Almond outlook rebounding after drought, floods, market glut

This year's almond crop is set to be about 60 per cent bigger than the weather-battered Australian harvest of 2023.

Global prices for the world's second most popular nut are on the up, too.

For a decade almonds were one of our fastest growing agricultural investing and crop expansion stories, but the past few years have belted growers and processors with high input costs, bad weather, poor crops, a global glut and retreating investor activity.

Although more orchard plantings had matured for harvest last year, Australia's total yield fell at least 25pc below 2022's result.

This year's harvest, now underway in southern NSW, northern Victoria and South Australia, is set to yield about 164,000 tonnes.

That's way up from a modest 23,000t 17 years ago, which by 2019 had grown to 100,000t, despite serious drought and irrigation water shortages and temporary water prices hitting $800 a megalitre.

Market prospects for this season's bigger and better quality Australian crop are much improved thanks to declining global stockpiles, India's decision to cut import tariffs and US yields being depleted by a poor pollination season and weather problems in 2023.

Rabobank has tipped global almond production in 2023-24 would be 15pc down on the 2020-21 record when a market oversupply coincided with shipping bottlenecks and weaker demand during the COVID pandemic.

"One swallow doesn't make a summer, but the mood across the industry is definitely much more positive now," said Amaretto Almonds chief executive officer, James Campbell.

"At the risk of sounding like a bad country music song, where the crop fails, the wife leaves home and the dog dies, it certainly has been a very challenging period.

"At least we're now looking forward to a more normalised situation around prices."

Amaretto Almonds is owned by UK agribusiness investment funding group, Cibus, and its partner investors.

Back in 2019, Amaretto's strategy was to triple its 1000 hectares of established and newly planted trees, but those plans were blown off course by the pandemic and the global market crash.

Cross border movement restrictions made life awkward for Amaretto workers moving between their homes and the Noraleigh orchard on the Murray River at Tooleybuc in NSW and another at Lake Powell near Robinvale, Victoria - and even harder for management stuck in Sydney.

COVID also cooled investment interest in the almond sector, particularly from overseas.

The pandemic restricted global shipping movements and the accompanying economic slowdown undermined almond prices just as Californian crop volumes and stocks peaked.

Although eastern Australia's post drought irrigation water costs fell back to earth in 2020, successive years of skyrocketing farm fertiliser, chemical, machinery and other input expenses forced Amaretto to be highly focused on cost management.

Mr Campbell said strategies have centred on fine tuning input spending to maximise the long term needs of trees and improve water use efficiency, while deferring non-priority investment and maintenance.

However, those efforts were not enough to weather the impact of an unusually cool, wet 2022-23 growing season, plus orchard flooding, and the border lockdowns disrupting critical pollination services which followed last year's varroa mite outbreak in NSW bee hives.

Nut producers across south eastern Australia suffered yield slumps of 20pc to 30pc.

"Almonds are generally regarded as a high input, high return industry, but for the past two years everyone has been operating on returns below the cost of production," Mr Campbell told NSW Farm Writers' Association last week.

Fortunately, however, prospects looked to be rebounding.

Global stockpiles were now equivalent to just six weeks' supply with stocks of unsold US crop tipped to end the current marketing year below 500 million pounds for the first time in several seasons.

"Buyers are taking renewed positional interest in our crops," he said.

"I think we will see more sustained increases in price. We're looking at around $7.50 to $8 a kilogram."

While well below the $10/kg territory enjoyed last decade, a price above $7.50/kg would be welcomed in Australia after lows closer to $5/kg in recent times.

Last year Australia's biggest almond producer and processor, Select Harvests, averaged about $6.20 for its entire crop.

Rabobank has also pointed to margin improvements for producers, thanks to lower input prices, including affordable water, plus improving export values.

Rabobank associate analyst, Pia Piggott, noted exports accounted for about 80pc of the crop.

"The reduction of tariffs on Australian almonds to India has prompted significant growth in trade to the region, with volumes up 140pc year-on-year from March to November 2023," she said.

"Shipments in the marketing year to November were up 8pc in volume, exceeding the crop size for 2023, which is resulting in a significant reduction in carry-out volume."

However, in China, Australia's largest export destination, sluggish economic conditions had softened consumer demand and exports fell 32pc in the March to November period.

"Fortunately, growth in other markets and in domestic sales have been positive as Australia continues to diversify its export destinations," Ms Piggott said.

Despite global production returning to higher levels, and likely to hit new records in the next five years, Rabobank forecasted a strong rebound in international almond prices in the next 12 to 18 months.