FRESNO COUNTY, Calif (KSEE/KGPE) – Fresno County growers are picking their fruit early this year.

“Across the board, we’re experiencing, with most of our crops, about a 10-20-day early ripening this year,” Fresno County Farm Bureau CEO Ryan Jacobsen said.

Jacobsen blames the heat.

“That’s because of that very warm March that we had. That warm March just kicked everything into high gear, and since then we’ve had a pretty good growing season,” Jacobsen said.

According to the National Weather Service, the average temperatures in March range from 65-70 degrees.

This year, Fresno County saw temperatures in the high 80s and 90s, even breaking the area’s heat record at 93 degrees.

“It caught a lot of people off-guard because we knew the crop was early, but it just seemed like it was overly early. So we have table grape varieties in the area right now, for example, that are legit two and a half weeks early,” Jacobsen said.

He says the early harvest is impacting everything from grapes to peaches, to nectarines, to plums, to almonds and pistachios.

He says some farmers will have to give up on a huge harvest this year altogether.

“We did have one major catastrophe when it came to those March temperatures, and that is the pistachio crop. It looks to be extraordinarily light right now,” Jacobsen said.

For others, he says the early harvest may actually be a blessing in disguise heading into an El Niño year.

“This early year right now is for a lot of folks probably a blessing because it’s the ability to get these crops out of the field a little bit earlier if we do see those early fall storms,” Jacobsen said.