The Oversupply of Walnuts is Putting Downward Pressure on Price

Mike Poindexter is CEO of a Poindexter Nut Company in Selma. He said, it's going to take a little work to get the supply levels down, so the price goes up.

“It's going to go through a rough patch. One thing that we need to do, I think on the supply side is there are some old orchards that need to go.

And some of these old orchards are being pushed out from place to place. “Yeah, but they're not going fast enough. We need to go through in the next two years and rip out every single orchard that needs to go. I mean, what's the point? Why are we holding on to them? And they need to go,” explained Poindexter.

I remember somebody talking about this in regards to the raisin industry. They used to talk about what's the harvesting capacity? What's the trucking capacity? What's the receiving capacity? And then they were talking about what is the bulldozer capacity because they were pushing out grapes so fast,” noted Poindexter.

“What is the capacity to push out all those vineyards? We're not at that kind of stage on walnuts, but there is a limit to how fast you can push out walnuts because it's very cost intensive to replant a walnut orchard, a lot of work in general. You're going to follow that up with, uh, another permanent crop and it's not cheap either,” he said