Tim Hearden/Capital Press Louie Colombini, general manager of Westside Farmers Cooperative Gin Inc. in Tranquility, Calif., holds a cotton flower while standing in a cotton field in 2015. Once one of Fresno County's most lucrative crops, cotton has fallen out of the county's top 10 in terms of receipts as acreage has been decimated by water cutbacks.

Drought was a key factor as the total receipts from Fresno County decreased by more than 6 percent in 2015, an industry insider says.

Farm gate receipts in the county totaled $6.61 billion last year, down from the $7.04 billion in 2014, according to county Agricultural Commissioner Les Wright’s most recent Crop and Livestock Report.

Water-supply issues were a top concern last year, as were the slippage of some commodity prices and labor shortages, said Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive officer of the Fresno County Farm Bureau.

“It dropped a little bit more than I was probably expecting,” Jacobsen said. “It was definitely not going to be the highs we experienced with the 2014 report.”

Fresno County was the nation’s top county in agricultural sales in the 2012 Census of Agriculture. The total value of crops sold was greater than those in 23 states. But the county has since slipped to No. 3 behind Tulare and Kern counties, according to their annual crop reports.

In 2014, Tulare County’s $8.1 billion in total crop value led the nation, followed by Kern County’s $7.55 billion. Fresno had $7.04 billion in 2014.

Jacobsen has said growers in Fresno County have not been able to produce to their full capacity because of water shortages, including a shutoff of federal water to much of the San Joaquin Valley in 2014 and 2015 and cutbacks in annual allocations in western Fresno County because of endangered species concerns. About one-quarter of the county farmland has been fallowed because of the drought.

Fresno County growers produced nearly 400 commodities last year, of which 62 exceeded $1 million in value, Wright told the county Board of Supervisors on Aug. 9. Almonds were the top crop at $1.2 billion, followed by grapes at $896 million, poultry at $561 million, cattle and calves at $552 million and tomatoes at $520 million.

Vegetable crops saw an increase in value last year, rising nearly 5 percent to $59 million.

But decreases occurred in field crops (42 percent), seed crops (31 percent), fruit and nut crops (6.6 percent), nursery products (25.7 percent), livestock and poultry (9.4 percent), livestock and poultry products (31 percent), apiary (2.4 percent) and industrial crops (54 percent), according to the report.

In addition, two of the county’s former staples — pistachios and cotton — fell out of the top 10. Pistachio production took a hit last year because of “blanking” caused by the drought and a lack of winter chilling hours, and cotton acreage has decreased significantly because of reduced water supplies.

With the water situation having improved somewhat in 2016, Jacobsen said he expects this year’s production to hold steady.

“It’s so hard because we’re talking about such a significantly large number (of commodities), and just one or two major commodities could shift it one way or another,” he said. “I would expect it to be relatively flat this year, or maybe a relatively small gain.”