Increasing dispersion - tracking California planting trends is getting harder

Part 6 of 10 in a series on the almond and pistachio sectors in California. Download a complete report here and explore the underlying data in a standalone application here.

Across this series, we've documented several shifts in where California's almonds and pistachios are being planted: away from Westlands, toward the Tule sub-basin, northward into the Sacramento Valley. There is also a subtler trend running through the data that is worth flagging: planting activity is becoming more dispersed.

The "other" category is growing

In both irrigation district- and GSA-level data, the catch-all categories - districts and GSAs that individually account for less than 1% of total planting - have been steadily absorbing a larger share.

For almonds, the "other districts" category accounted for roughly 23% of in-district planting in 2010. By 2024, it was above 35%. A similar pattern appears in the data for plantings outside irrigation districts: "Other GSAs" rose from ~13% of outside-district almond planting pre-SGMA to roughly 19% since 2022.

For pistachios, the pattern is noisier year-to-year, but the direction is similar: smaller districts are collectively accounting for a larger share of total planting than they did a decade ago.

Source: Demeter

Implications for tracking the sector

Through the 2000s and into the mid-2010s, California almond and pistachio planting was reasonably concentrated. A handful of large irrigation districts (Westlands, Semitropic, Turlock, Madera, Merced) and a few major groundwater sub-basins accounted for the majority of activity. Tracking five or six locations alone provided a reasonable proxy for where the industry was heading.

That is no longer the case. The traditional large-scale planting destinations - Westlands, Semitropic and others documented earlier in this series - have seen their share decline sharply, and the activity that remains is scattering across a larger number of smaller locations. Each of these individual districts or GSAs may only account for a fraction of a percent, but in aggregate they represent a significant and growing share of the total.

The data does not tell us what is driving this dispersion. It may reflect water constraints, land availability, price competition for parcels in established districts, or some combination. What it does show is that the planting landscape is measurably more fragmented than it was a decade ago, and the trend has been consistent across multiple years and both crops.

For anyone trying to understand California's almond and pistachio supply trajectory - whether for production forecasting, water resource planning, or investment analysis - this dispersion means that aggregate statewide or even county-level numbers may be increasingly misleading. Interesting signals are emerging at the district and basin level, and they require tracking dozens of locations rather than a handful.

Next in this series: Almond removals: the other side of the planting collapse

You can download a complete report here.