With the price to growers for the 2022 walnut crop at about 40 cents per pound or less — well below last year’s break-even price of 70 to 90 cents per pound — walnut groves are coming out this winter
Walnut farmers are tearing out older trees and less desirable varieties as the price for the nut has plummeted well below the cost of production, causing some growers to rethink walnuts and look for alternative crops.
“I’ve seen several younger orchards that have come out already in Fresno, Merced and Madera counties,” said Kings County farmer Brian Medeiros of Hanford, who farms walnuts, almonds and row crops. “My neighbor had a walnut orchard that was about six years old, and he tore the whole thing out. He just said, ‘I’m losing money hand over fist. I’m not going to keep doing it.’”
A heat wave last September cooked the walnuts on the trees during a critical time of the growing cycle. High temperatures were followed by rain that led to mold problems.
“We had extremely high temperatures — up to 117 degrees for three to four days in some areas — and this occurred when walnuts were at their most sensitive stage in growth,” said Robert Verloop, president and chief executive officer of the California Walnut Board and California Walnut Commission. The Commission conducted their own survey suggesting that handlers opening up 100 pounds of walnuts will find 30 to 40 pounds absolutely not usable.
With the price to growers for the 2022 walnut crop at about 40 cents per pound or less — and well below last year’s break-even price of between 70 and 90 cents per pound—walnuts were the obvious choice for removal for Medeiros, he said. He pulled out 16 acres of walnut trees to scale down his water use to comply with groundwater regulations and manage his allotment.
“Our orchard is only 15 years old, so when I was pulling out those 16 acres, it literally broke my heart because I’m pulling out beautiful trees that look gorgeous, and I’m bulldozing them over,” Medeiros said.
“The (walnut) price is making it much easier, much quicker for us to move ahead because — unless this price changes dramatically in the coming year or we have some outstanding support from USDA — we’re probably pulling the rest of them out next year,” he said.
Affecting the demand-supply problem is a carryover crop of about 135,000 tons and a 2022 crop expected to be between 750,000 tons to 780,000 tons and much larger than the 720,000-ton crop forecast last September.
If there are too many walnuts, the same appears to apply to almonds — the state’s most valuable crop. With new orchards coming online year after year the price per pound continues to drop. In 2014 almonds fetched $4/lb. That price fell to$1.71 in 2020 and stands around $1.10 today.
February is that time each winter you can drive around the Valley and see what trees are being pushed over as farmers reassess the market.
California Farm Bureau supplied much of this story.
Big solar farm was county's biggest project last year
What's more valuable than all the commercial building projects permitted in Kings County in 2022? One 1,000-acre solar project.
One utility-scale solar project permitted in Kings County in October 2022 valued at $62.2 million eclipsed the value of all other commercial permits in the county at $62.01 million. That solar project is one of the 12 Westlands Solar Farm projects built or pending — named Chestnut along the Avenal Highway.
Meanwhile the California PUC is poised to order California’s power providers to procure an additional 4 GW of resources, to come online in 2026 and 2027 pointing to a variety of factors, says a report in the magazine Utility Dive.
They include “increasing electric demand, more than regulators anticipated, likely due to extreme weather, a greater expected increase in electric vehicles, higher usage of air conditioning, and electrification of the built environment. At the same time, California expects to have less access to imported electricity from its neighboring states, as they face similar trends.”
That will mean plenty of new solar projects in the Valley that will need to launch permitting soon to come on line in that time frame.
In the meantime more big firms are adding renewable energy for their own use. That includes Home Depot which has pledged to produce or procure 100% renewable electricity equivalent to the electricity needs for all of its facilities by 2030. The home improvement company says they'll add solar to 25 California stores starting early in 2023.There are 10 stores between Fresno and Delano in the Central Valley.
Also Amazon now says last year's additions to their renewables portfolio included 918 megawatts of energy produced in Arizona, California and Texas.
Amazon says they made renewable-energy investments in late 2022 that will enable it to operate on 100% clean energy as soon as 2025, five years ahead of its original target, the company said.
According to a report from industry trade group the American Clean Power Association, Amazon, along with Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. (META) and Google, owned by parent company Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), are the top three corporate purchasers of wind and solar energy.
The three lead a total of 326 companies that had contracted for 77.4 gigawatts of wind and solar energy by the end of 2022, which is enough energy to power over 1,000 data centers or 18 million American homes, American Clean Power said.
Visalia Bed Bath & Beyond will close
Retailer Bed Bath & Beyond appears to be near bankruptcy and this week announced more stores would close. On the list is the Visalia store on Mooney Blvd. — a part of the Sequoia Mall. The locations in Fresno and San Luis Obispo are spared for now.