare them to the equity multiple created from their labour.

Sometimes a few are “freed” through shares. Early employees hit liquidity and cross the line into ownership. The rest remain in the wage tier, cycling between companies, rebuilding empires they will never control.

The uncomfortable question is not whether this is morally identical to historical slavery. It obviously is not. The question is whether we are comfortable with an economic model where creative and technical labour consistently produces outsized returns captured by capital, not by the people who actually built the thing.

Antoine grafted pecan trees and created an industry. The plantation owner owned the trees.

In tech, we graft distributed systems and machine learning models. Someone else owns the orchard.

That parallel should at least make people uneasy.