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Dear HWA Growers,

The October 2020 Position Report was released Thursday November 12th. The industry was expecting another strong report, but shipments for this past month have surpassed what many in the industry thought was possible. Overall shipments have set a new record for the third month in a row and made October 2020 the new overall record for any month in history.

The year to date crop receipts are now 1,810,654,910 pounds. The gap between the 2019 and crop 2020 has closed slightly this month, in September there was a 25.39% gap and now it is down to 13.86% when compared to the October’s 2019 receipts of 1,590,261,712 pounds. At this point we still don’t have enough information to know where the crop is going to land, so it looks like the debate of whether or not the crop will be more or less than 3.0 billion pounds will have to continue for the next few months.

Total shipments for the month were 309.68 million pounds and the first time that overall shipments surpassed the 300-million-pound mark. The increase is 16.6% over last year’s 265.50 million pounds. Export shipments were 235.92 million pounds, which is up 16.2% from last year. Domestic shipments came in at 73.76 million pounds, up 17.0% from last October.

New sales slowed down a little this month, but still landed at a respectable 250 million pounds. This brings the total 2020 crop sold percentage to 53.0% based on a 3.0-billion-pound crop.

Overall, this was an extremely strong report and pre-2020 logic would say that prices should see a healthy bump going forward. Sadly, this has been our third strong report in a row and the best we can hope for is pricing to stabilize and maybe see a few cents increase. California has done a great job moving the crop so far, but we still have a long road ahead and many hurdles to get over. COVID-19 cases seem to be spiking and Europe is going into another lockdown, there is a container shortage that we are starting to feel the effects of, and the industry could run into a lack of storage if shipments start to slow down. We should know where pricing lands early next week. If reports like this cannot move the needle, then I am not sure what will this season.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to your Grower Representatives.

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