California Almond Crop Expected to Be Worst Since ’58

Under a warm sun, California’s almond orchards cast a welcome cooling shade under their seasonally thick canopy of foliage last week, but the greenery concealed a sobering fact: a severe lack of growing nuts.

Few of the gorgeous blossoms of February and March fulfilled their destiny after heavy rains grounded the bees that play the crucial pollinating role that transforms bud into almond.

According to an estimate released Friday by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the state’s 418,000 acres of almond orchard are expected to produce just 250 million pounds of nut meats this fall. That compares to 465 million pounds produced last year on about 409,243 acres.

“We were figuring on about 447 million pounds this year,” said Roger J. Baccigaluppi, president of the California Almond Growers Exchange in Sacramento, a farmer-owned cooperative that markets almonds under the Blue Diamond label.

Baccigaluppi calculated that each acre of almond orchard will yield just 598 pounds of nuts, compared to 1,546 pounds an acre last year.

“I would attribute the whole thing to very poor pollination due to the heavy rains during the February pollination period,” he said in an interview.

The likely outcome will be a severe global shortage of almonds, Baccigaluppi said. California, which produces the entire U.S. almond crop, is the world’s No. 1 producer, followed by Spain, whose promising crop was similarly devastated by frost last month. Consequently, the world’s almond supply, including unsold inventory from previous years, is expected to total 580 million pounds of shelled nuts--far short of estimated consumption of 751 million pounds.

Crop damage was most severe for almond growers in the northern San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys--an area stretching from about Modesto north to Chico. Kern County, which missed the worst of February’s rains, will likely profit from a normal crop in a year of tight supplies that will bring premium prices--as much as double last year’s bargain-level prices of $1 or less a pound of bulk almonds.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Baccigaluppi lamented. “It’s so frustrating. After all, you can’t manufacture these things. It’s a very tough blow to growers. This was the year we expected to make some money.”

Developed New Markets

The decade began with a record almond crop in 1981, another large crop the next year, one nearly as small as this year’s expected crop in 1983, followed by another record crop in 1984 and the second-largest last year. Despite the small crop in 1983, substantial surpluses built up, sending prices on a persistent downward spiral at the same time that many growers staggered under increasingly heavy debt after expanding in the face of growing export sales in the 1970s.

The almond exchange, which has labored mightily through the 1980s to develop new markets at home and abroad to dispose of a succession of bumper crops, now finds itself anticipating the smallest harvest since 1958. Ironically, growers took what advantage they could of surplus nuts to develop new markets within the United States and in Canada, as well as in Japan, Western Europe and, most recently, the Soviet Union.

Sales to Soviet Union

Indeed, a series of major sales to the Russians over the last two years succeeded in whittling the exchange’s surplus inventory to what Baccigaluppi described as the “optimum” level. This is the prime fact underlying the rosy outlook that portrayed 1986 as the first year in which many almond growers would do more than merely break even.

Instead, there will be a scramble to meet existing contracts, Baccigaluppi predicted. And that could jeopardize some of the newly won markets abroad.

For example, years of modest sales to the Soviet Union finally paid off two years ago after Turkey experienced a bad hazelnut crop, cutting the Russians off from their traditional supply of nuts used in chocolate candy. California almonds replaced Turkish hazelnuts, which this year may well displace California almonds.

“The problem is that you can lose it all in one year,” Baccigaluppi said of new markets, “but you can’t get it all back in one year. It’s just a tough, tough situation.”