How Iran Made California a Pistachio Superpower
The pistachio paradigm.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
It all started, the story goes, with a single pistachio that American botanist William E. Whitehouse picked out of a pile of drying nuts in an orchard in Kerman province on Iran’s central plateau in 1929. The name Kerman stuck to the tree that grew from it at the US Department of Agriculture research station in Chico, California, and the millions that have descended from it.
The USDA began distributing Kerman pistachios to California growers in 1957, and significant plantings began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, motivated in part by federal legislation that cracked down on tax shelters involving citrus and almond orchards but failed to mention pistachios. The first commercial crop was harvested in 1976.