February 2025 Position Report
The February position report was released on March 11th, providing some more insights to further analyze the 2024 crop size, sales, shipments, and the other dynamics that will drive the market going forward.
2024 Crop Receipts
The crop receipts continue the steep decline that has been trending over the last few months. February’s receipts total just 18 million pounds, bringing the total year to date crop receipts to 2.682 billion pounds. This is an 11.3% increase when compared to total receipts through this time last year. Now that all the major hullers in California are done processing, receipts will just trickle in through the rest of the year. Based on historical data over the last few years, it’s safe to assume that the total 2024 crop size will land right around 2.7 billion pounds.
2024 Crop Quality
This season’s weighted inedible average of 3.08% is pretty much final at this point. There won’t be enough pounds received throughout the rest of the year to move the needle in either direction. 2024 was certainly an improvement over last year’s 4.23% inedible, but it’s still quite a bit higher than the sub 2% inedible that we saw in the years prior to 2023.
Shipments
Total shipments for the month were 214.9 million pounds, this is a decrease of 2.8% when compared to last year. Export shipments came to 158.8 million pounds, which is down 2.2% form last year. Domestic shipments landed at 56.2 million pounds, down 4.4% from last year. Year-to-date shipments now total 1.588 billion pounds. This is within 1% of last year’s shipments through February. If the industry continues to maintain our current monthly shipping average of 226.9 million pounds per month, we will ship just over 2.7 billion pounds. Once the “Loss & Exempt” pounds get factored in, we should end up with a carryout between 450-500 million pounds.
Sales
New sales for the month were 220.8 million pounds compared to 214.6 million pounds sold last February. The industry’s overall sold position is 68.8% compared to a sold position of 69.8% at this time last year. Monthly sales have remained strong thus far and demand is expected to remain steady going forward.
2025 Bloom
As of writing this report, the 2025 bloom is drawing to a close and it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows this year. The bee population was down this year causing some growers to struggle to get all their contracted hives. On top of that, the blossom count per tree varied greatly from orchard to orchard, and variety to variety. The most notable example of this is how light the nonpareils look, which makes up 38% of the almonds grown in California. It’s still too early to start estimating the 2025 crop, but at this point we aren’t seeing any indications that 2025 would be a larger crop than 2024.
Market Summary
Overall, this was a strong report and shows that California is continuing to move the crop at a rate that will keep the carryout at a manageable level. We have some good momentum on our side and should see prices increase by a few cents following the industry digesting the info in this report. Almost everything looks good for California almonds going forward. The one concern is what impact the tariffs and global politics will have on our industry. Harris Woolf is monitoring the situation daily and as things develop.
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