Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1218525
A L M O N D O R C H A R D 2 0 2 5 G O A L S ZERO WASTE 11 Waste Not, Want Not: Achieving Zero Waste Reaps Multiple Benefits As a child, you (hopefully) learned not to waste your food, and chances are you were probably not allowed to leave the table until your plate was clean. Though you may have been sneaky enough to share your broccoli or cauliflower with the family dog, at the end of the day you knew, albeit deep down, that waste is wrong. That same gut feeling you had as a child is the same feeling that drives the industry to find beneficial uses for the hulls, shells and woody biomass left over from growing almonds for consumers around the globe to enjoy. It's the feeling that drove the industry to commit to achieving zero waste in the orchard by putting everything grown to optimal use, one of four Almond Orchard 2025 Goals developed and announced by the Almond Board of California (ABC) and industry leaders in 2018. Throughout 2019, the Almond Board worked diligently with growers, handlers, researchers and others to define the metrics that will pave the road to success in achieving the 2025 Goals, creating the Almond Orchard 2025 Goals Roadmap, 1 which will guide the industry on its journey towards continuous improvement. Given that almond coproducts already are widely utilized, progress toward achieving the zero waste goal will focus on finding optimal uses for coproducts, reducing the industry's environmental footprint and adding value — economically and environmentally — via three key measures: f increased adoption of Whole Orchard Recycling (WOR), f effective elimination of open burning to dispose of woody biomass, and f diversifying applications for hulls and shells beyond current uses in the California dairy industry. "We currently don't waste anything, but the idea is to ensure that our coproducts are going towards the best possible uses," said Guangwei Huang, associate director of Food Research and Technology for ABC. The Almond Board estimates that by 2025, the industry's biomass — shells, hulls, prunings and trees at the end of their productive lifespan — could reach nine billion pounds, annually. Meeting the industry's goal of putting everything grown to optimal use, therefore, will require innovation on multiple fronts. WOR: how can it help? Whole Orchard Recycling (WOR) involves grinding trees into small chips, then spreading that material across the orchard and disking it into the soil. This practice provides a sustainable outlet for orchard biomass with multiple benefits for soil quality and prevents air quality issues associated with burning. It's a practice that gets at the heart of what it means to "waste not, want not" — using the resources of trees and other biomass, growers can lessen their soil's needs and potentially see yield increases. Huang estimated that a little more than half of the 37,000 acres of almonds pulled out of the ground since 2018 have been recycled via WOR. Brent Holtz, a UC Cooperative Extension farm adviser in San Joaquin County who has spent years researching WOR in almonds, said at The Almond Conference 2019 that as many as 25,000 almond acres have been recycled in the past decade. Growers Christine Gemperle, who farms 135 acres of almonds in Stanislaus and Merced counties, and Mike Curry of Johnson Farms in Denair, have experience in practicing WOR on their operations. Gemperle tore out 20 acres of old trees in November 2018 and had a front row seat to the whole process. 2 "Once the massive chips of almond wood were worked into the soil, it was like the trees were never there," Gemperle said. Similarly, in Sept. 2019, Curry and his colleagues recycled 150 acres of almonds back into the soil — and received incentive funds to do so. 3 Reduced burning + recycling make the perfect pair The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District is tasked with overseeing the improvement of air quality for residents in its eight-county region (San Joaquin to Kern). To incentivize the agricultural community to move away from open burning to improve air quality, the district has offered $6 million over two years to growers who practice WOR rather than burning their old trees. When Curry and his team learned about this opportunity, they jumped on it immediately. "It's very simple paperwork. It's pretty straightforward," Curry said, adding that 1 http://www.almonds.com/sites/default/files/GoalsRoadmap_2019_web.pdf 2 http://newsroom.almonds.com/content/considering-whole-orchard-recycling-keep-mind-0 3 http://newsroom.almonds.com/content/funds-available-for-whole-orchard-recycling "In addition to needing more growers to participate in CASP, we will need growers who have completed CASP modules in past crop years to go back and reassess their orchards. This new information will provide us with a baseline on which we can measure progress leading up to 2025," said Huang, shown above.