Almond Market Update December 2021 Week 51

After quite a difficult year for the almond industry in California, there is finally another winter storm system coming to help deal with drought conditions in the region. It is expected that rain will continue in the value while the Sierras will experience snowfall for the next ten days.

Of course, this won't completely solve the water issues but will definitely help to deal with the problem.

After the release of the Almond Board of California's November shipment report, industry experts reported a shipment of 220.91 million pounds in November with a 16.1% decrease from last year. The domestic market shipped 65 million pounds, around 4% lower than last year.

With the industry behind by 15% this year, the total crop shipped is 872 million pounds shipped versus last year's 1.026 billion pounds shipped. The industry will have some work ahead in the next 7 months of the crop year to make improvements in these numbers.

Despite the export issues, the market seems quite stable. Buyers have realized that the current pricing is the lowest since last year, and growers are willing to wait until February to see an increase in price before selling.

There are no expectations of the price to increase any time soon before New Year's because there's resistance to a price change due to the increased cost of production for almonds in 2021.

As usual, shipping issues are expected to remain. We shall have to see how things progress in 2022 to comment any further.

As it is, we were able to obtain this week's price for almond in-shells and kernels which you can see as follows: