PRESIDENT’S CORNER
2020 Final Crop Return This summer’s drought and continued COVID-19-related challenges have certainly tested the resilience of your Blue Diamond co-op and proven our collective tenacity to overcome. Despite supply chain and global shipping challenges over the last year, California almond industry shipments remained strong with an increase of 526 million pounds from the 2019 crop. Contributing to that success, our Global Ingredients sales increased by 36% to profitably move our record handle. I’m incredibly proud of the co-op’s hard work, including SVP Global Ingredients, Bill Morecraft, who has announced he will retire in December after 35 years with Blue Diamond. We are grateful for Bill’s leadership and legacy. I know most of you are currently deep in harvest and while the 2021 crop is not expected to be as large as last year’s, it will, nevertheless, be a significant one. I’m confident we’ve proven as a co-op that we can effectively receive, process, and market whatever size crop our growers entrust us to handle. As almonds are coming in, we’re starting to see that this year’s challenge may not be the size of the crop, but the size of the kernel impacted by trees stressed by higher temperatures and insufficient water during the growing season. Whatever the challenge, I assure you that our mission remains to maximize returns to you, our growers. One of the strengths of our Blue Diamond cooperative is the breadth of our product portfolio. Because of Blue Diamond ’s line of value-added products during this year of lower prices, we were able to substantially increase our competitive return, estimated at more than a $.20 per pound advantage, to help reduce the financial impacts to our grower families. The table on the right summarizes the final payments for all varieties - the actual rates earned by your deliveries are shown in the box on the last page of your grower’s statement. The Revolving Reserve for the 2020 crop has been set at 3.0 percent of the base payment rate.
Mark Jansen President & CEO
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