What’s on the radar of the Almond Board of California? There’s a wave of new production coming in the next five years that needs buyers. There are booming businesses like Sears Roebuck, now fallen on hard times. There are growing piles of shells and hulls without much value.
Along with challenges like these come opportunity, though, said ABC President and CEO Richard Waycott and board chair Mike Mason. They spoke to a crowd of members who gathered for a keynote on Tuesday, opening night of the 2017 Almond Conference in Sacramento.
First challenge: A wave of growth that shows the strength of the industry, and dictates that there must be new demand.
How big is it? By 2021, about 3 billion pounds of almonds could be produced in California.
“That’s about a 30% increase over the next five years, about 700 million pounds,” Waycott told the crowd. “That’s more than we sell in the U.S. every year. We’re not scared, we’ve done this before, but we want to be ready for this.”
Waycott presented the three guiding principles of the board:
1. Creating demand ahead of increased supply
2. Accelerated agriculture innovation
3. Transforming consumer landscape
Some of the demand efforts are already underway:
This coming year the board will advertise in Japan, hoping to renew that nation’s love for almonds. Mexico is another prime target, right across the border, and whose citizens love food, snacking, and tend to follow U.S. dietary trends. South America is also a target, with a huge, health conscious group of consumers.
“We’ll have all the guns out there blazing to make sure demand’s ahead of supply,” Waycott said.
Why is it important?
ABC Chairman Mason made a parable out of Sears Roebuck, which he recalled was the biggest retailer in the country when he was growing up.
“They made a conscious decision to grow their business and not worry about other businesses,” Mason said. “We can all see that was not a good idea.”
Mason pointed to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as an example of the a leader willing to invest in future efforts like delivery drones, in order to find what might push his company to future dominance.
Besides rising supply, the board sees rising costs for growers as a part of the future that can’t be ignored.
“Costs are going to go up,” Mason said. “I’ve been farming almonds for 20 years, and in that time the cost per acre to produce them has tripled. If it only doubles in the next 20 years, that will be around $7,000 an acre.”
One solution that can’t be overlooked, Waycott said, is improving co-product values—the prices that shells, hulls, and almond wood can earn.
He shared projections that show a possible $500 to $600 million gain in revenue from co-products if:
- hulls move from $65/ton to $300
- shells from $5/ton to $50/ton
- and wood from a disposal cost of $35/ton to revenues of $50 per ton.
While those co-products are sold today for dairy feed stocks and bedding, the board is studying their usefulness for improving feed value, soil amendment, and eventually value-added solutions like incorporating them in manufacturing of plastics.
Almond hulls show promise for improving feed value because they’re high in minerals, and feeding a hull substance to flies can produce larvae that amount to high-quality protein feed for chickens.
Shells that are torrefied, or cooked to a specific consistency, can be used in plastics, and potentially tires, irrigation drip tubes, and more.
Both the hull and shell markets are currently being investigated by researchers funded by the Almond Board. Early results from the research were presented in Sacramento, and will be the subject of in-depth blog posts in days to come on the Ceres Imaging blog.
Mason compared the cutting edge research to work done years before that revealed health benefits of almonds, turning their image around in the minds of American consumers.
“There’s so much that we don’t know about these co-products,” Mason said. “I think this is one of those things we should think really big on. I think we should be selling almond shells by the pound, not by the ton.”
Stay tuned for more blogs from the Almond Conference during and after the conference. We’ll be writing about the latest research and news that’s shared there for growers who couldn’t make a panel, or couldn’t make it to Sacramento this year.
If you are at the Almond Conference, stop by Ceres Imaging Booth #1132 for a chance to win a $100 Bass Pro gift card, and while you’re there, see how our images can reveal applied water for almond orchards on a per-tree basis, as shown in USDA-funded work by UC Cooperative researchers.