In a record year for Fresno County agriculture, there’s a new crop in the top spot
Grapes grown for eating, and making raisins and wine or juice in 2022 regained their top spot as the most valuable crop produced in Fresno County, surpassing almonds for the first time since 2012.
The estimated gross value of the grape crop last year was more than $1.2 billion, according to the 2022 county crop report released this week by the Fresno County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office. Almonds dropped to second place on the county’s Top 10 list, with gross production value of just over $1.1 billion.
While grapes and almonds both saw their values fall compared to 2021, Fresno County still set a record value of crops and commodities of almost $8.1 billion in 2022 – an increase of about $10 million over the previous year, Melissa Cregan, the county’s agricultural commissioner, said Tuesday as she presented the report to the Fresno County Board of Supervisors.
“Every year we have a certain number of commodities that go up a little bit, certain that go down,” Cregan said.
The complete top 10 crops or commodities were:
Grapes, $1.24 billion.
Almonds, $1.14 billion.
Pistachios, $705.9 million.
Milk, $655.1 million.
Poultry, including chickens, ducks, geese, game birds, turkeys and eggs, $538.3 million.
Cattle and calves, $488.3 million.
Tomatoes, $429.3 million.
Peaches, $368.4 million.
Garlic, $351.9 million.
Mandarins, $240.7 million.
Cregan noted that the estimated values reflect the gross production value of each commodity, and not overall profit for farmers and ranchers because the figures do not take into account the expenses that go into producing the crop or commodity.
Much of the variation in crop values between 2021 and 2022 are due to year-to-year price fluctuations; to a lesser degree, changes in acreages are also a factor.
The number of acres producing almonds in 2022, for example, rose by more than 15,000 in Fresno County from 2021, while the overall estimated gross value of the almond crop dipped by almost $219 million from one year to the next. Almond prices fell by almost $600 per ton from 2021 to 2022.
The productive acreage of grapes fell by about 3,400 from 2021 to 2022. Raisin prices dipped by about $460 per ton from 2021 to 2022, but prices rose slightly for grapes sold for canning or crushing and for table grapes.
A wide variety of crops produced
The report covers more than 180 different types of crops, livestock and commodities, including 77 valued at more than $1 million each, Cregan said. “Fresno County continues to supply the highest quality of food and fiber nationwide and abroad,” she said, “exporting 89 unique commodities to more than 90 countries around the world.” The five nations to which the greatest number of shipments were sent were Canada, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Cregan added.
Fresno County’s bounty regularly ranks it at or near the top of the most productive agricultural counties in the U.S. “Obviously the productivity we have here is found in very few other places,” Fresno County Farm Bureau CEO Ryan Jacobsen told county supervisors Tuesday. “This is a time for us to celebrate all that we do have in our backyard.”
Jacobsen, who farms grapes in the Easton area south of Fresno, reminded the board that while 2022 represented a record value of crops, it was far from a banner year for farmers and ranchers.
“It was a third year of drought here in the Valley,” he said. “It followed that very painful 2021, which is arguably one of the worst years we’ve had on record” with zero allocations of water for irrigation from state and federal projects for western Fresno County. “The bounty of this year can easily make you forget what happened, but farmers did struggle once again.”
Last year “will also be remembered for the many extraordinary increases in our input costs, such as energy, crop protection tools, machinery and so much more,” Jacobsen added. Farmers and ranchers are at the mercy of sometimes-wild swings in the market prices that their crops or commodities can command, but they cannot avoid increases in their production costs. “Therefore they don’t pass on those prices in the global agricultural economy that we play in,” he said.
The changing nature of Fresno County agriculture
For most of the past half-century, grapes were the No. 1 crop in Fresno County, reaching the top spot for 36 years between 1970 and 2011, occasionally knocked off the perch by cotton.
But the character of crops planted in the county has changed significantly in recent decades.
In 1981, for example, more than 450,000 acres of land in Fresno County was planted with cotton. Since that time, however, the acreage has trended lower. In 2022, cotton acreage reached its lowest point since 1970, dipping to fewer than 37,000 acres – or only about 8% of its high-water mark 41 years earlier.
Grape acreage was less than 200,000 throughout the 1970s, hitting a low point of less than 144,000 acres in 1973. That was still enough acres of vines to keep grapes as the most valuable crop in that particular year. In 2012, the last time grapes were the most valuable crop, a record 255,000 acres were planted with grapevines. That’s been generally shrinking over the past decade, dipping to fewer than 170,000 acres in 2022.
Almonds, in the meantime, experienced a meteoric rise in acreage, climbing from fewer than 6,500 acres in 1970 to an all-time high of almost 303,000 acres last year.
The county has also seen increases in the number of cattle for beef and dairy purposes combined, from about 400,500 in 1970 to more than 605,000 last year. Milk production over the same 52-year period has grown almost five-fold: from just over 5 million hundredweight – a hundredweight is 100 pounds – in 1970 to nearly 25 million in 2022.
