Trends

In previous pieces in this series, we documented the scale of California's almond removal wave , which has seen ~450,000 acres (~182k ha) removed between 2014 and 2024, and the shift in planting patterns.

One of the assumptions that runs through most discussions of water risk in Californian permanent crop plantings is that orchards inside irrigation districts - with access to surface water deliveries, in addition to groundwater resources - are better protected than those in white…

Pistachio removals in California tell a very different story to almonds . The scale is significantly smaller, but with one stand-out finding.

The planting data indicates where new trees are going in. The removals data tells us where existing orchards are coming out. Taken together, they paint a far more complete picture of the trajectory of California's almond supply than either dataset alone.

Across this series, we've documented several shifts in where California's almonds and pistachios are being planted: away from Westlands , toward the Tule sub-basin, northward into the Sacramento Valley .

In our previous post , we showed that Westlands Water District - historically the largest single destination for both almond and pistachio plantings - has seen new planting fall dramatically. This raises an obvious question: where has the remaining planting activity gone?

Westlands Water District, on the west side of California's San Joaquin Valley, is the largest agricultural water district in the United States by acreage. For decades, it was one of the most important destinations for new almond and pistachio plantings.

Almonds and pistachios are grown in many of the same regions of California's Central Valley, face the same water constraints, and overlap in their grower base. But their planting trajectories since 2016 have diverged dramatically.

In our previous post , we showed that California almond plantings have collapsed from their 2016 peak. But the decline was not smooth. 2020 stands out as an anomaly.

California's almond and pistachio sectors are planting fewer acres than at any point in the modern era. Demeter has cross-referenced a variety of datasets, including the Department of Water Resources' Land Use Mapping, to track every acre of almonds and pistachios planted and rem…