MARIANI,
DENNIS-JACK-MARTY
Walnut Processor
In
the early 1900s, immigrants from Croatia and the Adriatic islands in Dalmatia
had followed their older brothers to the Santa Clara Valley, where they bought
and farmed fruit and nut orchards. Their children were farming those orchards
in the 1950s and 1960s when houses started to fill the area. Like other Santa Clara farmers, as they sold
orchards to developers, they often brought new orchards farther away and set up
processing facilities. That’s why you’ll find the 25-year-old Mariani Nut
Company, the largest independent nut
processor in the world, right in the Bay Area’s backyard, in Winters, in Yolo County. Owned and
managed now by the third generation of Marianis- Dennis, Jack and Marty- the
company ships millions of pounds of nuts worldwide for over 1,000 California
farmers. At one time, says Jack Mariani, part of the walnut crop was held-
unsold- to maintain market price. About
a third of California’s walnut crop is handled “old fashioned,” in-shell, for shipment
in October and November. Much of it goes
by ship to Northern Europe, where it’s sold during the year-end holidays. The
other two-thirds of the crop is shelled, then packaged and sold as walnut meats
throughout the year. The biggest market for these shelled nuts is here in the
United States. In the first half of the century, Southern California and the Stockton area were the state’s major
walnut production centers. Walnut
orchards were abundant here, too, on the deeper soils in the valleys of the Bay
Area and its outlying counties until swept away by the housing boom of the
1950s and ‘60s. In Contra Costa County, walnuts were planted around Clayton and
Brentwood, in the Moraga Valley, in the small valleys around Lafayette, in the
Diablo Valley, around Walnut Creek and Concord. The Santa Clara Valley had
early plantings of walnuts, with orchards trailing down through Morgan Hill to
Hollister. Walnuts have moved north now, out of Southern California and almost
out of the Bay Area, forced out by housing development. Visalia is the significant southern producing
area. The orchards skip up to Stanislaus
and San Joaquin counties, then follow the Sacramento and Feather Rivers up to
Chico and Red Bluff.