The pistachios on supermarket shelves around the world most likely came from California’s Central Valley, where roughly two-thirds of the global supply now grows. The crop has no native history in the state, and most Californians drive past these orchards every day without knowing what they are or how they got there.
The industry’s current chapter is stranger than its rise. Even with worldwide demand increasing, the growers who helped build the industry have nearly stopped planting new trees, and the pause traces back to what’s happening with California’s water. Whether food is grown locally is a question that follows residents on every grocery run, and the people who work this ground are assessing things season by season.
Tom Coleman, chair of the Administrative Committee for Pistachios and owner of Coleman Farming Co., has been growing pistachios since 1982, when the industry barely existed. Alongside Stephen Vasquez, the committee’s executive director, he explains how a crop nobody expected to take hold became a world leader, and what now decides whether it keeps growing. Coleman traces the industry’s rise back to his own worst harvest, and to something that had nothing to do with farming technology.
