This is our forecast of the California farm-gate avocado price — what a California grower is paid per pound, before picking and packing come out of it. It runs twelve months ahead in detail and three years ahead in outline, and it is updated once a month.
We publish it because we could not find it anywhere. Plenty of sources tell you what avocados cost in a shop, or what a carton fetched at shipping point last week. Almost nothing tells a grower what the next season might pay, and nothing we found puts its own past forecasts on the record to be marked.
What growers were paidEstimated from Mexican pricesForecastRange we expect 8 times in 10
Forecast made 24 October 2026. Updated monthly.
What price this is
The California average grower price, in dollars per pound, for conventional Hass. It is the number a grower actually receives, not the shipping-point carton price and not the supermarket shelf price.
No public source publishes it weekly, so the solid line is built from the USDA shipping-point price for California fruit, converted at the ratio the California Avocado Commission’s own season averages imply. From roughly October to February there is almost no California fruit being sold and therefore almost no California price, so those weeks are estimated from Mexican 48s and drawn as a dashed line. Treat the dashed stretches as an indication rather than a measurement.
These are not our own numbers. What our grove is paid depends on when we pick, what sizes we have and what grade they make, and that is our business rather than the market’s. Nothing on this page is derived from what any individual packer has quoted us.
How the forecast is made
It starts with a ten-year trend and the shape of a normal year — prices are reliably lower in spring than in late summer. Then four things move it:
- The California crop estimate. A bigger California crop pushes the price down, with roughly half the force you might expect, because California is a small share of what Americans eat.
- Rain in Michoacán before bloom. The strongest single signal we found. A dry year in the Mexican growing region shows up in the price about eighteen months later.
- El Niño and La Niña. A real effect, but small, so it is deliberately damped and capped.
- Today’s price. Heavily weighted one month out, almost ignored twelve months out, because what is true this week stops being informative quickly.
The model re-fits itself every month on the newest data and only adopts the new settings if they would have done better over the previous two years. Several things we tested were dropped because they did not survive that test, including the USDA’s Mexico production forecast, California bearing acreage, and industry marketing spend. Being plausible is not the same as being useful.
What it cannot do
Across twenty years, everything we can measure — season, supply, the peso, fuel, incomes, weather — accounts for a little over half of how the price has moved. The remaining 47% is not explained by anything in the model. Border closures, a bad week of weather at the wrong moment, a sudden change in buying: those arrive without warning and they are the reason the shaded band is as wide as it is.
So read the shaded band, not the line. The line is the middle of a wide range, and the range is the honest part. Twelve months out, the forecast has historically been out by around a quarter in either direction. That is useful for planning and useless for timing.
This is published for interest and for planning. It is not advice, and nobody should commit money on the strength of it — including us.
How it has done
Every forecast is written down before the month happens, so it can be marked afterwards. Below is what the model would have said at each lead time, against the price that actually followed. Choose how far ahead the forecast was made.
Scroll the chart sideways to see the whole period.
What growers were paidForecast 12 months earlier
Across 106 months, that forecast was out by 28% on average, and the price landed inside the shaded range 78% of the time.
Scroll the chart sideways to see the whole period.
What growers were paidForecast 6 months earlier
Across 106 months, that forecast was out by 26% on average, and the price landed inside the shaded range 75% of the time.
Scroll the chart sideways to see the whole period.
What growers were paidForecast 3 months earlier
Across 106 months, that forecast was out by 24% on average, and the price landed inside the shaded range 80% of the time.
Get it once a month
The forecast is updated once a month. Leave your email and we will send you the new one, with a short note on what moved and why. One email a month, nothing else, and you can leave at any time.
And if once a month is not enough
Consider joining us as members of the California Avocado Society. Membership includes the Weekly Newsline — market news, opinion and statistics written for California growers, in your inbox every week — along with the Society’s quarterly publication, four to six seminars and field meetings a year, and an invitation to the annual meeting.
It is a non-profit, founded in 1915, and it does not market anybody’s fruit; it exists to put information in growers’ hands. We are members ourselves, and the Weekly Newsline is one of the few places a grower can read what the market is actually doing rather than what it did at retail. Membership starts at $170 a year, and the higher levels add the digital Avocado Handbooks and recorded seminars. See what each level includes.
Who we are
Holmes Grown USA is a second-generation ten-acre avocado grove in Escondido, California, planted in 1974. We built this because we needed it ourselves: our own budget depends on what next spring pays, and guessing was not working. More about the grove.
