Billion-pound baby

摘要

In the mid-1980s, Blue Diamond Growers ran a series of humorous TV commercials, showing coop growers buried up to their waists in almonds, asking Americans to buy "a can a week, that's all we ask." In those years, the U.S. almond industry (then as now, virtually 100-percent California based) was producing around 400 million pounds of nuts in a typical year. If those same commercials were filmed today, the growers would be buried up to their necks, as the California crop now tips the scales at more than 1 billion pounds in a typical year. The co-op anticipates a 30-percent increase in bearing acreage by 2010 and that crops will then top 1.5 billion pounds.