In the central San Joaquin Valley, the season's damage began before most orchard work looked dramatic. A March temperature spike arrived during pistachio pollination, when a few hot days can matter more than a long summer of ordinary heat.
The result is a tree nut year that is smaller on paper and more complicated in the orchard. California's pistachio crop is now projected to fall from 1.6 billion pounds to about 1 billion pounds, according to AgNet West's report.
A Short Window for Pistachio Pollination
Pistachios do not need a calendar reminder to flower, but they do depend on the weather behaving during a narrow window. The March heat disrupted pollination across the central San Joaquin Valley, leaving orchards with losses that county officials in Kern and Fresno measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Kern County reported a 56% pistachio crop loss valued at $396 million, while Fresno County estimated roughly $400 million in losses tied to poor pollination, the Fresno Bee reported. Those figures give the season a physical scale: not just fewer bins at the end of harvest, but a large amount of orchard potential that never became nuts.
John Duarte of Duarte Nurseries describes the combination of warm weather and lower yields as a challenging production year for tree nut growers. The problem arrives with the usual expenses still attached—orchard passes, irrigation, labor and harvest logistics—while the crop side of the ledger has thinned.
Almonds Enter Harvest With Less Margin
Almond yields are also coming in below expectations across California. An early-season heat event reduced the size of the expected 2026 crop, with the USDA forecast discussed by FreshPlaza based on grower phone surveys rather than a later field count.
That distinction matters in an orchard. A forecast can describe the crop from the roadside; harvest receipts eventually describe what made it through the shaker, huller and sheller. For almond operations, the gap between those two descriptions will affect packing plans, delivery timing and the amount of production available to cover fixed costs.
Pistachio growers face the same accounting problem in a crop whose final quality and volume become clearer only as harvest advances. A smaller crop may simplify some handling, but it does not erase the costs already committed to the orchard.
For California tree nut operations, the practical question now shifts from estimating the spring injury to managing the harvest that remains. Almond and pistachio growers will need county-level yield information, processor schedules and their own block records to separate a broad weather effect from differences in variety, site and orchard condition.
The almond harvest typically wraps up in October, making the close of the 2026 harvest the next useful checkpoint for comparing early forecasts with actual deliveries. Until then, the spring heat remains visible mostly as missing nuts—an absence that becomes harder to ignore every time a bin is weighed.