“Things don’t happen with lightning speed in agriculture,” Stewart explains. “It takes seven to ten years for newly planted trees to mature. That gave us time to invest in planting, branding, processing, and merchandising. Then, as demand grew, we aggressively built nut-processing capacity. The scale economies in processing make it hard for smaller farmers to build their own processing facilities. And unless you can do processing, packaging, marketing, branding, and distribution, it may not pay to buy more land and plant new trees.”
