Almonds Down, Citrus Coming: Kern County's Harvest Calendar Turns to Winter

Kern County farms on a calendar with two great hinges, and November is one of them. The almond harvest, which shook the orchards around Shafter, Wasco, Delano and McFarland through late summer and fall, is complete: the nuts have been swept, picked up, hulled and sent on their way, and the orchards stand quiet. Ahead, the citrus season builds toward winter, as navel oranges in the groves on the valley's east side, around Delano and the foothill edges, color up toward harvest.

The almond's rise in Kern County is one of modern California agriculture's defining stories. Orchards have expanded across the county's west and north sides, making Kern a pillar of the state's almond industry, and the harvest's machinery, shakers, sweepers and pickup equipment moving orchard to orchard, is now as familiar a fall sight as the harvest festivals it overlaps. By November the work turns to post-harvest irrigation, orchard sanitation and the winter decisions that set up next spring's bloom.

Citrus runs on the opposite rhythm. Where almonds are a late-summer sprint, citrus is a winter marathon, with picking extending through the cold months and packing houses running as the fruit matures. The juxtaposition keeps Kern's farm labor, trucking and packing economy moving across seasons rather than peaking once, one reason the county's agricultural output ranks among the largest of any county in the nation.

California farming's pressures run underneath the calendar: water supplies that vary by year and district, labor that must be there when the crop is ready, and markets that reach from Bakersfield to ports and overseas buyers. November is when growers take stock of all of it, with the almond crop in and the citrus crop still on the trees, a moment of both accounting and anticipation.

Drive SR-99 or SR-65 this month and the transition is visible from the highway: bare almond orchards on one side of the road, citrus groves greening toward winter on the other. Kern County's economy grows out of that ground, and November is when it changes gears.