The Beekeeper's Lament (11 page)

Almonds seemed more appealing than another winter among the rattlesnakes. So the Millers started delivering bees to the Thoming orchards in the spring of 1974, and signed on with a few other farmers in the Tracy area. The timing was propitious: the interstate highway system was close to completion, allowing the Millers to move large numbers of bees on trucks. Improved forklift technology allowed the Millers to use pallets to load and unload multiple hives at a time, requiring less backbreaking labor—Miller Honey Farms’ first forklift, a skid-steer 610 Bobcat with a Clark mast, dates to 1973. And more and more farmers were planting almonds, which meant there were more and more people who needed to pay beekeepers for a service that used to be free! As almond demand chased bee supply, pollination prices climbed to around twelve dollars a hive, which even promised a little profit for beekeepers willing to haul their hives to California each spring. It seemed as good a way as any for a beekeeper to spend the last months of winter, and in 1976, Neil bought the family’s current property in Newcastle, east of Sacramento, to serve as a base of operations during the winter months. John moved from Blackfoot to California with his new bride, Jan, in 1978.

S
O NOW
F
EBRUARY IS, IF NOT THE HIGHLIGHT OF
J
OHN
Miller’s beekeeping season, certainly the crux of it. He brings every hive he owns to California; so does almost every commercial beekeeper in the country. It is a spectacle: the miles of unbroken blossom, the panoply of bee rigs jamming the roads, flatbeds and hives and netting and ropes and helpers—rush hour for beekeepers. Miller enjoys a spectacle, so every year during the almond bloom he hosts what he calls the “native migrant tour” to introduce newcomers to the wonders of the bee and the bloom. It’s a simple concept, a bee tourism marketing pitch, of sorts:

I hunt up a couple of gullible naifs for a tour of the almond orchards, and the overall agriculture miracle . . . emphasis on the role of the honey bee.

The first time I joined him on the tour was in February 2006, a week or so after Valentine’s Day, when the bloom begins, and a week or so before the bloom’s peak in late February. Miller picked me up in his red Corvette, transferred me to a large red pickup with a Miller Honey Farms logo on the side, and headed seventy miles south from Sacramento to Modesto—holding forth the entire way, of course. We pulled into a sparse but clean motel just outside Modesto that was humming with beekeepers, bee brokers, and a lot of hired help. In 1983 the Millers had moved their bees from the Thomings’, a half hour west of Modesto, to the east and south side of the valley, where the blocks of almond acreage are larger and more contiguous, thus easier to service. Modesto lies at the center of California’s Central Valley, which lies at the center of California, which lies at the center of the agricultural universe. The area is the most productive farming region in the nation—on earth, in fact. But there is little rural romance here. The valley smells like a brew of fertilizer, chemicals, and manure, and it hosts an eternal ebb and flow of mostly Hispanic migrant workers. Venture along Crows Landing Road, Modesto’s gritty main agricultural strip, and you’ll find taco stands, chicken farms, El Tio Auto Sales, and more tractor dealerships per square mile than anywhere else on the planet, along with flea markets (“You can buy anything you want,” said Miller: “a wet umbrella, a dry umbrella, a dead policeman’s badge”), and of course, acres beyond acres of almond trees. There is no better place to grow almonds. “When God was thinking about almonds,” says Miller, “this was the dirt he made.”

God was selective when he was thinking about almonds: the four-hundred-mile stretch of the Central Valley between Bakersfield in the south and Red Bluff in the north remains the only North American location where almonds can be cultivated for bulk commercial sale. The sandy loam and Mediterranean conditions there are perfect for the mass production of almonds—fifteen to twenty inches of rain a year; dry, hot summers; six hundred annual chilling hours during November and December; mild Januaries and Februaries; well-drained soil; flood irrigation. Farmers here have made a science of the ostensibly natural process of growing the nuts: the trees are planted in an orderly, perfectly spaced, nineteen-by-twenty-foot diamond grid, each tree leaning ever so slightly to the northwest, whence come the most damaging winds. Thanks to extensive research into almond productivity, the grid has grown tighter over the years: in 1985, the standard almond grid was 95 trees per acre; now it’s 135, even 150 trees per acre in some spots. To enhance their survival and output, growers graft cuttings from almond trees—which are, in nature, reedy, delicate flora—onto hardier peach rootstock. Pruning techniques vary among planters—German Baptists, Miller says, prune very vertically. But these days most growers just let the trees grow—the more tree, the more almonds, the more money. The soil is tilled with nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers. The ground under the trees is soaked in herbicides to keep the area beneath the canopies clear. The trees are sprayed with fungicides to combat nasty diseases like jacket rot and ground rot, and with pesticides to combat worm infestations. Then they are soaked in ample water to keep them alive and growing. They begin producing nuts in about five years, reaching peak yield in about ten, and tapering off in about twenty-five.

Almonds are a stone fruit related to cherries, plums, and peaches. The nut meat is the pit; the fuzzy green hull is the fruit. They were served to Egypt’s pharaohs; they receive prominent mention in the Old Testament; their English name derives from the Latin
amygdala
—“tonsil plum.” They have been so widely eaten and traded for so many years that no one knows where they originated. They may have once grown wild on the mountain slopes of central Asia and been dispersed via traders along the Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean region and northern Africa, where the nuts flourished in the hot, arid climate—though some food historians place their origins in the Middle East. Their New World provenance can be situated more precisely—the almond tree traveled to the California coast with Franciscan missionaries in the 1760s, and for two hundred years they fared poorly in the moist weather. Then in the nineteenth century, someone planted an almond orchard in the Central Valley. The trees thrived in the hot, dry climate. By the turn of the twentieth century, almonds had become an important California crop; by the 1950s, they were an industry; by the 1970s, a movement; by the 1990s, a global market force.

Almond season is bracketed by holidays. The bloom begins around Valentine’s Day and the harvest winds down at Halloween. In between, buds form and open into pale whitish pink flowers and then fall, petals covering the orchard floors like snow. Nuts begin to grow in the flowers’ place. As the almonds ripen on the tree, their outer greenish hulls harden and then, in July, crack open, the fissure widening through late summer and early fall to reveal a pale inner shell. Inside the shell sits the oblong brown-skinned kernel—the nut that launched three-quarters of a million acres. The preparation for the harvest begins in early August, when “shakers” come through, knocking the nuts to the orchard floor, where they lie in the sun for a week or two to dry. Before the early 1960s, workers tapped trees with tall mallets to shake the fruit down onto a canvas; now they drive hundred-thousand-dollar trapezoidal tractors with air-conditioned cabs and names like “Shock Wave” that use rubber-coated hydraulic pincers to grip the trunks and jiggle them with a force that has been compared to an earthquake or an electric chair. The machines can strip a tree of nearly every nut in less than a minute.

Next, “sweepers”—low-slung contraptions that look like a cross between a street sweeper and a tank—pass through, using brushes and wheels to push and blow the nuts, leaves, and workers’ discarded lunch wrappers into neat rows between the trees. Then comes the pickup machine, whose belt looks like a vacuum-cleaner rotary. It sucks up the almonds, dirt, leaves, and lunch wrappers, leaving the ground utterly bare but for enormous pluming clouds of dust. By this time, all the trees, grass, fences, irrigation pipes, and roads in the vicinity are covered in a fine loam that hangs in the air for days. The pickup machine deposits its load onto a screen that sifts the dirt and blows off the leaves and lunch wrappers. From there the nuts travel to a processing plant, where they are sorted, piled, fumigated, hulled, shelled, packed, and shipped with the help of a series of elevators, under-rollers, conveyors, perforated sorting trays, nets, blasters, and vacuums. The machines pull off the soft hulls, crack off the shells, and siphon off the remaining dust. Then they grade, size, and weigh the nuts for shipment in one-ton wood containers. Throughout their mechanized odyssey, the nuts are handled with great delicacy—unsullied nuts fetch top dollar at market, while chipped nuts are sold at a discount for baking and product manufacture.

California supplies the vast majority of the world’s almonds, both a pleasant accident of geography—the valley’s superlative climate and soil—and a purposeful result of the industry’s remarkable productivity. Almonds are California’s leading agricultural export—ahead of raisins, lettuce, avocados, strawberries, and cattle. They book more than twice the revenues of the state’s wine exports. In recent years, the nut has become ludicrously profitable. Almond ranchers break even if their almonds sell for more than a dollar a pound wholesale. In 2005 they sold for three times that price, grossing California growers somewhere around $3 billion. Since then the price has fluctuated at around $2.50 a pound. The last decade has produced for the industry what almond farmer Dan Cummings, who manages several thousand acres of almonds and walnuts in the Sacramento Valley and serves on the Almond Board of California, has called a “perfect storm”—the good kind, this time. Almonds grew in popularity, especially in Europe; the euro appreciated; and competing nut prices stayed high.

It’s no surprise, then, that record almond profits, combined with depressed prices for other crops that also grow on land suited for almonds, have enticed a lot of Central Valley farmers to plow over their cotton, wine grapes, peaches, and apricots and plant more almonds. Growing almonds makes perfect sense for a farmer seeking to maximize his profit and minimize his labor costs and headaches. Nut crops command high value at market. They are less perishable than most fruits and vegetables. They can be harvested mechanically, unlike such stone fruits as peaches, which must be handpicked. Almond acreage has increased from 400,000 acres in the 1990s to 800,000 today (with around 740,000 actually producing nuts), pushing harvest totals from 236 million pounds twenty years ago to nearly 1.4 billion in 2009. Those observing the frenzy have taken to calling it the “almond rush,” as every sane and sensible farmer in the region has planted himself a diamond grid. “We make our determinations on what we plant by the highest and best use of the land,” Cummings told me. “And it’s almonds.”

When I traveled with Miller to Modesto that first time, we drove to a high point in the middle of an almond orchard. From there we could see nothing but almonds. Mile after monocropped mile of pale pink petals extended from the western horizon to the eastern mountains—a monumental reshaping of the landscape—grass- and shrubland eclipsed by a bloom so enormous you could certainly glimpse it from space. Along the superhighways, new almond trees abounded, foot-tall, diamond-gridded grafts stretching cheerfully toward the three-dollar-a-pound future, staking out roadside real estate in intense competition with the equally rootless strip malls and stucco-encrusted housing developments that had sprouted across the landscape in the previous decade. The almond boom, like the real estate boom, had created its own sprawl; it had also generated remarkable wealth. On the back roads near Modesto, it was easy to spot an almond rancher’s home amid the tin roofs, tired siding, and dusty driveways that pass for typical farm structures in that part of the world. The almond-funded homes were hand-plastered and mansard-roofed, their paver-laid driveways invariably lined with palm trees. Miller likes to draw a graph of the rise of “cabins owned by almond guys” at Lake Tahoe from 1970 to the present—a soaring diagonal, approaching infinity. Meanwhile, says Miller, “bee guys don’t even have time-shares.” Miller regularly gets calls from almond farmers on their yachts in the Sea of Cortez and at backcountry heli-ski lodges in British Columbia. Miller went on a Caribbean cruise once ten years ago; “about every other year we’ll go to some Jed Clampett time-share.” That’s about all the adventure travel he can cop to. “If you enjoy playing golf,” LeRoy Brant, a bee broker and friend of Miller’s, told me as we ate breakfast in Modesto, “don’t become a beekeeper.” Better, by a long shot, to be an almond grower.

In 1950, a consortium of almond farmers formed the Almond Board of California to combine grower resources for marketing and research. At the time, U.S. growers produced 50 million pounds of almonds and claimed 17 percent of the world market; Spain commanded 75 percent of global almond sales. Today California boasts an 80 percent market share. Almond economics have defied the laws of gravity. Typically, a large supply of a product will mean a drop in prices for farmers who sell it—hence the regular price supports for staples like corn, cotton, and soybeans, of which we often produce too much. But not just anyone can grow an almond—you need a specific climate and soil, a large investment to get the trees growing, and five years of patience and funding before they begin to bear. Those who can do it are amply rewarded, because in the almond world these days, there is no such thing as too much. Thus far, more nuts has simply meant more money. Even at the trough of the global recession of 2008 and 2009, almond sales set a record. Growers shipped 10 percent more in 2009 than they had the previous year. The almond was one of the few products, agricultural or otherwise, that continued to boom as the rest of the economy went bust. It was, apparently, the bulletproof nut.

The Almond Board has displayed remarkable marketing savvy in its campaign to increase demand. It has commissioned and advertised a number of studies touting the health benefits of almonds. Such campaigns have been credited for much of the increase in domestic demand, though the majority of Central Valley almonds today are still shipped overseas. The largest market is in Europe, but almond sales have also soared in India and China, where the Almond Board once deliberated over whether to rename the nut. The Chinese call it
xingren
—“apricot kernel”—and the board felt a less bitter-sounding moniker might boost sales. It toyed with names like “vitality nut,” “good fortune nut,” and “big California
xingren
” before deciding that continuing sales growth in China didn’t warrant a name change. Exports to China had more than doubled from 2008 to 2009. And “apricot kernel” is, after all, a discernible linguistic improvement over “tonsil plum.”