Record Pistachio Crop Coming This Season

California pistachios are in their bloom period for the 2020 production year, It’s an on-year for pistachios and it’s an expected crop is 1.2 billion pounds a record. Jimmy Valov is a pistachio grower in Kings and Tulare County and he's busy getting that crop to a good start.

“We put our first bloom spray on of boron and copper if it needs it. And the Golden Hills are always the first ones. We started planting Golden Hills in 2007 to help the processing side of the industry, so we wouldn't be clustering everything at one time with the Kerman variety. So the Golden Hills seemed to be seven to 10 days earlier and we spray them first. They're always the first to bloom. And then the Kermans follow right behind that,” said Valov.

“So we're just finishing up right before we got this big rains last week where we got an inch and a quarter,” he said.

And of course pistachios need a certain amount of winter chill hours in order to get back into production in the spring.

“Yeah, we're a thousand hours, I think we're going to be fine on chill. So we were a little concerned there for a little while, but we got an extra little burst of cold weather, which helped us out tremendously. But the loads look very impressive,” said Valov. “Now, I don't know if they're going to be blanks or if they're going to be good nuts, but I think with a thousand hours we ought to be fine,” he said.