The shaking of almond trees around Manteca and Ripon as the harvest gets underway is giving the dairy industry a cow.
Just five years ago almond milk accounted for less than a half percent of overall milk sales. Today it is at 6 percent.
And with almond prices going from around $5 a pound past spring down to below $3 this past month and a record crop estimated at 2.05 billion pounds that is now in the process of being harvested, Wall Street investors and agricultural marketing experts see products using almonds gaining even bigger market share.
Topping the list is almond milk. Sales of the dairy substitute hit $938 million in the fiscal year ending June 30. Demand has been surging since Starbucks added almond milk at its 23,000 plus locations worldwide.
The Milk Processors Education Program is fighting almond milk’s sales growth that is close to 30 percent a year with humorous TV ads.
And while almond milk has replaced soy milk as the leading non-dairy substitute, it still has a long ways to go before even coming close to dairy milk’s volume. In California — by far the nation’s largest producer of agricultural crops — milk ranks as the top crop with $9.4 billion in farm sales in 2014. Almonds were second at $5.9 billion.
Almonds are the top crop in San Joaquin County with 68,100 tons harvested in 2014 with a value of $578.5 million out of the county’s overall ag production of $3.3 billion. San Joaquin County’s almonds are grown almost exclusively in the Manteca, Ripon, and Escalon area
The three Northern San Joaquin Valley counties of San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Merced account for a third of all almond volume in California. The state grows 80 percent of the world’s almond crop.
Unlike a number of other crops, 91 percent of California’s 6,500 almond orchards are on multi-generational family farms with 61 percent being less than 50 acres in size.
Almonds are the state’s top ag export and add $1.1 billion to California’s gross state product. There are 104,000 jobs in the almond industry including 97,000 in the Central Valley.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com
