Measuring the Almond Orchard 2025 Goals

Measuring the Almond Orchard 2025 Goals

Patrick Cavanaugh
Patrick Cavanaugh
By 2025, the California almond community wants to reduce the amount of water used to grow a pound of Almonds by 20%; use more environmentally-friendly crop protection products, and reduce dust during harvest. It's all a part of the California Almond Sustainability Program (CASP).

Eric Harris is senior director of science and sustainability with SureHarvest the technical advisor to the Almond Board of California to help develop the sustainability program.

Harris said measuring the adoption of the goals is important. “Yeah, it is impressive in terms of the industry’s commitment towards the 2025 almond orchard goal, but also in terms of the approach to measuring it, to ensure that it can be substantiated and justified with the statistically valid data that we have through the CASP platform,” he said.

And the CASP participation numbers are impressive. “The number that we commonly cite is around 22% of almond orchards in California has done some type of assessment on the online platform,” said Harris. “And that represents almost half, about 45%, of organizations in the state,” he said.

“An organization might have multiple orchard blocks and maybe one of those has been assessed on the platform. Maybe another one hasn't, but it's a considerable, almost a quarter of orchards has had a direct assessment on the platform representing almost half of all organizations in the state, which again is an impressive number in terms of participation in a program like this,” he noted.

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