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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.
One time, I was driving on a highway, and every now and then I'd see a tomato on the side of the road. At first it was one every couple minutes, but as I passed more vehicles the rate increased. 10 per minute. 30 per minute. Then, hundreds. Every mile, I passed more tomatoes than my household would eat in a year (and it's probably a household that eats an above average amount of tomatoes).
This went on for about an hour, but finally, I made my way up to the truck that was carrying the tomatoes. They were pouring out of the open top. Other vehicles kept their distance in the right lane so as not to be pelted with tomatoes. But the thing was is that the truck was still full. And the road was isolated, so it must have been driving along like this for several hours. All those tomatoes we passed on the road - decades worth for a single family - just an irrelevant minor leak. It wasn't even a leak, someone just filled the truck a tiny, probably imperceptibly small bit too much.
If one truck carries that much food, and then there's however many other tomato trucks each day, then that's a lot.
Better idea:
1. Find a random large, barren public land nearby
2. Dump all fruit there.
3. Wait 15 years
4. New enchanted forest available for public use [1]
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-jui...
Farming history seems to be boom and bust and the golden ages of farming seem to be not quite what they were and surprisingly short.
A local university professor did a study on homesteading in my state and determined that even then the land offered to immigrants was actually to small to regularly turn a profit, to some extent that seems to continue to this day at times.
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.
As someone close to agriculture this is the only true response in this thread and anyone understand fruit business knows this.
Another issue here is that these are clingstone peaches.
Clingstones are best for mechanized processing, which needs the peach to physically hold itself together while the machine does its thing.
Consumers overwhelmingly prefer freestone peaches due to the ease at which they can be quartered and de-stoned by hand without making a total mess.
So on a personal level, my calm was greatly enhanced once I came across the full description of the crop type. There isn’t much use for clingstone outside of mechanized processing, as consumers just don’t want clingstone peaches due to how difficult they are to cut apart cleanly.
Source: orchardist in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, Canada’s western-end orchard region. I grow apples, but I know many other orchardists, including peach growers.
We recently had two cases in Germany of farmers giving away hundreds of tons of potatoes, as they'd have been destroyed otherwise. In one case they were paid for, but the store didn't want them anymore, in the other case it was overproduction and not worth transporting at the price they'd fetch.
You guys just didn't discover the beauty of fermentation and distillation, one can process rather large quantities and all you need is bunch of vats. Private smaller distilleries I believe work as a service in US too (as in you bring your stuff in and they process it professionally so no methanol inside).
Its quite popular in some parts of central Europe (say Czech republic) and resulting drink, in say 45% content of alcohol its fruity sweet and smooth and has absolutely nothing to do with cheap flavored chemical crap from potato/sugar beet one can buy in shops.
> Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.
Uneducated rice farmers in Bangladesh would understand the problem better than the people complaining about this.
Peaches are from the great country of China. Very popular and important in culture. Export may be the best solution. However, cultivar matters, and it may be too late in this case.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is your fault for eating fewer canned peaches. The clingstone variety is bred for canning and not well suited to eating fresh.
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.
Some local meat smoker is going to be very happy about all that peach wood. holy smokes!
As I understand it, Del Monte made a few mistakes.
The first was related to COVID. Sales of canned goods spiked during COVID. They misinterpreted this as a permanent change and invested accordingly.
Second, they did not find a way to compete with store brands, which are no longer at a quality deficit vs. more expensive name brands like Del Monte.
Finally, they didn't address changes in diet that (as I see it) makes sugary syrupy tree candy not something people want to eat. Carbs are recognized now as seriously unhealthy. Ozempic and related drugs may have also affected this.
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?
I'm from that area and grew up around those sort of farms. A neighbor actually had peaches. Fruit canning had been in decline for a long time leading up to this (consumers prefer fresh), and most of the producers have long since moved away from canning peaches.
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!
I've worked in agtech for the last 20 years supplying CA with various equipment and there's a vast amount of food industry there. So, the unfortunate thing is, kind of need to let capitalism do its job here. Ultimately, there is a lot of opportunity and infrastructure for all kinds of crops. Either people adapt or someone will buy them out. The only time you should really worry is if anyone trys to rezone agricultural land for other purposes.
Serious question
Were these trees ever profitable? If the true cost of water resources were added?
If the true cost of picking them with US workers were paid?
Any other subsidy?
In my country there is a farm lobby too, but they rather look after the massive agribusiness at the expense of small farms. Is that the case in the US?
I have never seen a californian peach orchard (I have read Grapes of Wrath, if that counts!), are they a similar environmental disaster to the almond monoculture?
I know this is naive but I wonder why the CCPA, together with the Department of Agriculture, chose not to purchase the peach canning facilities that Del Monte Foods was running. I suppose that it's more risk for the farmers in a world where canned peach sales are declining. I can't imagine it's easy to just clear cut a ton of trees though. 9 million sounds like nothing when it will take years for whatever new crop they plant to fruit.
glad we piped all of that water off the Colorado river to them
This is all because :peach: now only means "buttocks" or "impeachment" isn't it? Who'd want to eat those anymore!
It’s all about maximizing value for creditors.
Similar with the Spirit bankruptcy, nobody wanted to save the company... they wanted to sell the assets to reduce losses.
Farmer here. We would not need these interventions if we simply had high tariffs on food. Farmers produce a commodity product that has to compete on price with food grown in countries with zero labor protections (Mexico cowboys earn $17 per day on average vs WA state cows boys who make $17 minimum per hour) and zero environmental protections (many chemicals are banned from use here and engines need very expensive pollution mitigation devices).
What do they do with the wood from the trees. I have an offset smoker and fruit woods are excellent fuel.
Everybody gangsta about not needing government handouts until it's their own livelihood at stake.
> 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.
The Man from Del Monte said No?
They should hire me to maintain those trees, they'll die faster that way.
Trash eating peaces.
Napkin math suggest 500 tankers of peach juice, which makes me sad.
Frozen peaches are superior
What are the likely crops that would replace these? Is there chance for Agrivoltaics or straight up Solar being the most profitable opportunity?
Fruit isn’t very efficient.
So weird to have so many peach experts here, but I think it’s peachy.
You know something is dark when they had to make it exactly the infamous number 420k. For those who say "California has always had some satanic/dark element to it", they might be onto something huh?
Nothing new here
“ 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
So, they cut down the trees and do what? How is this supposed help anything?
All I could think about when I read the title was all the food insecure people who live in my little rural neck of the woods.
The only reason this is upvoted at all is people have an emotional attachment to trees. Note, there is no moral difference between a cultivated tree and a cultivate tulip or corn stalk. Its not like trees have a bigger brain because they are bigger, it doesnt work that way.
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.
https://interestingengineering.com/lists/7-mighty-machines-f...