What the macadamia is to this region
The macadamia is Australia’s native nut, and this is where it comes from. On the Australian Macadamia Society’s account, the tree is native to the subtropical rainforests of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, the country that runs from the Northern Rivers up over the border. From that origin it has become a global industry, and two regions still carry most of the Australian crop: northern New South Wales, the Northern Rivers included, and Bundaberg in Queensland. For a region whose farmland leans heavily on this one crop, the macadamia is not just an orchard among many; it is the district’s signature nut, grown on the ground it evolved on.
That is also why the story of the region’s macadamia year is, unavoidably, a national story. The Australian Macadamia Society, the industry body, forecasts the crop for the whole country and does not break the Northern Rivers out as a separate line. So the honest way to answer how is the region’s crop tracking? is to read the national forecast, which the region’s growers share in and are shaped by, and to say plainly that it is national. That is what follows.
The number, and how it moved
The society opened the year with what it called cautious optimism. In March it forecast a 2026 Australian crop of 59,080 tonnes in-shell, measured at 3.5 per cent moisture, the equivalent of 63,350 tonnes at the alternative 10 per cent moisture basis the industry also reports. That March forecast was itself a large step up from a hard 2025, when the final crop came in at 43,800 tonnes in-shell at 3.5 per cent moisture.
Since then the number has come down. Off its June crop assessment, published in mid-July, the society revised the 2026 forecast to 56,888 tonnes at 3.5 per cent moisture. That is about 2,200 tonnes below the March figure, roughly a 4 per cent trim. Read like-for-like, all three of these numbers sit on the same 3.5 per cent moisture basis, which is the only way to compare them honestly; the 10 per cent figures run higher and should never be set beside a 3.5 per cent one.
| Crop | At 3.5% moisture | At 10% moisture |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 forecast, March | 59,080 t | 63,350 t |
| 2026 forecast, revised (off the June assessment) | 56,888 t | n/a |
| 2025 final crop | 43,800 t | n/a |
So the shape of the year is two things at once. Against 2025 it is a clear recovery: 56,888 tonnes is roughly 30 per cent more nut than the 43,800 tonnes the industry brought in last year. Against the year’s own opening expectation it is a step back, from 59,080 tonnes forecast in March to 56,888 tonnes now. Both are true; they just answer different questions.
Why it moved
The early optimism was grounded in the way the season began. The society’s chief
executive, Clare Hamilton-Bate, put it this way in March: Flowering was strong and
slightly early in many orchards, with good conditions for cross pollination, and nut set has
generally been better than first anticipated.
A strong flowering and a good nut set are
the two things a grower most wants to see early, and they are what carried the March forecast
well above the 2025 result.
The downward revision since then is, on the society’s own framing, a reflection of how variable the 2026 season has proved: variable across regions, across individual farms and across varieties. A crop that looks strong in flower still has to hold its nut through to harvest, and the June assessment, taken closer to the crop that is actually on the trees, trimmed the number. That is the ordinary arithmetic of a tree crop, not a failure of one.
Our read
Here is our read, and we label it as ours. For a region whose agriculture leans this hard on a single native crop, the national forecast is the number that sets the local growers’ year, and the honest headline is that it is a rebound with an asterisk. The rebound is real and worth saying first: after a poor 2025, a crop near 57,000 tonnes is a materially better year for the orchards along the Richmond and the Tweed and up onto the plateau. But the operative verb in the fresh news is “revised down”, and that is the reminder underneath it. A macadamia crop is a weather bet as much as a planting one; the March forecast was a hope built on a good flowering, the July number is a count built on what the trees are actually holding, and the gap between the two is the season doing what seasons do. Growers already know this in their bones. The point for the reader is that a single strong number in March was never the safe thing to bank, and the region’s year is better read as a good one that got a little smaller, rather than a record that fell short.