The Almond Economy

California grows about eighty percent of the world's almonds. Most of those almonds come from the San Joaquin Valley. The orchards you are driving past, or will drive past if you leave Modesto in almost any direction, represent what may be the most complete transformation of a single crop in the history of American agriculture.

In eighteen eighty-eight, all the almond orchards in California together produced two hundred fifty tons. By nineteen fourteen, that figure had grown to two thousand two hundred fifty tons. By nineteen nineteen, it was four thousand six hundred tons. Today, Stanislaus County alone brings in well over a billion dollars a year in almond revenues, with the two thousand thirteen crop setting a record at one point one two five billion dollars in gross income.

The tree was not native here. Almonds originated in Central Asia and came to California through the Spanish missions in the eighteenth century, though the coastal climate proved marginal for commercial production. The decisive shift happened when irrigation arrived in the San Joaquin Valley, when the water from the Tuolumne and the other Sierra rivers could be directed to orchards in a climate that was warmer and drier at bloom time than the coast and far better suited to the almond's requirements.

The orchards demand water in spring when the Sierra snowpack is melting, and they demand bees, which is why the Central Valley's almond bloom is the largest managed pollination event in the world, with roughly two million commercial hives trucked in every February from as far away as the East Coast.

What you see in these fields is not scenery. It is a system, and the valley built that system out of water rights, borrowed money, and UC Davis research, one orchard at a time, over about one hundred forty years.