When things go wrong — especially if they go really, historically wrong — people tend to look for answers. So when California entered the fourth year of one of the worst droughts the state had ever seen, everyone — the media, politicians, scientists — wanted to know what had gone wrong.
In the process, a number of things were set upon the altar of public opinion as scapegoats for the drought: lawns, golf courses, wealthy Californians taking more than their fair share of the state’s dwindling resources, climate change. But none provoked the maelstrom that surrounded the almond, which seemingly transformed overnight from a healthy snack to the evil source of California’s water woes.
“California’s Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as Los Angeles Uses in Three Years,” proclaimed Mother Jones, which basically led the almond-witch hunt with articles like “It Takes How Much Water to Grow an Almond?!” and “Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters.” “The Thirsty West: 10 Percent of California’s Water Goes to Almond Farming” added Slate, arguing “That’s nuts.” In the New York Times, almonds were branded “water guzzlers.” For months, it seemed you couldn’t read about the California drought without some mention — menacing or otherwise — about California’s prodigious almond industry and its outsized impact on the state’s drought.
But for Gabriele Ludwig, director for sustainability and environmental affairs at the Almond Board of California, the demonization of the almond wasn’t just ubiquitous or unpleasant: it was unexpected.
“We were quite caught off guard,” she told ThinkProgress, noting that almonds have been grown commercially in California for almost 100 years, and have existed in the state for much longer. From the inside, the California almond didn’t seem like a terrible example of Big Agriculture gone wrong — and at first, she couldn’t understand why others were viewing almond growers with such distrust.
“We have over 40 years of production research and other research, we have a sustainability program that has been in place for eight years, so we were kind of looking around going ‘Wait a minute? We’ve been considered thought leaders within the California world.’” she said. The issue, according to Ludwig, was that many of the most damning facts about almonds were presented without context.
Almonds are the state’s most valuable agricultural commodity, representing about quarter of California’s farm exports
Take, for instance, the fact that they use 10 percent of California’s agricultural water supply. While it’s true that almonds do use about 10 percent of water designated for agricultural purposes, that statistic doesn’t exactly illustrate the entire picture. Almonds are the state’s most valuable agricultural commodity, representing about a quarter of California’s farm exports. California almond farmers produce 80 percent of the world’s almonds, and almond farming adds an estimated $7.6 billion annually to California’s economy — the agricultural sector as a whole accounts for $21.59 billion. And, in comparison to other crops, almonds are hardly the most thirsty — cotton, which used to be a major crop in California, requires more water than almonds.
“Of the total water that goes to agriculture, yes almonds use a lot, but that’s because there are a lot of acres of almonds, not because almonds, per se, use a lot of water,” Ludwig said.
And the total amount of water used by almond growers over the past 40 years has actually been decreasing, despite the fact that total acreage of almonds planted has been increasing. This means that almonds farmers have become more and more efficient at using their water, mainly by adopting irrigation methods like drip and micro-irrigation, which allow for a more pointed application of water.
California’s Drought Could Upend America’s Entire Food SystemClimate by CREDIT: AP On April 1, California Governor Jerry Brown stood in a field in the Sierra Nevada Mountains…thinkprogress.org“Much of the information provided about almonds wasn’t factually incorrect, but it was presented without the larger context, and without that context, the numbers looked horrible or could be misconstrued,” Ludwig said.
So Ludwig and other members of the Almond Board of California sprung to action, working to fight against the misperceptions that had started to plague the crop the represented. For the last two years, they’ve waged a campaign — both private and public — to educate consumers about the conservation measures that almond farmers have taken. They’re asking consumers to reconsider the demon nut — but will it work?
So far, the public shaming of the almond has done little to dampen its sales. In 2015, almond prices surged to record levels. In the past five years, sales of almond milk have grown 250 percent. All of which is to say that demand for almonds doesn’t appear to be dwindling anytime soon, making producing almonds with fewer resources — especially water, as climate change shifts precipitation patterns across the West — especially important for California almond growers.
For Ludwig, that means understanding both where the almond has been, and where it can go. California almond growers pay into a shared fund that the Almond Board uses to fund research, and recently, that research has been especially concerned with sustainability. Last July, the Almond Board released a lifecycle assessment of an almond orchard, plotting all the energy and resources needed to take an almond tree from nursery through its approximately 25-year lifespan. The assessment found that, in terms of energy, water was the largest user, followed by fertilizer. That means that anything that almond growers can do to reduce their water use or fertilizer use — through more tailored application techniques, for instance — will help make almonds overall a less energy-intensive crop. The Almond Board has also begun working with researchers within the UC system to understand how agricultural land in general, and almond orchards in particular, might be able to help with groundwater recharge — an important issue to understand as California’s precipitation begins to shift from winter snow to rain, which is more difficult to store.
Much of the information provided about almonds wasn’t factually incorrect, but it was presented without the larger context
Beyond understanding their own impact, almond growers are also providing other services to the environment, Ludwig explained. The by-products that come from an almond harvest — the hulls and the shells — are often ground up and used for animal feed, which offsets the emissions associated with growing crops like corn or alfalfa. Moreover, throughout an almond tree’s lifespan, it’s sequestering carbon, which helps slow the rate of climate change.
The trick, Ludwig said, is finding conservation techniques that balance benefits for the environment with value for farmers. Almonds are a long-term investment — a tree lives for decades, meaning growers can be hesitant to try new techniques that might impact their crop in unknown ways. Irrigation, Ludwig explained, is an easy subject to broach, because research has shown that almond farmers can actually get higher yields using water-saving irrigation techniques like micro-irrigation. Fertilizer use is more difficult, because without a market for cutting the emissions released from fertilizer use (similar to what the Environmental Defense Fund is trying to set up with rice farmers) it’s more difficult for growers to see value in risking lower yields.
“When it makes sense to growers, they will adopt it, and they will adopt it pretty quickly,” Ludwig said. “But there has to be a financial reward built into that system, in some way, whether it’s that you get more yield, or less cost, or more money. And that’s really what it comes down to.”