Off-Year For Pistachios Will Be Big

Off-Year For Pistachios Will Be Big

Patrick Cavanaugh
Patrick Cavanaugh
It's technically an off year coming up for American pistachios, but it could be a big one, noted Richard Matoian, the executive director of the American Pistachio Growers, a nonprofit agricultural trade association based in Fresno.

“We're coming off our record-breaking billion-pound crops from 2020. That was our largest crop in history,” noted Matoian. “And now that we're coming into 2021, the pistachios, as they always are, will be alternate bearing. So, we expect an of-year this year. So, we initially expected lesser production than what we experienced in 2020,” he said.

Matoian said that there’s been a lot of pistachios planted, and now a lot of those trees are coming into bearing years.

“We should expect to see the record breaking both on year, like we did last year, as well as an off-year record crop. We just have a tremendous amount of acres that have been planted over the last 10 to 15 years, and now they're all coming into production or coming into full production,” noted Matoian. “We should see some large crops in the next number of years. In fact, we've estimated as American Pistachio Growers that we should hit 1.4 billion pounds by 2024.”

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