The Bitter Future of California’s Date Industry

In the Coachella Valley, a date palm grows on its own time.

It takes seven years to sprout a date palm shoot, seven more before it produces shoots of its own, and another seven before it bears its best fruit. When that moment finally comes, farmworkers rise in cherry pickers to hand-pollinate blossoms, trimming and bagging heavy clusters through the furnace of summer until the slow harvest of fall.

Nearly 90 percent of the nation’s dates come from this desert strip at the foot of the Santa Rosa Mountains, where, for more than a century, the Coachella Valley has been the country’s date-growing region. Date palms are not native: In the early 1900s, as part of the USDA’s Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction efforts to expand American agriculture by bringing crops from abroad to new geographies, plant explorers ventured to North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, whose long, hot summers and scarce rainfall mirrored the weather in the Valley. They returned with hundreds of Deglet Noor offshoots—young shoots taken from the base of mature palms that grow into fruit-bearing trees—and planted them in the desert. In 1927, with Morocco’s Medjool groves collapsing under a soil-borne blight that had already destroyed thousands of acres across North Africa, USDA explorers collected 11 surviving offshoots and brought them to the United States. (Today, every Medjool tree in the U.S. descends from those 11.)

Over the decades, the industry that followed those early plantings turned the Valley into America’s date capital: growers built packing sheds, nurseries and networks of seasonal labour, and turned hand pollination into an industrial system, sending crews into the canopy each spring to ensure nearly every tree bears fruit. Unlike thirsty crops citrus and grapes, which flourish in the Central Valley in Fresno and on the North Coast in Napa and Sonoma, dates remain one of the few where the Coachella Valley still claims a global edge.

Yet beyond the groves, time is moving faster: land prices soaring, subdivisions spreading across fields and family farms disappearing. In the past decade alone, U.S. production of dates has doubled, driven by health trends that have recast dates as a natural alternative to sugar in grocery aisles. In a single generation, the valley has lost nearly 13,000 acres of farmland to subdivisions, golf courses and resorts. Median prices for single-family homes across the Coachella Valley now exceed $650,000, pushing land values higher than farming can often sustain.

Consolidation has been just as swift. Late last year, Oasis Date absorbed more than 5,000 acres of date palms and a half-million–square-foot packaging facility, instantly becoming the largest grower in North America and the primary supplier to Natural Delights, one of the few date brands with national reach.

Though the pressures aren’t only economic, the valley relies in part on the Colorado River, now under historic strain, and labour still makes up more than a third of production costs. The question now isn’t whether the desert can grow dates, it’s whether the farmers who tend them will still control the land and the fruit.

From Farmland to Fantasyland

Tadros Tadros, founder of Aziz Farms

On a two-lane road outside Thermal — a small farm town in the eastern Coachella Valley, about ten miles north of the shrinking Salton Sea — Tadros Tadros’s SUV crawls past palm nurseries, stucco subdivisions, and a roadside “For Sale” sign hammered into the dust. Cars swerve impatiently. Tadros, who founded Aziz Farms nearly half a century ago, shrugs. “They can go around me,” he says. His focus is on what has vanished. When he arrived in the Coachella Valley from Egypt in the 1960s, Tadros remembers sleeping in the groves during harvest, when rows of date palms stretched unbroken to the mountains. Today, he points to polo fields where orchards once grew, and nurseries selling palms for landscaping instead of farming.

The pattern is bigger than Coachella. According to the American Farmland Trust, California lost 466,000 acres of farmland to urban or residential uses between 2001 and 2016. At the current pace, the AFT estimates that nearly 800,000 acres will be ceded by 2040. In the valley, about one in four cultivated acres has already vanished since 1990.

On the west side of the Coachella Valley, Disney’s Cotino resort-living community in Rancho Mirage will add 1,900 homes wrapped around a 24-acre lagoon. In the east, the Thermal Beach Club home to more than 300 homesites and a 20-acre swimming and surf pool. Valley leaders can point to “agricultural reserve” zoning as a means to slow projects like these, but the protections are fragile. Developers can petition for rezoning, and councils often relent. A 40-acre orchard may yield modest property taxes, but a subdivision can mean millions; without permanent conservation easements, the zoning works more like a pause button than a shield.

But while developers redraw the valley’s map, Mark Tadros is doubling down. A former chef, he returned to the Coachella Valley in the late 2010s when it looked like his father, Tadros, might sell Aziz Farms. Instead, he reconfigured how the business operates: pulling back from wholesale, redesigning packaging, hosting school groups, and even converting the packing house into a CSA hub during the pandemic. He also launched an agritourism property, The Packhouse at Aziz Farms, turning the site into both a gathering place and a business anchor. Today, the farm produces about 2 million pounds of dates annually.

Still, the math is hard to ignore. In Thermal, a 9.7-acre organic date farm went on the market last year for nearly $800,000, about $80,000 an acre. Larger parcels are listed for millions. For growers weighing years of labour against a developer’s check, selling out can look less like surrender than the most practical choice left.

The Corporate Grove

“There used to be a lot more smaller growers in the valley,” Mark says, standing outside The Packhouse at Aziz Farms, where canopies strung with lights make it as much a gathering place as farm infrastructure. “Guys who had ten acres, maybe a little packing shed in the back. They’re mostly gone now.” Inside The Packhouse, workers sort fruit. Outside, children finish a tour of the farm. The overlap is intentional: Aziz Farms is both a workplace and a community hub, a dual means of survival that builds leverage in a system where ownership no longer ensures control.

Pressure has intensified for growers since late last year, when Oasis Date was formed through a series of acquisitions that made it the largest grower and processor in North America overnight. Rather than scaling up from scratch, Oasis Date stitched together existing farms and infrastructure. Oasis’s strategy appears to echo a familiar playbook. Adam Cooper, Oasis’s CEO and the once-vice president of marketing at The Wonderful Company, has overseen the transition of niche crops into cultural juggernauts: Wonderful Pistachio, which now controls about 70% of the U.S. pistachio supply; POM Wonderful, a $200 million pomegranate brand grown across 9,000 acres; and Halos mandarins, which at peak season, can dominate up to 80% of the market. Farmers recall what followed: orchards were sold, contracts were rewritten, and profits were concentrated at the top. What consumers remember are the brands.

Mark doesn’t dismiss Oasis outright, acknowledging the upside of more marketing and consumer demand. But he knows small growers will have less leverage in a market dominated by a single buyer. “The margins are so small that the more you sell, the more money you potentially make — it’s why you see almost a corporatization of agriculture,” he says. His gamble is that Aziz Farms can endure by giving people a reason to choose the farm and not just the fruit.

Sam Cobb

In his Sky Valley grove, Sam Cobb — likely the only Black date farmer in the U.S. — is making a similar gamble. A former USDA soil conservationist, he spent years advising other growers before attempting to build his own farm. His first two attempts both resulted in bankruptcies, and it was only after selling his house that he finally managed to buy five acres and coax Medjools from the desert.

What began as a handful of palms now produces approximately 50,000 pounds of fruit per year, still only a fraction of the yield from larger farms like Aziz Farms. But he runs nearly every part of the operation himself: farming, harvesting, packing and even designing the labels for the dates he doesn’t sell to packers. Cobb is not without his own innovations, either. Years ago, he transplanted a wild palm he’d spotted on the side of the road and discovered a new variety he named “Black Gold” — chewy and caramel-dark, with a flavour no one can quite pin down. For Cobb, Black Gold is proof that independents can still create something new, and that his name deserves to stay on the box.

His next step is to build a processing shed, so his children won’t just inherit trees supplying someone else’s brand. They’ll inherit ownership, and in a valley where names are too often lost to consolidation, that is its own form of resistance.

Holding On to the Valley’s Fruit

For consumers, dates have evolved from a desert curiosity to a pantry staple: a TikTok dessert hack (“adult Snickers”), a Lärabar and RXBar binder, the syrup of choice for the wellness set. For farmers, though, that same boom has worked against them — inflating land prices and consolidating market power in the hands of Oasis, which snapped up groves just as demand made them ripe for takeover.

The struggle of date growers is less an exception than an example. In a state that produces more than a tenth of the nation’s food, farmers in Napa’s vineyards and Fresno’s citrus groves face the same pressures as those in the Coachella Valley: rising land values, corporate power and a public increasingly detached from the source of its food. Land has been wrested from farmers throughout history by force or decree; today it happens by paperwork and price, through zoning meetings and developer buyouts.

Yet the valley, like its heat, refuses to relent. Some point to agricultural conservation easements—like those championed by the Oswit Land Trust, which, since 2021, has protected over 10,000 acres of farmland and natural habitat—as a way to ensure land stays in family hands while offering needed financial relief.

Others lean on cultural preservation and agritourism. The revival of the annual Riverside County Fair & National Date Festival in 2023, along with a visit to Shields Date Gardens and immersive farm tours, such as those at Aziz Farms and Cobb Farms, helps keep the valley’s heritage alive. And, in 2024, the area added another tool: the Rancho Community Event Facility Ordinance, which formally legalised what many farms had long done informally — renting groves for weddings, quinceañeras and community gatherings. For growers like Rancho 51, which championed the measure, it was a lifeline, allowing them to “stay in business.”

Even as local efforts push back, the darker outcome looms: continued consolidation under vertically integrated giants like Oasis Date, a single farm-to-retail entity controlling massive acreage and supply chains. Worse still, dates could vanish from Coachella entirely — their groves bulldozed for lagoons and subdivisions — with production shifting south to the Imperial Valley near the California-Mexico border or out of state to Arizona to keep up with demand.

The future will almost certainly be a mix of consolidation, displacement and stubborn holdouts. The question is how much of the valley’s farming community can be preserved and how quickly solutions can scale to stop the bleeding. For Mark Tadros, that means reimagining Aziz Farms as both workplace and gathering place. For Sam Cobb, it means staking his future on Black Gold and a processing facility that bears his name. And for all farmers in the area, it’s not just about growing dates but about keeping control over how they reach people who consume them.

Taken together, their efforts underscore the larger gamble: whether dates of California remain tied to people and place or become just another commodity stripped of its roots.

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Colin Hanner and Laura Scherb are the husband-wife duo behind Dai Dai, a storytelling studio dedicated to food, culture and place. They recently published Date Party, a zine exploring the history, culture and future of dates in California’s Coachella Valley through original interviews, photography and recipes.