Nuts to Us This Year

Count on one thing this fall: You won’t see any ads with almond growers begging you, “One can a week, that’s all we ask.”

This year’s almond crop is nothing short of disastrous, less than half the size of last year’s and the worst on record since the flood-ravaged harvest of 1986.

“A lot of our guys just want to get the harvest behind them and over with,” says Dave Baker, director of member relations for Blue Diamond, a grower cooperative and the world’s largest handler of almonds.

What happened? Start with a warm winter that led to an early bloom. Then there were the March winds and rains. Almond trees, though drought-resistant, are notoriously shallow-rooted, and 15,000 acres of the state’s bearing trees--about 6% of the total--were destroyed, according to the Almond Board of California.

Those that survived suffered through a cold, damp pollination that further reduced the crop. Add midseason rain and hail that knocked developing nuts off the trees, and you’ve got a projected harvest this year of 310 million pounds, down from last year’s record 730 million pounds. California’s problems didn’t end with harvest. According to Blue Diamond, growers are rejecting triple the normal rate of damaged or insect-infested nuts: more than 3% of the harvest gone.

But it doesn’t end there. Spain, second to California among the world’s almond producers, is suffering through an extended drought, and its harvest is projected to be less than half of last year’s as well. In all, this year’s world almond harvest should be about 580 million pounds.

Not only is that down almost 40% from 1994, it’s also more than 30% less than the world’s average annual almond consumption.

“This is huge,” says Bill Wright, Blue Diamond’s director of sales for North America. “This year is the worst possible thing that could have happened to us, primarily because there are huge acreages of new almonds planted in California. We know that not only have we had excellent crops in the past, future crops are going to be even larger.”

But this year, he says all advertising and promotion of almond products will stop. And all new-product development work will probably come to a halt.

“Overall,” Wright says, “there will be a malaise when it comes to selling almonds. And history tells us that when it comes to years like this, it can take up to four years to make up for consumption that has been lost.”