Posts by Brenda Rodriguez9

Blueberries
At the start of this discussion, I see some debate over whether blueberries or walnuts are the better bet. Look, blueberries can be quite lucrative, but there’s a massive catch: you need serious manpower. In my neck of the woods, folks are out here managing dozens of acres. I know someone who back in 2007, working just about seven acres, pulled in roughly $75,000 from his blueberry crop. At that time, prices were hovering around a dollar per pound. Because the harvest season stretches out, prices fluctuate wildly—you usually see the highest peaks right at the beginning and the very end of the run. The gap between walnut farming and blueberry farming is astronomical. With blueberries, you are constantly hunting for pickers, and let me tell you, they are hard to come by. A single picker might manage to grab maybe 200 pounds in a day if the berries are large and high-quality; otherwise, you’re lucky if they hit 100 pounds every other day. To get those premium, large berries, you absolutely have to invest in irrigation. Any serious producer in the States is running a drip irrigation system; that is the only way to extend your season and guarantee quality. Now, regarding pricing—that was 2007, and those were stellar numbers. Prices aren't dictated by local farmers; even though we have major exporters, we are at the mercy of global markets. Competitors from places like Mexico, Canada, or Eastern Europe all jump into the fray, driving down the global market price. Most of our supply heads straight to the USA or over to Europe. But, for the optimists out there, consider this: just a few years ago, blueberry prices plummeted to as low as $0.20 a pound. When you factor in paying your pickers—and you have to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner because nobody wants to work on an empty stomach—you quickly realize you're staring down the barrel of a loss. It's simple math. If a picker earns $40 a day, you have to calculate the actual cost of labor in your specific region, not to mention the layers of wholesalers and middlemen who all want to take a cut while sitting in their climate-controlled warehouses. For perspective, frozen blueberries in major US supermarkets can retail for around $5.00 per pound.

The market price for walnut timber fluctuates anywhere from $1,100 to $1,450 per cubic meter. I know this firsthand because a close friend of mine makes his living in this industry; he actually buys up entire walnut trees, digs them up with the root systems intact, and sells them. That specific price point is what he’s currently pulling from an exporter who ships the stock over to Italy. Now, I’ve seen some folks on this forum mention they only cleared about $300 for a single tree—which is more or less the ballpark figure being paid out to the actual landowners. This tells you one thing very clearly: if you own a significant number of these trees, you absolutely have to find a direct buyer and bypass the middlemen. If you don't, those dreams of making millions will vanish into thin air before you even realize what happened. My outlook on walnuts is that prices are going to climb even higher. We are seeing far more harvesting than replanting; people are selling off trees that took 70 or 80 years to mature for just a few hundred bucks. Regardless, planting them isn't a bad move, whether you're looking at the crop or the timber itself. It’s almost a guarantee that someone will eventually see a return, though I'll be damned if any of you newcomers will live long enough to see the kind of astronomical figures I've read about. Those numbers were a total fantasy ten years ago. For context, I personally have about 40 trees that are roughly 25 years old, and believe me, they aren't anywhere near ready to be sold for top dollar yet.