Across Zimbabwe's macadamia belt — Chipinge, Chimanimani, Mutare and the wider Eastern Highlands — a growing number of farmers say the same thing about the 2026 buying season: the farm-gate price they are being offered for nut-in-shell no longer covers the cost of producing it. Fertiliser, irrigation power, labour for harvest and dehusking, and the fuel to move the crop have all held firm or risen, while the price per kilogram of wet or dry nut-in-shell offered by processors and buying agents has fallen sharply from the highs of the early 2020s.
The result is an uncomfortable arithmetic that has pushed the dispute into the open. When a grower is offered less for a kilo of nut-in-shell than that kilo cost to grow and get to the shed door, the orchard stops being a business and starts being a liability — and farmers are no longer willing to absorb the gap quietly.
What growers are actually being offered
The core grievance is not that prices have come down — everyone in the trade knew the exceptional prices of a few years ago would not last as new global plantings matured. It is that farm-gate prices have fallen much further and faster than the price of the finished product downstream. Growers report farm-gate offers that, for the poorer grades and lower-recovery lots especially, sit at or below their all-in cost of production once inputs, labour, drying and transport are counted. For smallholders without their own drying and grading capacity, who sell wet nut-in-shell to an intermediary and have no way to hold stock, the squeeze is worst of all.
The part that stings: European kernel has barely moved
What has turned frustration into organised pushback is the visible gap between the farm gate and the shelf. While the price a Zimbabwean grower receives for nut-in-shell has collapsed, the price of macadamia kernel in European retail and food manufacturing — the end product those nuts become — has stayed remarkably firm. Consumers in Germany, the Netherlands and France are not paying noticeably less for a bag of macadamias than they were two years ago, and confectionery and snacking buyers are still paying up for size and quality. The value did not disappear from the chain; growers argue it simply stopped reaching the farm. We unpack exactly where that margin goes in our companion analysis, the farm-gate-to-shelf margin gap.
Why the farm gate took the whole hit
Several forces have landed on the grower end of the chain at once: a slump in Chinese nut-in-shell buying that removed the price floor African growers had leaned on, a wave of new plantings across South Africa, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe reaching bearing age together, and a processing and export layer concentrated in relatively few hands that can pass weakness straight back to the farm. The grower, at the far end of the chain with a perishable crop and little storage, has the least bargaining power and so absorbs the most of any downward shock. For the underlying mechanics of how macadamia prices are set, see our explainer on what drives macadamia prices per tonne.
Farmers organising a response
Rather than accept the offered prices one farm at a time, growers are increasingly acting together — sharing price information so no single farmer is negotiating blind, pooling volume to reach exporters directly instead of through layers of agents, and pressing industry bodies for greater transparency on how farm-gate prices relate to realised export values. The details of that response, and what a single grower can realistically do about it, are covered in how Zimbabwe's growers are fighting back.
Where Umkondo Estate stands
As a single-origin grower-exporter that controls its crop from orchard to container, our view is straightforward: the fairest way to close the farm-gate gap is to shorten the chain. Growing, dehusking, drying and grading on our own estate and exporting directly means the export value comes back to the farm rather than being skimmed at every hand-off — and it lets a European buyer see exactly what they are paying for and what the grower receives. We set out that case in the case for direct-trade macadamias. Current grades and indicative pricing are on our products page; send a trade enquiry for a quote to your port.