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Separated by a distance of a little more than three miles in Hollister, the fate of two local apricot farms is stunning. One is experiencing a bumper crop of plump, ripe fruit, and the other’s crop has been decimated by hot weather and unrelenting winds.
This time of the year, Jim and Mari Rossi’s B&R Farms, family-owned since 1927, would be expecting upwards of 500 people from as far away as Los Angeles to visit its store on Fairview Road to buy fresh and dried fruit, along with preserves, scone mix, chocolate bites, and frozen puree, or to pick their own fruit from the rows fully-laden trees on the 50-acre farm.
This year, though, Mari Rossi announced on her Facebook page June 17 that B&R had to cancel its 2026 U-Pick event.
“Due to the unpredictable weather this spring, our apricots ripened much earlier than expected and simply won’t be able to remain on the trees until our scheduled U-Pick dates,” she wrote. “To save as much of this year’s crop as possible, our crew has already begun harvesting. We are truly devastated.”
However, there was a glimmer of good news.
“Fresh Blenheim apricots are still available,” she wrote. “We currently have pre-picked fresh apricots available.”
Rossi also wrote that this season B&R will be honoring its U-Pick sliding scale pricing on pre-picked fresh apricots.
“Mother nature hit us hard,” Rossi told BenitoLink. “We were affected by heat in March, along with these winds. The fruit did not size up, and the winds are causing them to get bruised.” She said the constant winds caused the small fruit to drop to the ground.
“We’re actually very fortunate, though, to be able to have a cannery that’s willing to take the fruit,” she said. “They do a process with the dicing to use it in the canned fruit.”
Rossi said even though the fruit is small they can sell it as fresh or dried out of their store in 1-pound, 3-pound, 10-pound, and 14-pound containers. There won’t, however, be as much dried fruit available.
On the other side of town, though, Apricot King Orchards was more fortunate.
“I’ve got 39 acres and they’re all plumping right up on Union Road,” Patty Knoblich-Gonzales said. “They’re young trees and that makes a big difference. So, we’re going to take 40 tons off the home ranch, which is 27 acres on Westside Road, and then we’ll start picking the bigger crop, but that’s all going to go to juice. And then we’re going to start picking the ones on Union.”
Knoblich-Gonzales said she and her husband, Gary, have been farming for 40 years. She said last year the crop amounted to 800 tons. She wasn’t sure why their farm was doing so well, while across town B&R Farms was not.
“It could be because it gets a little hotter over there,” she said, “so they ripen first and ours ripens next. We’ve been babying it quite a bit and we thought we’re going to have a bunch of peewees [small fruit, not worth picking] but we didn’t.”
Joe Tonascia, who farms about 20 acres of apricots scattered around the Hollister area, including in some residents’ back yards, said he sells apricots at his store, Bertuccio’s Fruit Stand. He said it’s much the same story in most orchards—there is plenty of fruit, but little has “sized up.”
“It’s so expensive to pick small fruit that nobody buys,” he said, adding that people do not support the local apricot market. Instead, he said, they prefer imported fruit from Turkey.
“Ours are better quality but it comes down to price for a lot of people,” he said. “Once they taste our apricots, then they want them. But the crop is small fruit and it’s ugly.”
He said the ugly fruit is caused by a combination of “too few cold days during the winter for the fruit to set right, followed up by a hot March and April, along with intermittent rainstorms.
“A lot of it drops on the ground and then, like in the last few days, we had some warm weather that really brought them on,” Tonascia said. “We’re two weeks or more ahead of schedule. Usually, we’re starting around the 4th of July.”
Apricots and San Benito County
The history of apricots in San Benito County is one of dramatic change. In 1941, according to the county’s crop reports, apricot orchards covered 4,850 acres across the Hollister and San Juan Valley areas. Today, only 500 acres of scattered commercial plantings remain, along with some heritage orchards and agritourism operations. This represents an 80.6% decline over 85 years.
According to the county’s 2024 Crop Report, those 500 acres of apricots produced $4.9 million in sales in 2024. This is quite a bit more per acre than in 1941, when there was just $173 in sales per acre. In 2024, it was $9,800 per acre.
Statewide, according to the California Farm Bureau and the Economic Research Services reports, apricot acreage in California has declined by 65% since 2003. During that same period, San Benito’s decline was 60.3%, according to the crop report.
Several long-term factors contributed to the decline:
- Many older apricot orchards were removed because growers could earn higher returns from wine grapes, vegetables or other crops.
- Labor costs for hand-harvested tree fruit have risen significantly.
- Processing and packing infrastructure for apricots has largely disappeared from California.
- Consumer demand shifted toward other fruits available year-round.
Development pressure in parts of San Benito and neighboring counties also reduced orchard acreage over time.
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