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Discussion (149 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I fully understand that there is processing and logistics problems. This is an understanding 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvLMH0wb_0k
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.
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/
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.)
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.”
“ 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.
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.
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.
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...