California is harvesting its first almond crop in about sixty years without a field-measured government estimate of its size, after the Almond Board of California voted in December 2025 to stop funding it, leaving buyers and handlers to negotiate new-crop prices against private numbers.

The July 2025 Objective Measurement, the last the US Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service published, put California's crop at 3.0bn lb. The state produced 2.715bn lb on the agency's own final figure and handlers received 2.69bn lb, a miss of about 10 per cent that ended a series the Almond Board had paid for since the 1960s.

Prices fell 50 cents, or 16 per cent, in a single day when that forecast landed — the largest one-day fall Terra Nova Trading said it had recorded — and the Punjabi American Growers Group put the cost to growers at $1.2bn, GV Wire reported in December.

[table slug="california-almond-harvest-heat-om-forecast-vs-outturn"]

Select Harvests, the Australian grower listed in Sydney, described the sequence in its annual results in November: prices rose from October 2024 to June 2025, then took "a price correction in July when the USDA 2025 objective forecast was released", and recovered "over the following months as actual 2025 California crop receipts have been below expectations".

The five forecasts before it had all landed within 5 per cent of the final crop. The board's case was that the report's precision had decayed: the range covered by its 80 per cent confidence interval widened from 300m lb in 2019 to 780m lb in 2025, "calling into question its value for the industry", Natalie Henderson of the Almond Board told FreshFruitPortal in December.

The surviving estimate, the May Subjective Forecast — a survey of about 500 growers taken between 21 April and 6 May — put the 2026 crop at 2.70bn lb. This was down 1 per cent, on an unchanged yield of 1,940 lb an acre and bearing acreage of 1,385,870 acres — down 15,227 acres, the first decline in three decades, on Land IQ's estimate for the board.

[viz src="https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/crop-markets-c5bd8.firebasestorage.app/o/media%2Flarge%2F2026%2F08%2F12%2F1786551888003-california-almond-removals-by-county-2026.webp?alt=media&token=22948e25-2795-457f-89a9-7beee07e650b" title="Where California is pulling out almond trees" subtitle="Acres removed in the 2026 crop year against bearing acreage; counties labelled where 1,000 acres or more came out" source="Land IQ for the Almond Board of California, 2026 Standing Acreage Initial Estimate, 23 April 2026. Removals confirmed by spatial analysis to 31 March 2026; a further 12,211 acres estimated statewide for April-August are not allocated to counties. Basemap: geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0)" alt="Map of California showing almond acreage removed by county in the 2026 crop year, with the largest removals in Kern, Merced, Stanislaus and Fresno counties in the San Joaquin Valley"]

NASS has also stopped publishing the California report the forecast used to appear in. "NASS made the decision to no longer generate publications tailored specifically to individual states or regions," Bryce Spycher, the Almond Board's senior manager of marketing order services, wrote to industry members on 12 May. The 2026 California forecast now exists as a single table inside the national Crop Production report.

Private estimates have filled the gap, and all of them sit at or below the official number. Terra Nova Trading's 1 May estimate implies about 2.66bn lb; Blue Diamond Growers cut its own to 2.67bn lb on 10 July from 2.69bn in May; and Sunny Toor, president of Valley Pride Ag, told AgNet West in July that his number was 2.6bn to 2.65bn lb. Terra Nova, which called the removal a long-term negative for the industry, described a trade that "will no longer enjoy the objective crop estimate in July as a 'backstop'".

Handlers have described the absence as steadying. "With no objective estimate looming ahead, both sides seem more comfortable to continue participating," RPAC, a handler in Los Banos, wrote in its July market update. Select Harvest USA, a Turlock handler unconnected to the Australian company, said on 11 August that "industry sentiment has been hedging on the softer side of the 2.7 billion pound Subjective Forecast".

A blue self-propelled sweeper machine gathers almonds into a windrow in a California orchard, throwing up dust as the operator drives between the tree rows

Ninety-two per cent of last season's supply had been shipped or committed by 31 July, when the marketing year closed. Crop receipts came in at 2.69bn lb, down 0.7 per cent, and uncommitted inventory at 248m lb, down 17.2 per cent, according to the Almond Board's position report of 11 August. Domestic shipments fell 11.3 per cent over the year while exports rose 3.0 per cent.

US shelled almond exports realised $6.55 per kg over the eleven months to June, 46 per cent more than two marketing years earlier, on US Census Bureau trade data accessed via Cropli. Grower field prices for Nonpareil in-shell passed $3 a pound in June for the first time since November 2018, Steve Malanca of West Valley Hulling told AgNet West. "Almond pricing has reached the highest levels seen in about a decade," RPAC said, "but grower costs have risen sharply over that same period."

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Harvest opened early, with shakers entering the first orchard on 10 July in western Colusa County, Mel Machado, Blue Diamond's chief agricultural officer, wrote in the co-operative's crop progress report of 3 August. Daily maximum temperatures then ran 3.3C to 5.1C above the 1991-2020 normal at all nine of Cropli's monitoring points in the almond belt over the thirteen days to 11 August, peaking on 9 August at 44.6C at Bakersfield and 44.4C at Visalia.

[explore layer="origin-chart" originId="almond-united-states" tab="temperature" snapshot="es_4892cfa518514e42" title="California almond belt temperatures against the 30-year envelope" subtitle="Nine monitoring points, daily maximum vs the 1991-2020 P10-P90 band"]

Handlers attribute the smaller kernels now coming off the trees to warm weather in the weeks after bloom. RPAC reported kernel sizes "considerably smaller than last season" and Select Harvest USA "disappointing kernel size and oversized hulls". The only effect either has put on the August heat is a compressed harvest.

The Almond Board's crop reports page still carries the 2025 Objective Measurement, at 3.0bn lb, among its headline figures.