People underestimate how difficult it is to seek buyers for the amount of produce we are talking about here.
Farmers are specialists at growing things, not at moving them across great distances, marketing them to dozens small buyers and or starting up packing plants from scratch. They don't have enough trucks, people or packaging machines to move them around.
Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.
Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.
A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article).
Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. The company that purchased their assets is continuing to buy 24,000 tons of peaches, but the previous unsustainable business was buying a lot more. It's the excess fields that need to be repurposed to growing something that the market will absorb.
The reason the trees are being destroyed is so they can grow something else on the land. Something that comes with a sustainable business model for the current market demands. Yes, the trees are technically going to waste, but if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying.
In the article you can even see that the farm lobby was so powerful that they got the USDA to pay for the tree removal. The comments talking about farmers not being organized enough or powerful enough must be unaware of how powerful the farm lobby is and how much money they're able to secure from the government every year.
The big thing I fear about this sort of destruction is that it takes a very long time for tree bearing fruit to start turning a profit. That means someone that wants to plant new trees needs to do so with the notion that they won't get any sort of return on investment for a decade.
My fear is that institutional farming does not have the long term fortitude to ever start growing a tree bearing crop. Once these trees are destroyed, they are gone for good regardless how the demand shifts.
A downturn of 2 or 3 years or crazy political maneuvers which kill off exports puts access to these fruit in jeopardy. And once they are out of the diet, it's very hard to get them reintroduced. That's a big part of the reason why the US has such a limited fruit diet in the first place (the other being that many fruits are very hard to ship).
> if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying.
Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
> A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article).
And a very low understanding of basic biology. A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_ in many parts of the world. There's a million things you can do with it, alcohol, fertilizer...
edit: me right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free. Trying to figure out the most economic way to get a rather barren place some soil.
If rotten fruit was exceptionally valuable, then people would be paying exceptional amounts of money for it instead of wondering where they can get truckloads of it for free.
Reminds me of stories about McDonalds introducing new menu items. The logistics of introducing things at all their locations is a major concern. Maybe they could have introduced a new peach desert or something, but like you said supply isn't the only thing - you need to move them around and process them too.
> Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.
A negative of the subsidy is that the farmland is not going to hit the market at a much lower rate. That raises the bar for entry into farming or at least keeps the bar at some level higher than the market would have had it.
The great injustice is very much me paying however much per pound of peaches when the supply is so great that they should be much cheaper.
However, if these are the trees that grow rock hard peaches that never soften as they ripen with no flavor, then bulldoze them all and say good riddance. Hell, might as well take of and nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
> The great injustice is very much me paying however much per pound of peaches when the supply is so great that they should be much cheaper.
But its not, because the supply and competing demands for motor fuel and all the other things that are required between the orchard are involved, not just the supply of peaches at the orchard.
You want BC Okanagan peaches. I've found them to be dramatically better than anything that's come out of the states for some reason. Granted, most of those would probably be coming from the western half of the country
>However, if these are the trees that grow rock hard peaches that never soften as they ripen with no flavor, t
That's not even how trees work. If they wanted, those same trees could grow plums within 2 years, or almonds, or pretty much any stonefruit except cherries (which tend to be incompatible).
If the tree that is being grafted into is still producing these rock hard never ripining peaches, then the tree still needs to be eradicated. Not really sure what GP's problem with the solution was.
When I moved to the US from southern Europe I was so horrified by the lack of taste of any fruit I tried, particularly the peaches and plums. I moved back to Europe and not a small factor was the lack of good produce and food in general. Its just mind boggling how Americans dont revolt against this, stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice.
That's so odd to me. You can buy cheap, cost-optimized fruit in the US. You can also buy amazing produce that would blow your mind. My wife and I look forward to our annual road trip to Monterey partly because of the fruit stands we pass along the way where we'll get cherries so dark they're nearly black, and strawberries the size of my fist (no, really, I have pictures) that are sweet as sugar and incredibly delicious.
The existence of Subway doesn't mean you can't get phenomenal deli sandwiches. It does mean you probably need to look around a little more and don't settle for the first sandwich place you see.
IME there is a large difference in quality in what is available at the super market. Sure I can do a once a year road trip to Monterey. The average organic heirloom tomato at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's is worse than the average organic heirloom tomato at Spar
No doubt they were delicious - fruit picked while walking is always special.
But here in California, we have tremendous strawberries in our markets: Camarosa, Albion, Gaviota. Each is different in size, texture, flavor-profile.
I usually buy a "flat" of strawberries from the local farmer's market during peak season every weekend. They go in my oatmeal, my smoothies and in my lunches.
Not sure why you’re downvoted. The bigger the fruit the less sugars / nutrition it has per gram. A big reason why wild strawberries are so tasty is because theyre so small. I’ve had the fortune to forage for wild mountain strawberries in my native country in the balkans and their taste is nothing comparable to the farmed ones. Its like two different fruits. Once you try wild strawberries you will remember that experience forever
I dont know if where you live you have access to areas where wild berries grow by themselves, not with agriculture. But I highly suggest to try to find something nearby, go for a hike, and specifically go looking for the berries and forage. Theyre so delicious its honestly not even anyhow comparable to the ones us humans grow. Its insane how delicious they are. Like doesnt even come close.
Subway (and McDonald's et al.) did run a bunch of local diners, restaurants, and cafeterias out of business, though. The ones that sold the middle ground between "optimized slop" and "bespoke actual food made by expensive chefs."
Perhaps you haven't had the pleasure of eating fresh-picked strawberries from Watsonville on your drive down PCH 1. Strawberries that are shipped across the US (Watsonville produces something like 40%) are picked under-ripe and will not sweeten more along the way.
Ripe, Watsonville farm-stand strawberries are something else entirely. They can indeed be fist sized. I encourage you to try them yourself.
Alternatively, you can go to pick your own places along the way - also fantastic.
I've had a similar experience when shopping at a gas station store that bought produce from a local strawberry patch. Unfortunately, it was on a road trip.
There used to be an amazing upick organic strawberry farm just past La Selva. I saw exactly what they put in them. Eating huge strawberries perfectly ripe, picked a half hour ago from there was incredible.
This is a funny statement in that California has probably the best agricultural produce on the planet. If you were in say Texas or Georgia - you could be forgiven for your statement.
Bay area produce is unparalleled - Tomatoes, peaches, figs, strawberries, etc.
More organic growers if thats what you care about - high quality growers. There is also massive commercial growers doing high volume low cost but you do need to know where to look.
That's funny specifically about peaches that you call out Georgia. Also, I am in Texas, and some of the best peaches I've had are from East Texas. Not really sure why you picked those two states. Sounds like you haven't been to either and are way out over your skis here.
I've stopped buying peaches from the supermarkets. They just are not worth it. To get peaches with actual flavor, I have to get them from special vendors that know they have better peaches and charge accordingly.
The suppliers don't notice when the numbers that stop are rounding errors. The vast majority of people don't have any experience with anything other than supermarket produce and don't know there's a choice. Growing up as a kid, I didn't know there were so many varieties of apples. Our store only carried red delicious, golden, and granny smith. It wasn't until I moved out of the sticks and saw more varieties. Some people never move, so they only know what they know and never experience new
Same with Maui Gold pineapples. I can't eat the Dole crap you get everywhere else. The ones at the markets in Maui are a completely different fruit, they're like candy. Whenever I go I eat them until my tongue burns from the citric acid.
This is what happens when you optimize your food supply for profit instead of being edible; varieties are selected for yield, longevity and shipping rather than flavor or nutrients. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
> Whenever I go I eat them until my tongue burns from the citric acid.
Been to Maui once, and this was pretty much my exact experience as well. Thought I was the only weird one to do that. I only slowed down though until it got really bad before stopping. Wish I was smarter to stop earlier ::face-palm::
Yes. Flavour isnt the main factor, its easier and faster growing, not spoiling, basically all the factors that are what a supermarket asks for. Here in southern europe flavor is the main concern. The flavorless produce doesnt fly here because nobody would buy that crap. We have standards. When I was living in the US I was shopping in wholefoods only and buying the most expensive varieties of the produce, and it still sucked xD
You are comparing fruit in a prime stone fruit-growing region to the US.
The US is big and fruit needs to be refrigerated to be transported. Refrigeration kills aromatics.
I assume you would have a similar experience buying plums in Germany. Similarly, if you bought stone fruit in California where it is grown, it would taste good.
> stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice
Unless you are willing to pay $30/peach for them to be flown next day on a jet, peaches in New York are not going to taste as good as they do off the tree.
It's hard to vote with your dollar when market economics are such that only a handful of (massive) firms sell almost all of thing you're protesting. What leverage does one have in the age of oligopolistic enshittification?
I agree that the tree destruction is a perfectly rationale reaction - but it is still an injustice. This quantity of waste is not free and not fully priced into the cost to produce the fruit.
I think the emotional misalignment most people will feel at this announcement is a signal that there's a large missed externality that allowed margins on this produce to get too thin.
A big part of the problem here is that Del Monte was the victim of several leveraged buyouts that had executives walking away with millions while the company was saddled with debt.
It’s an injustice to destroy orchards of commercially planted fruit trees that were bathed in pesticides for their entire life? I’m not seeing the injustice here, something else will be planted in place of the peach trees. It’s productive agricultural land.
I mean you are destroying an entire forest that grows food, of course people are incensed, they are funding the destruction with money paid from taxes. Food is already bananas expensive. And it feels so terribly inefficient to just rip and replace.
I fully understand that there is processing and logistics problems. This is not a misunderstanding of economics - its a wild misallocation of resources, and massive destruction of crop.
Have a banner year of peach sales in California for super cheap... market corrects for its past mistakes.
the difficulty of bringing produce to market is reflected in the cost structure. 90% of a food dollar goes towards all the efforts required to get food to the customer (transportation, packaging, warehousing, marketing, retail, etc).
this is why I think the solution is to have people grow their own fruits in their own backyards and front yards. customers will save a huge amount of money and it's better for the environment too.
You're assuming that the customer growing their own fruit could do it at lower overall cost. Logistics are fairly inexpensive all things considered, if they really represent 90% of the total cost of fruit it says a lot for how low agribusiness has driven down the cost of the other 10%.
Not really. I buy bare-root tree from home depot, throw it into the ground, and get fruit in a few years. No fertilizer, no anything, just give it water and sun. It's not rocket science.
In a less profit driven world, we might stockpile these in cans and then later throw them away once they spoil, taking over the canning facilities and paying for the wages via taxes on things not needed for survival. We don't maximize food security though, we prefer profit, up to and including choosing not to feed people.
Of course if they did then what's about to happen with the peach trees, you'd end up killing the dairy cows, which I'm guessing the people in this thread would have a problem with.
The government would step in and take over operations. This is why we don't need profit-driven companies responsible for food supply. By all means let Del Monte's managers try their hand in some other industry if they couldn't make it work (or not, because they couldn't make it work).
What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?
Also which government? Because there are at least 3-5 relevant ones here, maybe more.
I'm not saying this is a good idea, but the government doesn't need to know how to micromanage these operations. The company already has employees who can do these things. All they need is to get paid. If the government decided that the final harvest of peaches needed to be canned, they could take over the business and pay to make it happen.
edit: Actually, they don't even need to take over the business. Another company is already operating it. The government could simply sign a contract to buy the 50,000 tons of canned peaches and the company would can them. Again, not to endorse the idea, but it is very straightforward logistically.
> What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?
The DoD (for one) runs lots of logistics, warehousing, HR (2.8M), and finance stuff.
>What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?
That'd actually be quite easy for this particular federal government actually (current administration aside). And probably California too.
The government is able to do all of this for an entire literal army of people, spread across the entire world. And for an additional smaller army we call the Marines. Only difference is we add peaches on top of the canning of lead.
Do you really want a world without any fast food or snack foods? I mean, I think we consume way too much as a society, but I'd rather not have the government decide what I'm allowed to eat.
Have a conversation with someone who grew up in communist USSR/Russia sometime... It definitely isn't cool.
If we had govt controlled food supply, we'd never have the likes of hot sauce (sriracha, pace, etc) and would likely never have seen a lot of options form. For better and far, far worse.
>but I'd rather not have the government decide what I'm allowed to eat.
I don't know how it'd get to that if we had even more supply. I'm saying we'd be better off dealing with the problems of overproduction rather than the problems of unprofitable businesses and killing production capacity because it isn't profitable in the short-term.
I also never said you couldn't have non/not-for-profit food production, just that they shouldn't be for-profit.
It's difficult because a lot of the margins have been pressed out, and capital funding is often done in a way that doesn't allow for a market to shrink and respond to over-production or a reduction in demand.
If the government was responsible for running the farms, we would not have near the variety we have today... and for that matter, it would be much closer to soviet communism. I'm absolutely opposed to that.
And how do you know we would be better off? What would you do with oversupply? We had mountains full of cheese for decades from oversupply.. and that's a single product. Canned fruit doesn't even last that long before breaking down. The alternative is waste year after year, vs. cutting back and planting something else, which is what is happening... part of the market was allowed to fail (Del Monte) and part is being bailed out (farms) in defense of being able to have ongoing production, even if the product is different.
That seems far better than having mountains full of rotten peaches in cans.
It's difficult for them because farmers are raised anti-union individualists that are at the mercy of middle-men. If they would cooperate, unionize even, they would be far more powerful than they are now.
US farmers are up there in terms of how much business protection exists for them. I do think there were policy issues and recent political extremism has diverted a lot of their political will from the matters that are critical to them - but this sort of an issue is larger than just collectivizing. Agriculture is a global market that is uncoordinateable (at least without massive effort) and so if local protections are to be offered the costs will need to be artificially introduced through domestic price increases that the larger American market finds extremely unpalatable.
This is a failing where a lack of coordinated collectivized action was one contributing factor but there is actually a large collectivized will here - but I think the bigger issue is that it's having difficulty aligning itself in the current political environment.
I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong. California canning peach farmers are organized and crop prices are set by industry-wide bargaining with processors every year. Additionally, now that Del Monte is out of the business, the only remaining operating canneries are owned by a grower cooperative. It didn't save the industry. In fact, it may have led to the irrational planting of these trees that now need to be pulled. Source: my father was a peach farmer and chairman of the board of the California Canning Peach Association for many years. But he saw this coming and got out of the business.
I’m an agronomist and while I don’t directly deal with that level of things, what you wrote sounds roughly like what goes on for the hazelnut industry here in Oregon.
He saw demand falling, exports falling due to the strong dollar and increased productivity in international farming, mismanagement at the canneries with executives cashing out using leveraged buyouts and saddling the companies with unsustainable debt, and trouble finding enough labor (peaches are harvested by hand, almost entirely by migrant workers from Mexico because no native Californian is willing to climb up and down ladders all day in 110 degree heat and 100% humidity, and it's hard to ensure legality).
He switched to almonds and walnuts, which are less labor intensive and have better management on the processing side. But they are an export-heavy market and have also been hammered by the strong dollar. Inflation-adjusted crop prices are near all time lows while costs are at all-time highs. Farming is a hard business!
Farmers generally own or lease their land. How and why would the owner or leaseholder of the land unionize? Who would they be negotiating with collectively? On the other hand, many farmers are parts of pools that pool their crops and sell them all into commodities markets.
I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about. And it’s a shame; unions actually deserve better representation than you just provided.
Clingstone peaches are best used for canning and this is one of the last canneries shutting down. The remaining CA cannery is buying what it can. This helps them remove now worthless trees and plant new crops. But it will take a generation to recover.
That's what happens when "family farms" rely on a large industrial complex and grow a mono-culture that doesn't have uses other than canning.
It was an easy, steady cash-positive business until it wasn't. If those farmers thought what is final product and who benefits from it most, they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally, which many California family farms do.
This is out of touch, many of these farmers are 100+ miles from a large population center. They can’t move enough produce at a local store to stay in business.
Maybe, but it's not an argument against diversification. When it comes to agriculture, the incentives should be aligned such that a single point of failure like this is highly unlikely.
> If those farmers thought what is final product and who benefits from it most, they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally, which many California family farms do.
And farmers that don't care about making money aren't farmers any more.
Agriculture is a highly competitive business - even large scale agriculture still has very stiff price competition. There isn't a lot of fat to burn on charitable gestures and what is there isn't on the scale of maintaining such a large unproductive orchard.
It sucks - don't misread my statement. It is deeply unfortunate and we should consider mitigations for the future - but the party to throw blame at here isn't the farmers and neither should they be expected to bear the cost.
If you are in agriculture you understand how expensive to move things, as crazy as this sounds it’s practically only option many times.
Easy way to understand, they can announce it’s free come and get it and it wouldn’t have moved. Which clearly shows financially moving these don’t make sense.
Why? From searches and LLMs it seems it costs $50-100 to move a tonne 1000 km via truck, giving 0.05-0.10 $/kg for a supermarket 500km away. Fruit prices at at least $4.5/kg for peaches, 3.75$/kg for apples 1.45$/kg. So transport cost seems negligible and if fruit is given away for free, it seems it would be very profitable for any supermarket in region to show up with a truck. What's missing in this analysis?
There's a good chance of that, yes! Farmers tend to be very good at getting every bit of value out of things. I live in the Sierras, uphill from many of these peach trees. Near the peach trees are lots and lots of almond trees. Almond trees are rotated (removed and replaced with young trees) every couple of decades or so, so 3-5% are taken out every year.
A lot of the removed almond tree wood is sold to people like me up in the Sierras where we heat with it in the winter. Almond has significantly more energy per unit of volume that most other species of trees in our area. I don't like the smell of burning almond wood. I bet peach wood smells a lot better, but it would take a lot more space to store the same energy.
This is rapidly changing. As almond orchards get taken over by corporate farmers instead of smaller family farmers, they just chip the almond wood and discard it instead of dealing with waiting for various people to come in and get the almond wood.
(Source: my relatives in the Sac. Valley don’t heat with almond wood anymore.)
It seems that del monte proper is not actually declaring bankruptcy, so how is it that the American tax payer is left picking up the check on this one? Privatized profits, socialized losses!
> When a processing facility closes and 55,000 acres of fruit suddenly have nowhere to go — that’s not something a family farm can just absorb
Won't they at least sell the fruit to customers through grocery stores, where possible? I can see replacing the crops based on reduced future demand from the canneries, but surely the current fruit is usable.
From what I understand it is a canning variety of peach that isn't all that great for eating fresh. So while im sure they could sell some, I doubt most people would come back for much more after the first time.
It is common in agriculture that there is no existing market in which the price would cover the cost of moving the crop to that market. Destroying the crop minimizes the loss to the farmer.
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
Not what's happening here. They are not destroying the trees to limit supply and jack up prices, but rather because no one wants them.
Nor are we destroying food while people go hungry; we produce more food than we eat by a considerable margin. What hunger remains in the world is a distribution problem, not a supply problem.
How would they establish those relationships with grocery stores, and get the peaches to them? Sure you could do it with a handful of local stores but the numbers we're talking about are a rounding error.
Ah so the real problem here is the loneliness epidemic. If yall were less shy and came over more often to share my home baked peach cobbler then this wouldn't be an issue!
While SFGate probably isn't renowned for its agricultural coverage, it'd be nice if there was at least a little context in their story. Is the demand for canned peaches dropping, or is production from other regions or countries displacing the California production, or what? What new crops might the farmers replace the trees with? Are there Peach Festivals or other local cultural events which will be impacted?
Del Monte was killed by COVID. Canned food sales spiked and they thought that would last, but it didn't.
The specific peaches referred to in this story are "Cling peaches", which can only be canned, they aren't sold fresh. But modern supply chains mean fresh peaches of other varieties are easily available, which has reduced the demand for canned.
They'll probably replace the trees with almonds, pistachios, and walnuts.
The problem for the individual farmers is that they own a farm covered in peach trees, but they can't profitably sell peaches. The money will let them remove all the peach trees and then develop the land for some new crop.
This is also good for the remaining peach farmers because it keeps peach prices high, and also because massive forests of unattended peach trees leads to pest problems.
They plant something else. There just isn't demand for canned peaches anymore, so this is exactly what should happen. It's just unfortunate that it had to happen all at once with this bankruptcy rather than in a more organized fashion that could have prevented these unneeded orchards from being planted in the first place.
California is not in any drought right now and our reservoirs last 10 years in the absolute worst case. Most of our water goes into the ocean.
I have no dog in the race in terms of what trees there are but if you take them down it'll be invasive South American pepper trees or mustard grass. As long as it's used and sequestering carbon it's all gravy.
You can see the water level there for Lake Orville which is the source for the California aqueduct system that feeds part of the Central Valley and the 20 million living in Southern California. Given that non-residential accounts for 92% of all the water use California is never in any danger of not being able to provide water to residential. That would require 20 years without rain and that also assumes we don't build new reservoirs.
California is the size of a country. The North is in an area more like the Pacific Northwest than any desert.
We just lived through a worst case scenario that lasted 3 years and only on the 3rd year of that did we even bother to start water restrictions. For the past two years we've been full to 100% and having to let it go in the spring.
I did a ton of research on this cause I own a property supplied by this system.
“ The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” - John Steinbeck; Grapes of Wrath
I loved reading Grapes of Wrath in high school. How is this related to the topic?
This reaction is similar to constituents who bristle at the fact that their local library destroys old books, seeing a parallel to book burnings in 1930s Germany.
> The impacts pushed a delegation of California lawmakers to ask the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide financial support to the fruit growers.
Seems like the opposite of the free market. Large farmers are usually the first people lining up for a government handout, and their representatives are regularly anti-market types.
this is exactly right, all US farmers are basically socialists and they consistently vote for the one of the most socialists parties on the planet - the republican party
The Free Market magic hand™ does not apply to those who have capital and are facing losses. That's only when you don't have capital and are facing losses.
I wonder why they cannot be moved. There are machines that simply pluck them from the dirt and have them ready to go. They could auction them off for $1/each and still make a profit.
The land is the thing that is actually valuable here, so filling that land with a perfect grid of 6 foot craters in exchange for a few dollars is probably a bad call.
The problem isn't that the trees are in the wrong place. The problem is that there are more trees than demand for canned peaches. It's a failure of planning on the part of Del Monte and peach growers.
I agree in principle that reuse is the best imaginable outcome... but You underestimate the labor and cost of machines. I bet it costs $200 to pluck a single tree let alone ship it somewhere else usable.
Why would they pay to ship it anywhere? Set the auction date and mandate the buyer brings a flatbed. All sales final. The work to remove the dead tree stump isn't going to be cheaper.
Farmers are specialists at growing things, not at moving them across great distances, marketing them to dozens small buyers and or starting up packing plants from scratch. They don't have enough trucks, people or packaging machines to move them around.
Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.
Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.
Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. The company that purchased their assets is continuing to buy 24,000 tons of peaches, but the previous unsustainable business was buying a lot more. It's the excess fields that need to be repurposed to growing something that the market will absorb.
The reason the trees are being destroyed is so they can grow something else on the land. Something that comes with a sustainable business model for the current market demands. Yes, the trees are technically going to waste, but if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying.
In the article you can even see that the farm lobby was so powerful that they got the USDA to pay for the tree removal. The comments talking about farmers not being organized enough or powerful enough must be unaware of how powerful the farm lobby is and how much money they're able to secure from the government every year.
My fear is that institutional farming does not have the long term fortitude to ever start growing a tree bearing crop. Once these trees are destroyed, they are gone for good regardless how the demand shifts.
A downturn of 2 or 3 years or crazy political maneuvers which kill off exports puts access to these fruit in jeopardy. And once they are out of the diet, it's very hard to get them reintroduced. That's a big part of the reason why the US has such a limited fruit diet in the first place (the other being that many fruits are very hard to ship).
Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
And a very low understanding of basic biology. A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_ in many parts of the world. There's a million things you can do with it, alcohol, fertilizer...
edit: me right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free. Trying to figure out the most economic way to get a rather barren place some soil.
https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...
A negative of the subsidy is that the farmland is not going to hit the market at a much lower rate. That raises the bar for entry into farming or at least keeps the bar at some level higher than the market would have had it.
The great injustice is very much me paying however much per pound of peaches when the supply is so great that they should be much cheaper.
However, if these are the trees that grow rock hard peaches that never soften as they ripen with no flavor, then bulldoze them all and say good riddance. Hell, might as well take of and nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
But its not, because the supply and competing demands for motor fuel and all the other things that are required between the orchard are involved, not just the supply of peaches at the orchard.
That's not even how trees work. If they wanted, those same trees could grow plums within 2 years, or almonds, or pretty much any stonefruit except cherries (which tend to be incompatible).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting
It's disgusting.
Real apple juice is dark brown and tastes nothing like the golden liquid mentioned above.
The existence of Subway doesn't mean you can't get phenomenal deli sandwiches. It does mean you probably need to look around a little more and don't settle for the first sandwich place you see.
No thanks. The most wonderful strawberries I ever tasted were wild ones picked on a disused Welsh railway line, probably a centimetre or so in size.
But here in California, we have tremendous strawberries in our markets: Camarosa, Albion, Gaviota. Each is different in size, texture, flavor-profile.
I usually buy a "flat" of strawberries from the local farmer's market during peak season every weekend. They go in my oatmeal, my smoothies and in my lunches.
E.g: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/07/13/farmers-market-pops-up...
Ripe, Watsonville farm-stand strawberries are something else entirely. They can indeed be fist sized. I encourage you to try them yourself.
Alternatively, you can go to pick your own places along the way - also fantastic.
Bay area produce is unparalleled - Tomatoes, peaches, figs, strawberries, etc.
More organic growers if thats what you care about - high quality growers. There is also massive commercial growers doing high volume low cost but you do need to know where to look.
The suppliers don't notice when the numbers that stop are rounding errors. The vast majority of people don't have any experience with anything other than supermarket produce and don't know there's a choice. Growing up as a kid, I didn't know there were so many varieties of apples. Our store only carried red delicious, golden, and granny smith. It wasn't until I moved out of the sticks and saw more varieties. Some people never move, so they only know what they know and never experience new
This is what happens when you optimize your food supply for profit instead of being edible; varieties are selected for yield, longevity and shipping rather than flavor or nutrients. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
Been to Maui once, and this was pretty much my exact experience as well. Thought I was the only weird one to do that. I only slowed down though until it got really bad before stopping. Wish I was smarter to stop earlier ::face-palm::
The US is big and fruit needs to be refrigerated to be transported. Refrigeration kills aromatics.
I assume you would have a similar experience buying plums in Germany. Similarly, if you bought stone fruit in California where it is grown, it would taste good.
> stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice
Unless you are willing to pay $30/peach for them to be flown next day on a jet, peaches in New York are not going to taste as good as they do off the tree.
I think the emotional misalignment most people will feel at this announcement is a signal that there's a large missed externality that allowed margins on this produce to get too thin.
This isn't pristine old growth forest, it has no great ecology.
I fully understand that there is processing and logistics problems. This is not a misunderstanding of economics - its a wild misallocation of resources, and massive destruction of crop.
Have a banner year of peach sales in California for super cheap... market corrects for its past mistakes.
Bankrupt everyone who grows peaches then?
There are actual costs in growing, harvesting, and delivering produce to market you know.
this is why I think the solution is to have people grow their own fruits in their own backyards and front yards. customers will save a huge amount of money and it's better for the environment too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvLMH0wb_0k
They overproduce for votes. Countries without farmer blocks swinging elections stockpile non-perishables for food security.
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/farm-bankruptcies-continued-...
https://www.adamsandreese.com/the-ledger/rising-farm-distres...
And those farms get bought up and folded into for-profit operations. You simply can't fix this in the current system.
The issue is that the company that owns the canning plants (Del Monte) went bankrupt. There is no canning capacity available to do this.
How did you possibly miss the point by this far? It’s like trying to drive to Los Angeles and ending up on Pluto.
Also which government? Because there are at least 3-5 relevant ones here, maybe more.
edit: Actually, they don't even need to take over the business. Another company is already operating it. The government could simply sign a contract to buy the 50,000 tons of canned peaches and the company would can them. Again, not to endorse the idea, but it is very straightforward logistically.
The DoD (for one) runs lots of logistics, warehousing, HR (2.8M), and finance stuff.
That'd actually be quite easy for this particular federal government actually (current administration aside). And probably California too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_City_Army_Ammunition_Plan...
Have a conversation with someone who grew up in communist USSR/Russia sometime... It definitely isn't cool.
If we had govt controlled food supply, we'd never have the likes of hot sauce (sriracha, pace, etc) and would likely never have seen a lot of options form. For better and far, far worse.
I don't know how it'd get to that if we had even more supply. I'm saying we'd be better off dealing with the problems of overproduction rather than the problems of unprofitable businesses and killing production capacity because it isn't profitable in the short-term.
I also never said you couldn't have non/not-for-profit food production, just that they shouldn't be for-profit.
If the government was responsible for running the farms, we would not have near the variety we have today... and for that matter, it would be much closer to soviet communism. I'm absolutely opposed to that.
And how do you know we would be better off? What would you do with oversupply? We had mountains full of cheese for decades from oversupply.. and that's a single product. Canned fruit doesn't even last that long before breaking down. The alternative is waste year after year, vs. cutting back and planting something else, which is what is happening... part of the market was allowed to fail (Del Monte) and part is being bailed out (farms) in defense of being able to have ongoing production, even if the product is different.
That seems far better than having mountains full of rotten peaches in cans.
This is a failing where a lack of coordinated collectivized action was one contributing factor but there is actually a large collectivized will here - but I think the bigger issue is that it's having difficulty aligning itself in the current political environment.
https://www.hazelnutbargaining.com/
He switched to almonds and walnuts, which are less labor intensive and have better management on the processing side. But they are an export-heavy market and have also been hammered by the strong dollar. Inflation-adjusted crop prices are near all time lows while costs are at all-time highs. Farming is a hard business!
Farming is hard. I heard Urea prices are up 2x since the start of the year. How many farmers will go out of business because of that…
I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about. And it’s a shame; unions actually deserve better representation than you just provided.
It was an easy, steady cash-positive business until it wasn't. If those farmers thought what is final product and who benefits from it most, they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally, which many California family farms do.
This is out of touch, many of these farmers are 100+ miles from a large population center. They can’t move enough produce at a local store to stay in business.
That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...
What if they can't make much money doing so?
This is out of touch. Growing fruit is one of the most difficult tasks in farming.
Agriculture is a highly competitive business - even large scale agriculture still has very stiff price competition. There isn't a lot of fat to burn on charitable gestures and what is there isn't on the scale of maintaining such a large unproductive orchard.
It sucks - don't misread my statement. It is deeply unfortunate and we should consider mitigations for the future - but the party to throw blame at here isn't the farmers and neither should they be expected to bear the cost.
Easy way to understand, they can announce it’s free come and get it and it wouldn’t have moved. Which clearly shows financially moving these don’t make sense.
A lot of the removed almond tree wood is sold to people like me up in the Sierras where we heat with it in the winter. Almond has significantly more energy per unit of volume that most other species of trees in our area. I don't like the smell of burning almond wood. I bet peach wood smells a lot better, but it would take a lot more space to store the same energy.
(Source: my relatives in the Sac. Valley don’t heat with almond wood anymore.)
Similar with the Spirit bankruptcy, nobody wanted to save the company... they wanted to sell the assets to reduce losses.
Won't they at least sell the fruit to customers through grocery stores, where possible? I can see replacing the crops based on reduced future demand from the canneries, but surely the current fruit is usable.
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
Nor are we destroying food while people go hungry; we produce more food than we eat by a considerable margin. What hunger remains in the world is a distribution problem, not a supply problem.
The specific peaches referred to in this story are "Cling peaches", which can only be canned, they aren't sold fresh. But modern supply chains mean fresh peaches of other varieties are easily available, which has reduced the demand for canned.
They'll probably replace the trees with almonds, pistachios, and walnuts.
> Del Monte was killed by COVID. Canned food sales spiked and they thought that would last, but it didn't.
Why can’t they reduce to their former size? It seems the California plants had been around long before Covid
If anything would have been profitable spun off, it would have been spun off in the bankruptcy.
This is also good for the remaining peach farmers because it keeps peach prices high, and also because massive forests of unattended peach trees leads to pest problems.
California is not in any drought right now and our reservoirs last 10 years in the absolute worst case. Most of our water goes into the ocean.
I have no dog in the race in terms of what trees there are but if you take them down it'll be invasive South American pepper trees or mustard grass. As long as it's used and sequestering carbon it's all gravy.
https://oroville.lakesonline.com/Level/
You can see the water level there for Lake Orville which is the source for the California aqueduct system that feeds part of the Central Valley and the 20 million living in Southern California. Given that non-residential accounts for 92% of all the water use California is never in any danger of not being able to provide water to residential. That would require 20 years without rain and that also assumes we don't build new reservoirs.
California is the size of a country. The North is in an area more like the Pacific Northwest than any desert.
We just lived through a worst case scenario that lasted 3 years and only on the 3rd year of that did we even bother to start water restrictions. For the past two years we've been full to 100% and having to let it go in the spring.
I did a ton of research on this cause I own a property supplied by this system.
“ The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” - John Steinbeck; Grapes of Wrath
This reaction is similar to constituents who bristle at the fact that their local library destroys old books, seeing a parallel to book burnings in 1930s Germany.
Seems like the opposite of the free market. Large farmers are usually the first people lining up for a government handout, and their representatives are regularly anti-market types.
Sure, there's plenty of puffed-up talk about having one. That's kinda like the talk about Santa bringing toys for good little girls and boys.
https://interestingengineering.com/lists/7-mighty-machines-f...