September is harvest time for Pistachios in California and at Terra Firma — along with dozens of other crops of course. We’re getting ready for that task here this week, and plan to start on it next week.
Unfortunately, TFF subscribers won’t be seeing any of our 2025 pistachios in their boxes any time soon. If that makes you sad, well, it makes me even sadder. We have a bumper crop of nuts on the trees.
This is not a story of a weather disaster, insect infestation, or fungal outbreak. It’s a story of consolidation in food processing and unintended consequences of well-meaning regulation.
Terra Firma is not a big producer of pistachios in the grand scheme of California agriculture, but we’re not exactly tiny, either. We have 35 acres of certified organic pistachios, representing over 10% of the land we farm. But pistachios are a capital-intensive crop. They require expensive harvesting equipment to shake the nuts and catch them before they fall on the ground — and highly specialized machinery to remove the outer hulls, dry the nuts, sort them and finally to roast them.
Since our first pistachio crop in 2005, we were able to work with a local farmer who harvested, hulled and dried the pistachios. But finding a processor to handle the additional steps of sorting, roasted, and packaging the nuts for was never easy. Most growers simply sell their crop to the processor, but we wanted to get them back to sell them ourselves. Understandably, the processors don’t want to deal with the headache of doing this. And while there are no organically prohibited materials used during the processing, in 2010 our organic certifier decided that our nuts must be processed by a facility that was certified organic — making our task even more difficult.
An additional hurdle was added when new food safety regulations came out in 2015. We found a processor in Fresno who was both certified organic and certified for food safety, but after a few years, they decided it simply wasn’t cost-effective for them to continue.
In 2022, the farmer who had always harvested our crop went bankrupt. We bought an old harvester and borrowed a shaker from a neighbor, but we still had no idea what we were going to do with what looked like a bumper crop of nuts in 2023.
We found a large organic processor who was willing to buy the nuts from us. They were willing to sell us back certified organic pistachios, but they wouldn’t be from our orchards. Then just two weeks prior to harvest they let us know they didn’t need any organic pistachios. They would “take the nuts off our hands”, but pay conventional prices: less than half what we were accustomed to receiving.
I try to end most of my newletters on at least somewhat of a positive note, but it’s tough with this story. We didn’t have a pistachio crop last year, as the trees tend to “alternate bear” with a heavy year followed by a light one. But this year’s very heavy crop will once again get sold for conventional prices, and we won’t get any of them back from the processor. The last pistachios you received, harvested in 2022, were the last of our certified organic crop.
We haven’t given up entirely on having certified organic, TFF-grown pistachios in your boxes. There is another small grower who is building a processing facility who may be interested in becoming certified organic. But for the foreseeable future, we won’t have any to share with you. As I said earlier, that makes me at least as sad as it probably makes you.
Thanks,
Pablito