The 2032 Agave Crop Is Being Decided at MXN 7.62

A crop with a seven-year lag decides the next decade

Blue agave takes six to eight years to reach harvestable sugar. Not to reach the optimum — to reach the point where the heart can be jimado — harvested — and milled at all. That single biological fact is the most important thing in the agave spirits industry, and it is the one thing no amount of capital, technology or demand can shorten.

Which means the 2025 price did not describe the 2025 market. It described a decision taken in 2018 and 2019, when the planting that produced this year’s crop went into the ground. And the price being paid in 2025 is, right now, writing the 2032 crop — by making it uneconomic to plant.

The area rose 92 per cent and the price broke

SADER’s agricultural yearbook puts the area under agave in Jalisco at 69,737 hectares in 2019 and 133,954 hectares in 2025 — a 92.1 per cent increase in six years. La Jornada reported the series alongside research from ITESO using European Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, which found the crop had spread onto forest land and outside the boundaries set by Jalisco’s environment ministry.

The price followed the area. SIAP, the Mexican agricultural information service, puts the Jalisco farm-gate price of blue agave at MXN 7.62 a kilogram in 2025, against MXN 22.21 in 2024 and a peak of MXN 24.09 in 2023 — down 65.7 per cent in a year and 68.4 per cent from the peak. La Jornada’s reporting of producer prices puts the 2022 spike at MXN 32 a kilogram, which is a different measure of the same market and a useful reminder that these are reported prices, not exchange-settled ones.

The average price is an average of three markets

Here is the number that matters more than MXN 7.62. The same reporting finds that producers enrolled in the CRT’s Agave Responsable Social programme are paid MXN 6 to 8 a kilogram under contract; that producers selling through intermediaries with no direct contract receive MXN 2.50; and that at the bottom of that chain the price falls to MXN 0.80.

That is a tenfold range inside one published average. It is not a distribution around a mean — it is three separate markets that happen to share a commodity code. A grower with a contract is running a business. A grower selling to a coyote at MXN 0.80 has already lost the six to eight years of land, water and labour that went into the plant, and the rational response at that price is not to replant.

The CRT’s own social programme shows the same thing from the other direction. Its Agave Social scheme counted 800 certified producers who sold 15,000 tonnes to 20 companies for MXN 80 million. That is MXN 5,333 a tonne, or MXN 5.33 a kilogram — below the national average, above the intermediary floor, and a price that exists only because a programme created it. It is a floor built by administration, not by demand.

What the collapse moved in the value chain

The CRT milled about 2.19 million tonnes of agave to produce 583.5 million litres in 2025. That is 3.75 kilograms of agave per litre of tequila, and it lets the whole industrial effect be stated per litre:

That is a transfer, not a productivity gain: MXN 31.9 billion moved from the field to the still in a single year. Becle, the largest brand owner, reported EBITDA up MXN 2,112 million — 6.6 per cent of the theoretical industry-wide saving. The rest was competed away into price and promotion, or never appeared because much of the crop moves on contracts struck before the collapse. It is also why a record production year produced falling revenue: supply rose 17.7 per cent and the price of the input fell by two thirds in the same twelve months.

Why 2032 is already written

The forecast in our Global Agave Spirits report runs to 2033 at 3.00 per cent a year by value on volume growing 1.50 per cent. The last years of that path depend on fruit that is either in the ground now or never will be.

Agave planted in 2025 is harvested in 2031 or 2032. Agave planted in 2027 is harvested in 2033 or 2035. So the volume line for the back half of the forecast window is not a demand forecast at all — it is a planting record, and the planting record is being decided at a price that does not repay the crop. A grower choosing in 2026 between agave at MXN 7.62 and sugarcane with a mill contract is not making a close call.

The CRT’s reconversion programme is that decision, measured. By May 2025 the council reported that more than a thousand hectares had already been converted out of agave into sugarcane and pasture, with the Tala sugar mill lined up as the buyer, and talks under way for a similar scheme in Guanajuato and a pasture conversion in Los Altos de Jalisco. That is a price signal working exactly as a price signal should. It is also a supply cut, scheduled to arrive seven years after the market that caused it.

The category’s cycles are structural, not cyclical

Every agave cycle in the record has the same shape, and this is the mechanism: a high price triggers planting; the planting cannot produce a litre for six to eight years; by the time it does, the price that justified it has been destroyed by the volume it created; the low price stops the next planting; and six to eight years later the shortage arrives into a market that has forgotten why. The lag does not damp the cycle. It amplifies it, because the response always lands in the wrong year.

What makes the current position unusual is how far the two ends of the lag have separated. Production is at a record 583.5 million litres, up 17.7 per cent. The US supplier revenue line for the category fell 4.1 per cent to USD 6.4 billion. The largest brand owner’s volume fell 4.4 per cent, and fell 8.8 per cent in the fourth quarter. Agave is at MXN 7.62 and the plantings that would fix 2032 are not being made.

So the honest reading of a MXN 7.62 farm gate is not that agave spirits have become cheap to make. It is that the industry has borrowed margin from a crop it is no longer paying to plant, and the repayment date is inside the forecast window. Becle’s 25.6 per cent EBITDA margin, up 540 basis points, is the borrowing. The replanting decision is the interest.

The one instrument that could break the pattern sits outside the spirits regulator entirely: planting, harvesting and the price paid for agave are governed by Mexican agricultural policy and the crop’s own NOM, not by the CRT. Every litre in the 583.5 million is legally certified, and the regulator has no power over the decision being made in the field that determines how many litres there will be in 2032. That is the asymmetry worth watching — not the next price print.