High Heat Could Lead to Early Almond Harvest

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:04]The 2026 almond growing season is well underway. We've had a, you know, pretty good start to the season, some interesting weather.

[00:00:11]And growers are wanting to know, as always, what's this crop year going to look like? And I'm here with Megan Nunes from Bountiful Ag. Could you tell us about you released sort of an estimate of what we expect so far. Tell us about what we can expect for this year's crop and how the season's gone so far.

[00:00:30]Yeah, so earlier this month in about the second week of April, Bountiful released our first crop forecast of the 2026 growing season. This will be at a minimum one of four forecasts we release, all using our machine learning models that we've developed in order to figure out what relationships there are from weather data, satellite imagery data, and so on in relation to yield.

[00:00:55]So those numbers are available on our platform to our um paid subscribers. That being said though, Bountiful does do something kind of like the USDA subjective, which is the community estimate. That is totally free for anyone in the industry to submit their opinion on crop size. And I checked it just before we met.

[00:01:13]And currently that is trending at 2.69 billion pounds as an expectation from growers, processors, haulers, and shellers on where they think the crop is going to be. I will say that number does align well with our first forecast release in April using our proprietary models.

[00:01:31]So we shall see what changes when we release our next forecast in May.

[00:01:35]That's awesome. How how how did you think, you know, with some of the weather patterns, how did that influence the early development? I'll start with March being unprecedented heat wise.

[00:01:46]Both maximum, minimum, and overall average temperatures across the entire valley.

[00:01:51]What that ended up doing as a result is you're seeing a lot more smaller nut set because high early heat basically increases cell division and so that limits how big essentially nuts can get.

[00:02:03]To give David Doll a shout out, he actually did a really good post, The Almond Doctor, on heat in March and what that will mean in relation to cell division and expectations around size for this year.

[00:02:14]That being said though, there are some canopies where you see very sparse nut set and there are almonds that look almost like the size of walnuts on the outside, which is absolutely crazy.

[00:02:26]From some of the nut samples we've taken in orchard that we've gone and looked at, whole size is appearing to look large, kind of like it did last year.

[00:02:33]That being said, it is sporadic. There's places where it is normal.

[00:02:37]We are curious and a hypothesis I personally have is like will turnouts look a lot like last year? Will they potentially be down? Because of the whole size to kernel basically ratios and that at the end of the day contributes to turnout size or turnout percents I should say.

[00:02:52]So it's going to be a very interesting season. We think harvest is going to be early, anywhere from two to four weeks.

[00:02:58]Will people be ready around July 4th for harvest? I don't know, but we will see cuz that is very much so a possibility.

[00:03:04]We have had some more milder weather, some hailstorms recently as well during the nut drop stage that the trees are currently going through as well. Every year is an interesting season. I feel like I say that all the time.

[00:03:17]This year is no different, unprecedented heat early on in a critical stage of nut set and nut development. A relatively good bloom overall, like it was sporadic, it was kind of weird, but bloom length, bee hours, chill portions, all of that is was pretty good to be honest overall.

[00:03:35]Um So we shall see what happens and how this year shapes up.

[00:03:39]Well great, thank you so much for sharing those, you know, some insights there and and for what you do for the industry. Read more about this in Pacific Nut Producer magazine. I'm Matthew Malcolm, californiagnet.com.

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