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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Dark Side of Almond Use
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/almonds-demon-nuts/379244/The only state that produces almonds commercially is California, where cool winter and mild springs let almond trees bloom. Eighty-two percent of the worlds almonds come from California. The U.S. is the leading consumer of almonds by far. California so controls the almond market that the Almond Board of Californias website is almonds.com. Its twitter handle is @almonds. (Almost everything it tweets is about almonds.)
Californias almonds constitute a lucrative multibillion dollar industry in a fiscally tenuous state that is also, as you know, in the middle of the worst drought in recent history. The drought is so dire that experts are considering adding a fifth level to the four-tiered drought scale. That's right: D5. But each almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce, as Alex Park and Julia Lurie at Mother Jones reported earlier this year, and 44 percent more land in California is being used to farm almonds than was 10 years ago.
That raises ecological concerns like, as NPRs Alastair Bland reported last weekend, that thousands of endangered king salmon in northern Californias Klamath River are threatened by low water levels because water is being diverted to almond farms. Despite the severe drought, as of June 30, California's Department of Agriculture projected that almond farmers will have their largest harvest to date. If more water is not released into the river soon, Bland reported, the salmon will be seriously threatened by a disease called gill rot. If there's one disease I never want to get, it's gill rot.
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)Waitasec, with all of the peanut butter consumed in this country, and the fact that almond butter is something like 3-5 times more expensive than peanut butter, Americans eat more almonds overall now?
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)sometimes use almond flour (expensive).
So it isn't just eating them like nuts or nut butter.
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)every form of almond always seems expensive to me, and peanut butter has long been a staple for those of us who are trying to keep costs down. I'm just surprised that enough people can afford almond this and that for it to have overtaken peanuts.
MADem
(135,425 posts)Really?
This doesn't seem accurate to me. I used to live in arid Spain, where there was very little rainfall, and no one watered the almond trees--they just grew. And the almonds were delicious.
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)Perhaps it's in the processing of almonds?
MADem
(135,425 posts)Heh, we never "processed" the almonds, we'd shake the tree, get them to fall on a cloth, gather them up and take them home!!!
A HERETIC I AM
(24,380 posts)Edit to add; FWIW, a large percentage of the water goes into the leaves.
Arugula Latte
(50,566 posts)LeftyMom
(49,212 posts)The almond orchards are in parts of the start where excess water is the more typical issue. Near the rice farming areas, ffs.
Brother Buzz
(36,478 posts)Row crops use a LOT of water. Hell, takes 3.3 gallons of water to grow one tomato. Walnuts are falling out of fashion, too; it takes 4.9 gallons of water to grow one walnut.
On a side note: my two almond trees did quite well with just the merger rainfall we had this spring.