California Specialty Crop Sizes Reveal Farmworker Woes
June 29, 2021 As the USDA-National Agricultural Statistics Service final 2020 reports on California fruit and nut crops have come in this spring, they reveal a pattern: Crops that require a lot of labor are down, down, down, but so-called mechanized crops are up, up, up.
To get a sense of how the state’s key fruit and nut crops have fared over time, we looked at the harvest figures for a wide range of crops over the past decade, and they proved to be eye-popping.
Take apples, for example. Just 20 years ago, apples were still a major crop in California, but by 2010, production had dipped to just below 100 million pounds. But that was nothing compared to what was in store for the following decade, as by 2020, the crop was down to 28 million pounds.
To get an idea of how low apples have fallen in the state, consider that there are now nearly double as many kiwifruit grown in California, or 55 million pounds, as apples. It’s even more astonishing when you consider that in 2010, just 8 million pounds of kiwifruit were produced.
Other crops that currently require hand-harvesting on a widespread basis include the stone fruits. All of the stone fruits show falloffs in production over the past decade that are similar to that seen in apples.
For example, peaches went from 395 million pounds in 2010 to 178 million pounds in 2020, a 55% decline. Their close cousin, nectarines, also saw a 55% decline, from 295 million pounds in 2010 to 133 million in 2020.
Plums fell off further still, down 73%. They went from 272 million pounds in 2010 to 73 million pounds in 2020. Apricots were down even more, 80%, from 20 million in 2010 to 4 million pounds in 2020.
Even cherries, which have seen consumption shoot up worldwide over the past decade, were down in California. In 2010, 124 million pounds were harvested, down to 91 million pounds in 2020, a decline of 27%.
Growers have responded by quite literally going nuts.
They planted lots of the big three tree nuts grown in California: almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. This is obviously somewhat of an oversimplification, as at the same time marketing efforts were paying off by opening up key markets, especially in Asia, and growers saw opportunity.
But still, the numbers are huge. The 2010 California almond crop was 744,000 metric tons, and increased 83% to 1,361,000 metric tons in 2020. The walnut crop increased 53%, from 510,000 tons to 780,000 tons.
Pistachios increased the most by percentage, up 111%, from 522 million pounds in 2010 to 1.1 billion pounds in 2020. And that number is projected to skyrocket as growers have been planting at a torrid pace for the past four years.
Because pistachios are the most precocious of crops, not coming into anything approaching full production until the seventh leaf, American Pistachio Growers expects a 1.4-billion-pound crop in 2026.
To avoid continuing declines in California hand-picked crops, and perhaps elsewhere, it seems these growers will have to mechanize. Two years ago, I wrote a cover story on a couple of California peach and nectarine growers, Jon McClarty and Drew Ketelsen of HMC Farms in Kingsburg, who were trying to mechanize their harvest. They said their neighbors thought they were crazy for trying to mechanize harvest, but the way they looked at it, not doing something was the crazy approach.
“If we don’t do anything,” McClarty told me, “it’s almost certain death.”
I agree with Jon more than ever. For many large-scale commercial growers of stone fruit and other hand-picked crops in California, finding a way to mechanize harvest seems less crazy — and more necessary — every day.
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