This is all because :peach: now only means "buttocks" or "impeachment" isn't it? Who'd want to eat those anymore!
California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
291–300 of 473 posts
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
It's so weird for you to be fearful of something when you don't know how farming works. Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand. So what. This is routine and seldom makes the news. Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
> Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?
The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed to hit 3 different grocery stores).
I haven't tracked peaches recently, but I can tell you that canned apricots have been a bit thin on the ground for at least a couple of years.
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#293Nothing 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 the…
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.
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I visited California a month ago and had some of the best strawberries I've ever had for $4/quart off the side of the road near Bakersfield (best I had was Oshii berries before they started to sell to grocers, but that was at luxury fruit prices). The Sunnyvale farmers market was a different story though. Two of the vendors gave out samples. One of them tasted like Safeway strawberries. The other gave out these small…
> My takeaway from this experience is that America sells bad produce less so due to supply reasons and more so that Americans just have poor taste in produce. Or maybe you don't generalize about an entire country based on your experience in one small city.
I'm American and was half being facetious.
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#295If you are in agriculture you understand how expensive to move things, as crazy as this sounds it’s practically only option many times. Easy way to understand, they can announce it’s free come and get it and it wouldn’t have moved. Which clearly shows financially moving these don’t make sense.
Why? From searches and LLMs it seems it costs $50-100 to move a tonne 1000 km via truck, giving 0.05-0.10 $/kg for a supermarket 500km away. Fruit prices at at least $4.5/kg for peaches, 3.75$/kg for apples 1.45$/kg. So transport cost seems negligible and if fruit is given away for free, it seems it would be very profitable for any supermarket in region to show up with a truck. What's missing in this analysis?
There 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.”
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
Incorrect. You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers. That way when one goes bankrupt, you don't wind up with complete supply chain disintegration.
The solution is quite straightforward. However, it requires an electorate that has a couple of brain cells to rub together in order to understand the solution. And 30% of the US is willfully hostile to any real solutions while another 30% is happy to fiddle while everything burns.
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#297People 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 r…
Although you have a point regarding this specific situation; the real, bigger issue is this industrial scale, low quality, high quantity food production system.
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ti…
Farmers switching from peaches to elsewise due to a lack of buyers represents a bailout?
Paying farmers to make the transition from peaches is a bailout
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I actually have farming experience. Farmers aren't naive about this stuff. They forecast future trends as best they can and will replace trees (or other crops) when it seems profitable. Newly planted fruit trees will generally start producing within a few years and output increases as the trees grow, then eventually levels off and declines as they age. A tree is just another capital asset with a limited lifespan…
Ok, then I'll just reissue my 2 questions > If that were the case, then why are there so many peach trees currently? Why hasn't the entire orchard been replaced with olive trees? I agree, that farmers forecast and switch up crops. But I disagree with you that you have a bunch of farmers that have mixed orchards setup because of that forecasting. It's not like wheat or barely where you could switch between the two eve…
Did you not read the linked article? There are so many peach trees because the farmers were contracted to grow and sell the peaches to Del Monte.
New orchards of various crops are planted every day, I don't know why you think this doesn't happen in the modern age.
Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 repurpo…
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 a…
If you don’t trust farmers to make the decision, who do you think should be making it?