More than 1.4 million kilograms of pecans have been shaken, scooped and sent to the processor from Australia's largest pecan farm, Trawalla, in northern NSW — but it wouldn't have been possible without the casual harvest team of mostly backpackers.

After a "challenging year", pecan business manager for Stahmann Farms David Reibel said he felt lucky to have a harvest at all, and even luckier that he secured the workforce before the COVID-19 pandemic closed national and state borders earlier this year.

"We need 40 to 50 casuals for each harvest season, so ... there was going to be potentially trouble sourcing staff and getting them to move interstate," Mr Reibel said.

Stahmann Farms, at Pallamallawa just east of Moree, brought in the casual harvest team in March and offered them a month's additional farm work and accommodation while they did 14 days' quarantine on the 700-hectare property.

The team does two shakes of the mature trees, first in May to see the early maturing nuts come loose, and again in late June for any nuts that ripen later.

Worldwide hands collecting Moree pecans

Mr Reibel said most of the casual harvest roles are filled by backpackers, who are "reliable and punctual".

This year the team came from Europe, South America, Indonesia and New Zealand — but were all in Australia when the borders closed.

"A lot of them have skills that don't apply to this sort of work, you can have engineers and all sorts of people working for you," Mr Reibel said.

New Zealander Megan Carrington was travelling South-East Asia with her partner at the start of the year, but they decided to fly to Australia when COVID-19 started putting pressure on international travel.

The pair had planned to return to Trawalla after working through the 2019 harvest on their travels.

Ms Carrington has been travelling and working around the world since she left New Zealand at the end of 2016. While in NZ, she mostly worked in caregiving and hospitality roles.

"I hadn't done anything on this scale before, I worked with my mum for a while, who was a gardener, but we didn't use machinery like they do here," she laughed.

"But we definitely didn't shake a tree."

Hungry calls for more pecans

Trawalla is the largest pecan farm in the southern hemisphere and supplies most major supermarket chains in Australia and has a significant export presence globally.

To meet demand, the farm is now expanding after acquiring land on either side of the current property.

"We have about 40,000 trees to go into the ground over the next six weeks, so our harvest crew is now pretty much turning into our planting crew," he said.