The California Walnut Market Having a Tough Time

Gary Hester owns Hester orchards in Visalia and custom farms for many other growers throughout Tulare County and beyond. Hester comments on the Walnut market.

“The market has been a really poor for the last several years. We saw it stabilize a little bit last year and we're hoping that we can see an upward trend. We'll believe it when we see it,” said Hester. We still have to keep things in context. We still have last year's crop, that we haven't been paid in full for. So we're working with last year's crop on this year's marketing prices,” he said.

Hester noted that hopefully that demand will increase and then stabilize.

“Of course, the world conditions and situations right now are not lending themselves to that at this point in time. But hopefully we'll get through this too,” he said.

Hester said is not that they don't have really good markets around the world.

“Well, we'll go into Europe, China, obviously within the continental United States, which is the walnuts industry's biggest market. And there's Turkey lot of product goes in and it’s shelled in Turkey.

And buying walnuts are not top in everybody's mind when they get to the grocery store these days. “You know, it's always difficult to sell food products that aren't absolute staples.

Making things worse that moving walnuts even in the U S is difficult right now. “Our transportation's been shut down because of the Corona virus that's out there,” he explained.