Bountiful

For decades, experts have done their best to estimate the size of California’s almond crop prior to harvest. With the state producing most of the world’s supply, the global market rises and falls with the fate of the Central Valley crop. Expectation of a shortage can stoke competition among buyers and raise prices, while a large crop forecast can achieve the opposite. “It affects many lives,” said Jasbir Sidhu, who grows almonds in Fresno and Madera counties. But the expansion of California’s almond industry, which brought greater variation from one orchard to the next, made it harder to forecast statewide yields by sampling a subset of orchards. In December, the Almond Board of California’s directors voted to stop funding a key forecast provided for decades by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Instead, the industry is looking to private entities to find new ways to estimate the crop. While counting nuts may not be rocket science, some firms have leveraged experience in aerospace engineering—using technologies such as remote sensing and machine learning—to forecast crop yields. Read more in Ag Alert: bit.ly/4dUWJ16 #News #AgAlert #CAFarmBureau #Almonds #CentralValley #RemoteSensing #YieldForecast #Orchards