UC Santa Cruz

Almond production in California has recently experienced an unprecedented boom accompanied by rapid expansion and concerning levels of water, fertilizer and managed pollinator use. This system stands in stark contrast to that of Spain, the largest exporter of almonds globally until the 1970s, where nearly all production is rain-fed and low-input. This research investigates three elements of almond production’s political ecology spanning these two geographies. (1) How and why did almonds become problematized? (2) What is the relationship between demand for almonds and their ecological entanglements? And (3) what agroecological production systems exist and how do relationships beyond the farm impact their resilience? Almonds here are taken as a case study for revealing how public dialogue tackles the tension between profit and public good, for demonstrating agricultural intensification as a material-semiotic process, and for developing a politics of more-than-human care which can strengthen resilience through relations. In doing so it pushes for a more-than-human approach to agrarian political economy, taking the materiality of agroecosystems as inherent to their sociality. This research finds that almonds attracted attention because they represented frictions between market signals and ecological signals, that the intensification and expansion of California almond orchards is a cause rather than a result of consumer demand, and that Spain’s alternative systems need networks of care relations, not just sound agroecological practices, to be resilient in the face of global change.