Almond hulls price

Almond hulls are a fiber source, fed for effective fiber and gut fill more than for nutrients. They are priced and tracked here, but they are not scored on the nutrient-cost screening board: no dry-matter-basis nutrient coefficient for them was verified against a primary extension or NRC table at build, and this site never guesses a coefficient. Prices are quoted per ton, and the cheapest board price is not the cheapest fed price once freight and moisture are counted (see the FOB-vs-delivered guide). Almond hulls come off the almond harvest almost entirely within California's Central Valley, the fleshy covering stripped away before the shell and kernel are separated. Because it is a co-product rather than a crop grown for its own sake, supply tracks the almond crop itself, bearing acreage, yield, and how the hulling run went, not a hull market of its own. Dairies in hull country value them as a fermentable fiber source with real sugar content, cheap next to hay over a short haul. Quality swings with weather at hull split and harvest; hulls picked up wet are prone to mold, and moisture is the first thing a buyer checks.

The hull outweighs the nut it wraps. UC Davis Cooperative Extension dairy specialist P.H. Robinson puts the hull at about 60 percent of the almond fruit's weight, the shell at about 15 percent and the nut at about 25 percent, so every pound of kernels leaves more than two pounds of hulls behind. Hull tonnage is fixed by the almond crop, and no hull price, however strong, adds a ton.

Harvest runs three months, hulling runs longer. The Almond Board of California lays out the calendar: hulls split in July, shakers harvest from August through October and the nuts dry on the orchard floor before being swept up and hauled to a huller/sheller, where they are typically stockpiled until the plant can run them. In an Almond Board report on hull and shell markets, one processor described his huller/shellers running four to five months to keep up with the crop, against about 45 days decades ago. So new-crop hulls come off the hullers over several months, not in one harvest pulse.

Priced against hay, sold to a dairy. Robinson found hulls roughly equal in overall feeding value to mid-grade alfalfa hay, lower in protein and much higher in soluble sugars. In surveys of California dairies, nutritionists let ration software pull a mix of other feeds out as hulls went in, lowering ration cost. The Almond Board says hulls can replace alfalfa hay pound for pound in part of a dairy ration and counts dairy feed as the outlet for all of California's hulls, while shells go mostly to livestock bedding. That makes hay, covered in what drives alfalfa pellet prices, the benchmark, and the state's dairy herd the whole demand side. A processor quoted in the Board's hull report tied weaker hull values to dairy consolidation and dairies leaving the state as almond acreage grew, and the Board has funded research into food, poultry feed, soil and fuel outlets.

Fiber decides what counts as a hull. The California Department of Food and Agriculture caps crude fiber in almond hulls at 15 percent, and shell blended back into hulls pushes a load over it. Hulls above the cap can only be shipped and labeled as almond hull and shell, and any shell added to a feed must be declared on the label with its maximum share. A buyer comparing quotes needs to know which of the two a price describes.