Beginning in 2019, the Almond Board of California (ABC) began an annual mapping process with two acreage summaries, one delivered in April and one delivered in November, during the same production year. The Land IQ April delivery informs and aligns with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) – National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) California Almond Forecast, which is an initial subjective forecast for acreage and yield.
Land IQ draws upon on multiple lines of evidence including agronomic and remote sensing knowledge, unique field boundaries, robust on-the-ground verification, customized image analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to classify almond orchards.
For each mapped year, Land IQ performs the following steps:
Imagery Acquisition
Irrigated Field Boundary Delineation
Ground Truthing
Remote Sensing Analysis
Change Analysis and Update
The initial bearing acreage estimate released on April 27 is for the 2023 production year (September 1, 2022 - August 31, 2023) and utilizes the spatial mapping from 2022. Removed orchards have been determined through spatial analysis as of March 31, 2023. Understanding that removals are occurring year-round, a numerical estimate of orchards to be removed based on historical analyses and present conditions from April 1, 2023 through August 31,2023 is also included.
As a result, the 2023 initial estimates are:
1,366,362 acres of bearing almonds
77,714 acres of removed almonds
Both bearing acreage and removals will be updated for the final 2023 total acreage estimate to be delivered in November 2023. It should be noted that bearing acreage may be adjusted slightly (+/- 1-3%) following summer 2023 ground truthing verification. Any change will mostly likely affect acreage transitioning from non-bearing in 2022 to bearing in 2023, thus the impact on estimates of overall production volume should be considered negligible.
Read more about the 2023 acreage estimate or click here to view the Almond Industry Maps.