AlmondBeat Report (California): The trees said it in June. Our growers heard it.

This year’s smaller crop did not surprise everyone.

On Phytech blocks, trunk growth flattened in the first week of June as the developing crop pulled the tree’s energy away from growth — an early, block-by-block sign of how hard each tree was working to fill. Growers watching those curves had the whole summer to act on it, steering water block by block as each tree showed how it was balancing its crop, instead of managing to a single number or waiting on the scale. In a season with no official in-season measurement, that was not a crop forecast — it was a live view of what each block was doing while there was still time to change it.

The hullers are telling us what the receipts already show. Kernel sizes are running small across the valley, yields in Nonpareil and Independence are variable by region, and the weights coming in point to a 2026 crop below 2025. As pollinizer volume moves through processing, that picture will likely firm up further.

None of it arrived without warning.

Early in the season, University of California researchers pointed out that the heat after bloom in March would cut short the time kernels have to fill, and a shorter fill means smaller, lighter nuts. Blue Diamond repeated that warning in its July report and added what it was seeing in the field: the crop was maturing about ten days ahead of normal everywhere, hull split started on early Nonpareil and Independence in mid-June, and conditions varied widely from block to block, mostly with crop load and nutrition.

So by July, the industry knew why the crop could come in small, knew the season was running early, and knew results would vary block to block. What it did not have was a measurement: nothing that showed how the crop was actually filling, orchard by orchard, while there was still time to act.

In December 2025, the Almond Board of California voted to stop funding the United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service Objective Measurement report, the July estimate that had historically provided a second look at the crop based on physical orchard sampling. The May Subjective Forecast, built from grower opinion collected April 21 to May 6, became the only official estimate for the 2026 crop. That survey closed before kernel fill had finished anywhere in California. From that point until the first loads crossed a scale in late August, the industry had no measured, in-season read on what the crop was actually doing.

Growers on Phytech did. Here is what their trees were telling them while everyone else waited on the scale.

Across our California almond blocks, the 2026 season opened about four weeks earlier than 2025 — median Nonpareil dormancy exit moved from early April to early March — and daily trunk growth flattened into the fill plateau by the first week of June. Fill then finished about a week earlier than 2025, consistent with the ten-days-ahead maturity observed in the field.

The pattern was not uniform, and that was the signal. The gap between our strongest and weakest blocks through the fill window widened for a third straight year — the strongest blocks still adding girth while the weakest lost it, the same block-by-block variability the hullers are now reporting.

Different regions and varieties took different paths through fill. Sacramento Valley pollinizers such as Monterey saw the most heat inside the fill window and the sharpest rise in block-to-block variability. Wood Colony and Butte in the southern San Joaquin paired that heat with higher, more variable growth. Sonora and Aldrich ran the shortest fill windows. And Independence, reported separately from Nonpareil, showed the steepest decline in fill-window trunk growth of any major variety.

Here is why the trunk carries the signal first.

A tree’s trunk expands and contracts a little every day, and our dendrometers record that movement hourly, in microns. The number we watch most closely is daily growth — the net change in trunk diameter over the day. Trunk growth is fed by the sugars and energy the tree allocates to its roots and woody tissue, so it is a direct, continuous readout of the tree’s vegetative activity: how much the tree is investing in its own structure.

Through kernel fill, that vegetative activity meets its competition. As the crop develops, the kernels become a major sink, drawing the tree’s sugars and energy toward the fruit and away from root and trunk growth. When the fruit load takes over, trunk growth slows and flattens — and the timing and depth of that flattening reflect how heavily the tree is carrying and how fast a hot, accelerated season is pushing it. That shift registers in the trunk weeks before it is visible in the canopy, and months before anything crosses a scale.

That matters now, not only in hindsight.

The crop that just came off set next year’s starting position. Post-harvest is when the tree rebuilds reserves and sets bud for 2027, and it is the easiest irrigation window in the season to underdo, because the visible urgency is gone. A tree that spent August finishing a crop under stress needs that water back before dormancy, and the trunk will tell you whether it is getting it.

It matters again next spring. This year’s small kernels trace back to the heat that followed bloom in March, and nothing guarantees 2027 will be cooler. If it isn’t, the same squeeze will show up in the trunk by early June — early enough to move water toward the blocks carrying the most crop and hold stress off them through fill. The growers who watched fill tighten this year now have 2026 on record: when their season opened, when fill began to squeeze, and which blocks held through it. That is the baseline they will judge 2027 against.

The next fill window opens on the same calendar for everyone — and this year it opened in early March. A sensor has to be on the tree before the season starts to catch it. If you want your own blocks on record when 2027 opens, reply to this note and we’ll set a time to walk them with you.