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.
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches.
Things are often more complicated than that. Del Monte was founded a long time ago and fruit trees take a long time to grow. As a result, as the originator of those trees, you're at a disadvantage because you have to pay for many years of maintenance and interest on capital before the trees bear fruit, and are then sitting on a load of debt from the unproductive years that you can't service if the market price is low after the trees are producing.
But bankruptcy (or new ownership) clears the old debt, and then you're left with a productive asset that might not have been worth the cost to create at current prices, but could easily be worth the cost to continue using now that growing the trees is a sunk cost, which requires a much lower market price to be sustainable.
> 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.
That sounds a lot like a cartel acting through regulatory capture to limit supply.
Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy?
> 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 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).
I don’t know about peaches but ‘round my way the cider apple farmers spank the living daylights out of their high density dwarf trees. They get grubbed up and replanted in under a decade. Fruit trees have a naturally short lifetime but mega yield modern species are something else — the arboreal equivalent of a 40 day broiler.
Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.
> 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.
Most people don't realize how powerful farmers are in the US. We (rightly!) complain about Wall Street and bank bailouts when they happen, but I'd wager that we've given significantly more money to farmers over time, through bailouts (like this one) and regular subsidies.
Maybe that's a good use of tax dollars, maybe not. It feels bad, but I'm not an economist.
(And before anyone says that farmers are much more sympathetic characters than bankers, remember that "farmers" in the US overwhelmingly means gigantic corporate farming conglomerates; the individual family with a few hundreds or thousands of acres of land and hearts of gold is sadly increasingly uncommon.)
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches
How did this happen? It takes a long time before a peach tree seedling gets to the point where it can bear a significant amount of fruit. I'm going to guess about 10 years. Given that kind of delay, how did they get into a situation where there was this much over-production?
There might be not enough demand to match the capacity they contracted and invested to can, but surely there is some demand. You'd think someone would buy out some of the contracts and the canning capacity at a discount and continue some sort of operation.
> 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.
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.
In the first half of this comment I thought you were setting us up for a old-Google-style interview question. I felt oddly disappointed to not find a Fermi problem at the end.
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.
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 are implying a centralized semi monopoly is the only way. If we had farmers to buyers direct distribution it would be much more resilient to this kind of problems.
You have not made any attempt as an argument. That’s a pure assertion without even an attempt at a causal chain. Being resilient to non-problems is a cost with no benefit.
> 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.
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.
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.
And they usually don't introduce something everywhere at once. They do trial markets, or short-term runs. If something proves very popular (e.g. chicken nuggets) it eventually rolls out everywhere.
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.
That's the problem with depending on monopoly for coordination.
Maybe if we didn't let one corporation control so much of the distribution chain, we would avoid both the decision to overproduce and the stagnation of overproduced goods.
Of course, the real problem is that we have accepted the notion that food must profit someone, even when we have too much of it.
Although you have a point regarding this specific situation; the real, bigger issue is this industrial scale, low quality, high quantity food production system.
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.
I mean, we already have one company going bankrupt in part because they are unable to sell enough of their production to cover costs. Your plan would just cause more peach producers to go bankrupt.
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%.
This relates to what the first poster said though, at these quantities “just give it away” is incredibly expensive. Trucks, workers, cleaning, fuel, etc.
Just give it away still requires someone to pay for 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
There's a floor on what they can charge, though: the cost of maintaining the land, the cost of labor to harvest, the cost to process the peaches and package them, the cost to ship them to the store, and the store's cost to hold them in inventory before you buy them.
A business cannot stay in operation if the only way to sell the product is to sell it below cost[0]. Having all this excess production is exactly why Del Monte failed as a company. There's no point in building a business to provide people with below-cost food; it's not sustainable and is ultimately wasteful.
Find a way to get the peaches from the trees to people's homes cheaper? Great, do that, and maybe you can sell more at a lower price.
Or produce fewer until you can sell at a price above cost without much waste. We don't wring our hands at factory owners when they don't manufacture a huge surplus of toys that no one wants to buy. We shouldn't be upset when farmers decide to stop growing as much of a certain crop because they can't sell it all. I get the visceral reaction against killing trees. But that's an emotional response that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. I would much rather that land be used for a more productive crop that people actually want to buy, at prices that reflect what it costs to produce.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Tree maintenance labor, harvest labor, storage before shipping, labor to load the truck, labor to unload the truck, supermarket storage, supermarket shelf-stocking labor, supermarket disposal labor and cost for any stock that spoils.
That's for peaches intended to eat whole. The peaches we're talking about here are intended for canning, so you also have to add the cost of running the processing and canning machinery, the cost of the cans themselves, and the cost of labor to run and coordinate all that.
Also consider that no single supermarket is going to buy out the entire truck, so you're going to be stopping at many supermarkets, and unloading multiple times.
For larger chain supermarkets they may be buying a full truck (or multiple), but then you'll probably be delivering to a distribution center, where the supermarket then has to pay for that storage, plus labor to re-load onto other trucks, ship to the supermarkets themselves, and unload again.
Your analysis is missing nearly everything. Driving the full truck from point A to point B is a tiny part of the process, cost-wise. And I'm sure I've left things out too.
Sorting, selling, cleaning, the variety may not be palatable or presentable fresh, transport and packing damage, warehousing and storage (grocery stores don't have huge piles of fruit or even dry goods in the back, this stuff is all JIT)... probably missed a few, but that's just of the top of my head.
There are a number of costs and steps you forgot to consider. Plus, these peaches are for canning, but we’ll ignore that and assume they could be sold for eating raw.
The fruit needs to be picked. Paying people to pick it costs money.
As far as I know, you can’t just load 44 tons of peaches into a grain hopper trailer. It has to be loaded into crates, which are stacked and palletized and loaded into a refrigerated trailer. Possibly this is automated, but I’d bet it’s done by humans.
Food is generally not delivered from a farm directly to a grocery store, (ignore local co-ops buying from local farms for the purpose of this discussion, we have 44 tons of peaches inside our 53 foot trailer) fruit is stored in a refrigerated warehouse and it costs money to store it there whether you own the warehouse or pay someone else to store it in their warehouse.
A grocery chain will have (or rent/rent space in) warehouses where they receive large orders and then distribute them to individual stores, or they buy it from a local distributor that sells to multiple chains. Include unloading from the truck to the warehouse, which is faster than loading the fruit onto pallets, and picking the order in the warehouse to then be loaded onto another truck to be delivered.
Then, someone at the store has to receive the order, and then someone is assigned to stock the fruit on the sales floor, which occupies space inside the store which costs money.
All of your freight costs go up if you ship less than a full trailer (LTL).
You gave the LLM the wrong prompt. You probably asked something like “How much does it cost to ship 1000 kg on a semi-truck in the United States?” when you should’ve asked something like “Name all of the input costs for selling peaches, include all costs starting at harvest and ending at the customer purchasing the produce at the grocery store.”
Eating canned stuff seems to be going out of fashion as people realize about the Alzheimer's risk. There are basically no "new" canned food brands. People prefer frozen fruit to canned fruit, especially since frozen has gotten a lot of positive PR lately, e.g. "it's fresher than fresh produce at the supermarket!
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.)
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.
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?
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.
True, but carbs are being vilified in the media right now, and have been for a while, so public opinion on them (and especially sugar) is very negative
Really? The only issues arising from fiber that I've heard of is constipation, and that's only if diet suddenly changes and large amounts of fiber are introduced to a digestive system unused to it. AFAIK most people don't even get a tenth of what they should in terms of fiber.
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.
I'm not sure that the Department of Agriculture could do a better job canning and selling peaches better than the previous company. I doubt they were just passing on profits on the way to bankruptcy ...
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.
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.
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!
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).
Australia exports ~ 400 thousand metric tonnes of beef into the US per annum.
US cowboys are also competing against Australian working conditions; universal healthcare, guaranteed minimum wages indexed against living costs, greater environmental protections than the US, etc.
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.
"Consumer preferences have shifted away from preservative-laden canned food in favor of healthier alternatives," said Sarah Foss, global head of legal and restructuring at Debtwire, a financial consultancy.
Grocery inflation also caused consumers to seek out cheaper store brands. And President Donald Trump's 50% tariff on imported steel, which went into effect in June, will also push up the prices Del Monte and others must pay for cans.
Del Monte Foods, which is owned by Singapore's Del Monte Pacific, was also hit with a lawsuit last year by a group of lenders that objected to the company's debt restructuring plan. The case was settled in May with a loan that increased Del Monte's interest expenses by $4 million annually, according to a company statement.
During the coronavirus pandemic, when more people were eating at home, demand rose to record highs, Del Monte said in the filing, and the company committed to higher production levels. Once demand began to ease, Del Monte was left with too much inventory that it was forced to store, write off and “sell at substantial losses.”
The company also said it had carried a large amount of debt since it was acquired in 2014 by Del Monte Pacific Limited, which borrowed to finance the acquisition. Interest rates continued to increase, and the company’s annual cash interest expense has nearly doubled since 2020.
If you're up for a 12 minute video, besides re-iterating the points above (particularly underscoring the debt issue), it also points out that the company has changed hands many times in its history.
> 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.
it's worth mentioning that this isn't a produce/fruit only thing. Dairies regularly dump milk when it isn't profitable, often in ways where it winds up in the ground water or watershed.
“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.”
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!
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?
> 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.
“ 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches.
Things are often more complicated than that. Del Monte was founded a long time ago and fruit trees take a long time to grow. As a result, as the originator of those trees, you're at a disadvantage because you have to pay for many years of maintenance and interest on capital before the trees bear fruit, and are then sitting on a load of debt from the unproductive years that you can't service if the market price is low after the trees are producing.
But bankruptcy (or new ownership) clears the old debt, and then you're left with a productive asset that might not have been worth the cost to create at current prices, but could easily be worth the cost to continue using now that growing the trees is a sunk cost, which requires a much lower market price to be sustainable.
> 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.
That sounds a lot like a cartel acting through regulatory capture to limit supply.
Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy?
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> 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.
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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).
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> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches
They appear to have gone out of business because of massive debt from a leveraged buyout, combined with other issues.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-private-equity-overcooke...
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I don’t know about peaches but ‘round my way the cider apple farmers spank the living daylights out of their high density dwarf trees. They get grubbed up and replanted in under a decade. Fruit trees have a naturally short lifetime but mega yield modern species are something else — the arboreal equivalent of a 40 day broiler.
Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.
> 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.
Most people don't realize how powerful farmers are in the US. We (rightly!) complain about Wall Street and bank bailouts when they happen, but I'd wager that we've given significantly more money to farmers over time, through bailouts (like this one) and regular subsidies.
Maybe that's a good use of tax dollars, maybe not. It feels bad, but I'm not an economist.
(And before anyone says that farmers are much more sympathetic characters than bankers, remember that "farmers" in the US overwhelmingly means gigantic corporate farming conglomerates; the individual family with a few hundreds or thousands of acres of land and hearts of gold is sadly increasingly uncommon.)
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> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches.
Maybe if grocery store peaches weren't a fibrous, tasteless representation of a real fresh peach, they'd still be in business.
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> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches
How did this happen? It takes a long time before a peach tree seedling gets to the point where it can bear a significant amount of fruit. I'm going to guess about 10 years. Given that kind of delay, how did they get into a situation where there was this much over-production?
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The new crop will be grapes of wrath
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Great point, hoping whatever replaces them uses less water. Ag pulls ~40% of California's water and it feels like 3 out of every 4 years is a drought
Is wood that useless that they need to be paid to remove it ?
There might be not enough demand to match the capacity they contracted and invested to can, but surely there is some demand. You'd think someone would buy out some of the contracts and the canning capacity at a discount and continue some sort of operation.
> 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.
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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.
In the first half of this comment I thought you were setting us up for a old-Google-style interview question. I felt oddly disappointed to not find a Fermi problem at the end.
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.
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.
As someone close to agriculture this is the only true response in this thread and anyone understand fruit business knows this.
> 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.
You are implying a centralized semi monopoly is the only way. If we had farmers to buyers direct distribution it would be much more resilient to this kind of problems.
You have not made any attempt as an argument. That’s a pure assertion without even an attempt at a causal chain. Being resilient to non-problems is a cost with no benefit.
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> 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.
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.
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They will be replaced with something else, don't feel bad for the trees, they had a good run.
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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 don't know what you mean by 'injustice' - it seems to be a proxy for 'I don't like it when trees die'. Is there more?
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What is unjust about cutting down an orchard producing a product people aren't buying?
This isn't pristine old growth forest, it has no great ecology.
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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.
And they usually don't introduce something everywhere at once. They do trial markets, or short-term runs. If something proves very popular (e.g. chicken nuggets) it eventually rolls out everywhere.
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.
Seems like an opportunity to form a coop. I guess I’m being naive though. I just don’t know how
Then why do they use so much land in the first place?
That's the problem with depending on monopoly for coordination.
Maybe if we didn't let one corporation control so much of the distribution chain, we would avoid both the decision to overproduce and the stagnation of overproduced goods.
Of course, the real problem is that we have accepted the notion that food must profit someone, even when we have too much of it.
Although you have a point regarding this specific situation; the real, bigger issue is this industrial scale, low quality, high quantity food production system.
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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.
This idea sounds like continued misallocation
I mean, we already have one company going bankrupt in part because they are unable to sell enough of their production to cover costs. Your plan would just cause more peach producers to go bankrupt.
>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.
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%.
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As an owner of an apple tree: that's great for about two months, but I don't have commercial quantities of cold storage.
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Local deer everywhere agree: this is the solution
No one is stopping customers from growing their own food. What's stopping is the lack of expertise knowledge and time commitments it takes to harvest.
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I’m actually appalled when farms are unable to sell their crop they destroy them instead of just idk give it away or something.
This relates to what the first poster said though, at these quantities “just give it away” is incredibly expensive. Trucks, workers, cleaning, fuel, etc.
Just give it away still requires someone to pay for it
> and call it great injustice.
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
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There's a floor on what they can charge, though: the cost of maintaining the land, the cost of labor to harvest, the cost to process the peaches and package them, the cost to ship them to the store, and the store's cost to hold them in inventory before you buy them.
A business cannot stay in operation if the only way to sell the product is to sell it below cost[0]. Having all this excess production is exactly why Del Monte failed as a company. There's no point in building a business to provide people with below-cost food; it's not sustainable and is ultimately wasteful.
Find a way to get the peaches from the trees to people's homes cheaper? Great, do that, and maybe you can sell more at a lower price.
Or produce fewer until you can sell at a price above cost without much waste. We don't wring our hands at factory owners when they don't manufacture a huge surplus of toys that no one wants to buy. We shouldn't be upset when farmers decide to stop growing as much of a certain crop because they can't sell it all. I get the visceral reaction against killing trees. But that's an emotional response that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. I would much rather that land be used for a more productive crop that people actually want to buy, at prices that reflect what it costs to produce.
[0] Cue VC-funded startup jokes.
>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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
That's how we got mountain bunkers filled with cheese over the course of decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvLMH0wb_0k
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Farmers are literally subsidized to over-produce for food security.
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Uh yeah, this was Del Monte’s business model.
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.
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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.
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?
> What's missing in this analysis?
Tree maintenance labor, harvest labor, storage before shipping, labor to load the truck, labor to unload the truck, supermarket storage, supermarket shelf-stocking labor, supermarket disposal labor and cost for any stock that spoils.
That's for peaches intended to eat whole. The peaches we're talking about here are intended for canning, so you also have to add the cost of running the processing and canning machinery, the cost of the cans themselves, and the cost of labor to run and coordinate all that.
Also consider that no single supermarket is going to buy out the entire truck, so you're going to be stopping at many supermarkets, and unloading multiple times.
For larger chain supermarkets they may be buying a full truck (or multiple), but then you'll probably be delivering to a distribution center, where the supermarket then has to pay for that storage, plus labor to re-load onto other trucks, ship to the supermarkets themselves, and unload again.
Your analysis is missing nearly everything. Driving the full truck from point A to point B is a tiny part of the process, cost-wise. And I'm sure I've left things out too.
What‘s missing is considering why, if it were so easy, nobody has done that before they went out of business.
Sorting, selling, cleaning, the variety may not be palatable or presentable fresh, transport and packing damage, warehousing and storage (grocery stores don't have huge piles of fruit or even dry goods in the back, this stuff is all JIT)... probably missed a few, but that's just of the top of my head.
There are a number of costs and steps you forgot to consider. Plus, these peaches are for canning, but we’ll ignore that and assume they could be sold for eating raw.
The fruit needs to be picked. Paying people to pick it costs money.
As far as I know, you can’t just load 44 tons of peaches into a grain hopper trailer. It has to be loaded into crates, which are stacked and palletized and loaded into a refrigerated trailer. Possibly this is automated, but I’d bet it’s done by humans.
Food is generally not delivered from a farm directly to a grocery store, (ignore local co-ops buying from local farms for the purpose of this discussion, we have 44 tons of peaches inside our 53 foot trailer) fruit is stored in a refrigerated warehouse and it costs money to store it there whether you own the warehouse or pay someone else to store it in their warehouse.
A grocery chain will have (or rent/rent space in) warehouses where they receive large orders and then distribute them to individual stores, or they buy it from a local distributor that sells to multiple chains. Include unloading from the truck to the warehouse, which is faster than loading the fruit onto pallets, and picking the order in the warehouse to then be loaded onto another truck to be delivered.
Then, someone at the store has to receive the order, and then someone is assigned to stock the fruit on the sales floor, which occupies space inside the store which costs money.
All of your freight costs go up if you ship less than a full trailer (LTL).
You gave the LLM the wrong prompt. You probably asked something like “How much does it cost to ship 1000 kg on a semi-truck in the United States?” when you should’ve asked something like “Name all of the input costs for selling peaches, include all costs starting at harvest and ending at the customer purchasing the produce at the grocery store.”
Reality is missing from that LLM analysis.
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Are there a lot of extra trucks and refrigerated trailers sitting around idle?
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This is your fault for eating fewer canned peaches. The clingstone variety is bred for canning and not well suited to eating fresh.
My fault? I'm blaming The Presidents of the United States of America.
Millions of peaches, peaches for m̶e̶ no-one -> https://youtu.be/3GCrzjVdmSg
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Eating canned stuff seems to be going out of fashion as people realize about the Alzheimer's risk. There are basically no "new" canned food brands. People prefer frozen fruit to canned fruit, especially since frozen has gotten a lot of positive PR lately, e.g. "it's fresher than fresh produce at the supermarket!
How do canned peaches cause Alzheimer’s?
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i blew up my tv and threw away my paper. i was working up to eating peaches. i'm sorry.
Some local meat smoker is going to be very happy about all that peach wood. holy smokes!
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.)
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That's going to make for some very interesting smoked cheeses. I'd love to try a smoked brie with this wood.
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.
> they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally
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.
That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
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And conversely you can't grow enough food local to a large population center to feed everyone.
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the private equity buyout of Del Monte, that's got to be a big factor.
> It was an easy, steady cash-positive business until it wasn't.
This is out of touch. Growing fruit is one of the most difficult tasks in farming.
> 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.
What if they can't make much money doing so?
Farmers care about making money.
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.
Agricultural exports are a $23 billion dollar business in California alone. Which is about 1/3 of the crops grown.
This is what happens when the federal government uses a 1940s era plan to manage the economy.
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?
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.
Correction: Carbs are not "unhealthy". That's a wildly inaccurate and broad thing to say.
Excess consumption of processed and/or "unhealthy" carbs is unhealthy.
Excess consumption of protein is also unhealthy. Same with fiber.
I'm not commenting on anything else, just the fact that "carbs are recognized now as seriously unhealthy" is absolutely untrue.
> "carbs are recognized now as seriously unhealthy" is absolutely untrue
I don't think they meant that the medical community recognizes carbs as unhealthy. I think they meant the general public.
It's not true that carbs are unhealthy, but I think it is true that people recognize them as unhealthy.
True, but carbs are being vilified in the media right now, and have been for a while, so public opinion on them (and especially sugar) is very negative
> Same with fiber.
Really? The only issues arising from fiber that I've heard of is constipation, and that's only if diet suddenly changes and large amounts of fiber are introduced to a digestive system unused to it. AFAIK most people don't even get a tenth of what they should in terms of fiber.
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.
I'm not sure that the Department of Agriculture could do a better job canning and selling peaches better than the previous company. I doubt they were just passing on profits on the way to bankruptcy ...
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.
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.
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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!
The money isn't going to Del Monte, it's going to their suppliers. The ones who lost money when Del Monte closed.
Yes, i have no issue with that, but why is the money coming from the tax payer instead of del monte?
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Everybody gangsta about not needing government handouts until it's their own livelihood at stake.
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).
Australia exports ~ 400 thousand metric tonnes of beef into the US per annum.
US cowboys are also competing against Australian working conditions; universal healthcare, guaranteed minimum wages indexed against living costs, greater environmental protections than the US, etc.
* https://www.mla.com.au/news-and-events/us-tariffs/
* https://www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecurity-trade/export/from...
glad we piped all of that water off the Colorado river to them
That area doesn't get Colorado River water.
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.
Thanks for your answers!
> 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
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Death by many cuts:
"Consumer preferences have shifted away from preservative-laden canned food in favor of healthier alternatives," said Sarah Foss, global head of legal and restructuring at Debtwire, a financial consultancy.
Grocery inflation also caused consumers to seek out cheaper store brands. And President Donald Trump's 50% tariff on imported steel, which went into effect in June, will also push up the prices Del Monte and others must pay for cans.
Del Monte Foods, which is owned by Singapore's Del Monte Pacific, was also hit with a lawsuit last year by a group of lenders that objected to the company's debt restructuring plan. The case was settled in May with a loan that increased Del Monte's interest expenses by $4 million annually, according to a company statement.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/del-monte-files-for-bank...
During the coronavirus pandemic, when more people were eating at home, demand rose to record highs, Del Monte said in the filing, and the company committed to higher production levels. Once demand began to ease, Del Monte was left with too much inventory that it was forced to store, write off and “sell at substantial losses.”
The company also said it had carried a large amount of debt since it was acquired in 2014 by Del Monte Pacific Limited, which borrowed to finance the acquisition. Interest rates continued to increase, and the company’s annual cash interest expense has nearly doubled since 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/business/del-monte-bankru...
If you're up for a 12 minute video, besides re-iterating the points above (particularly underscoring the debt issue), it also points out that the company has changed hands many times in its history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=879CJsz8X6A
They should hire me to maintain those trees, they'll die faster that way.
Frozen peaches are superior
The Man from Del Monte said No?
> 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.
This. They'll be edible, but we don't have a fresh peach shortage, so you don't really want these peaches.
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.
it's worth mentioning that this isn't a produce/fruit only thing. Dairies regularly dump milk when it isn't profitable, often in ways where it winds up in the ground water or watershed.
Reminds me of Steinbeck:
“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.”
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I assume there is market saturation for fresh peaches, that is, all the fresh peaches the market wants to buy are already in the market.
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.
How many kilos of peaches would you say you get through in an average day?
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!
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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?
What is dark about the best time to get high?
This is all because :peach: now only means "buttocks" or "impeachment" isn't it? Who'd want to eat those anymore!
https://emojipedia.org/peach
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.
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> 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
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Isn't that what is happening, minus the government assistance?
The U.S. has not had any sort of Free Market in agricultural products since at least 1942 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
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.
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.
Exactly.
(I wonder why my comment has been deleted)
Did Del Monte's investors and lenders lose money? It would be strange if they didn't.
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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
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 topic at hand is market forces demanding the destruction of agricultural products. The horror of that seems very topical to me.
So, they cut down the trees and do what? How is this supposed help anything?
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.
Significantly reduced water usage for one. The water is the limiting factor.
It's really not. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
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.
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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.
Well, all you've got to do is rent several thousand trucks to go pick them up "for free"
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...
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.
Covid boosted the sale of canned food, but people avoid the sugary syrup of canned fruits in non emergency situations.
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.
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Anyone who wants a peach tree is going to 1) have a cheaper way of getting one, and 2) probably want a different variety.
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.