With temperatures recently reaching unprecedented levels, farmers are checking almonds in their dry orchards in California's almond-growing San Joaquin Valley, where a historic drought threatens one of the state's most profitable crops, according to CBS News.
Farmers do not have enough water to adequately irrigate their almond orchards, so they provide less water than the trees need, and some have left part of their farmland uncultivated to provide water for the rest of it.
“We may have to sacrifice one of them at the end of the year if we feel we don’t have enough water over the next year,” Del Bosque, who grows watermelons, cherries and almonds, told the network. The trees are wasted.”
Historic drought across the western United States has taken a heavy toll on California's $6 billion almond industry, which produces nearly 80% of the world's almonds, and more farmers are expected to abandon their orchards as water has become scarce and expensive. .
It's a sharp reversal of the almond's relentless expansion in California's agricultural Central Valley, whose dry climate and reliable irrigation system have made it an ideal place to grow the increasingly popular almond.
Almond orchards are perennial crops that need water all year round, and with worsening droughts and increasing heat waves linked to climate change, scientists say climate change has made the American West warmer and drier over the past 30 years and the weather will continue to be more extreme.
good to mention; California almond production increased from 370 million pounds (approximately 168 million kilograms) in 1995 to a record 3.1 billion pounds (1.4 billion kilograms) in 2020, according to the Department of Agriculture.
During that period, the land planted with almond trees grew from 756 square miles (1,958 square kilometers) to 2,500 square miles (6,475 square kilometers). In May, the Department of Agriculture expected California's almond crop to reach a record 3.2 billion pounds (1.5 billion kilograms) this year, but in July that estimate was reduced to 2.8 billion pounds (1.3 billion kilograms), due to reduced water availability and rising temperatures. .
Almonds are California's largest agricultural export, with the industry shipping about 70% of almonds abroad, driven by strong demand in India, East Asia and Europe.
With almond prices soaring during the previous California drought of 2012-2016, farmers and investors planted hundreds of square miles of new orchards in areas without a reliable water supply.
But the almond orchards soon entered California's second major drought in a decade, with the US Drought Observatory reporting that 88% of the state was in severe drought, as of last week, with the Central Valley facing the worst conditions.
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