Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

sfgate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 473 posts

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#301

Post by kelnos »

lifis wrote: post #131
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #100

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.

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#302

Post by pinkmuffinere »

bsder wrote: post #296
goosejuice wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

> 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.

This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider:

- insurance companies

- banking

- utilities

It’s also hard to implement. What counts as a supplier? Is Google the sole supplier for search functionality? If 4 suppliers provide 1% of demand, and one supplies 96%, does that comply? If there’s only one company offering some new service (e.g. driverless cars), do they immediately get broken up?

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#303

Post by jjulius »

aidenn0 wrote: post #290
HerbManic wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your hand and raise you. Weird Al's straight cover. Al should just do an album like that, would be kinda neat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddju6JMSp7g

You neglected to mention the presence of Chris Ballew...

Also known as Caspar Babypants, the patron saint of children's music!

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#304

Post by ssl-3 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #279
cogman10 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts? That's exactly what I'm thinking. There are few crops where someone might want to lock in a 20 year contract. It's a major gamble for all involved. It's a gamble for the distributor because tastes might shift in 20 years (almost certainly a big part of why Del Monte went bankrupt) and it's a risk for the farmer b…

> We have access to only 1 because there's only one distributor of bananas in the US. Aren't there 3, at least? Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte?

In the US, there's at least that many.

I've also bought Fyffes bananas [in the US] in recent times; those probably came from Aldi.

The more diverse ethnic marketplaces surely have other sources. They've got their own ways of doing stuff. :)

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#305

Post by bsder »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #302
bsder wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ru…

> 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. This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider: - insurance companies - banking - utilities It’s also hard to implement. What counts as a supplier? Is Google…

> do they immediately get broken up?

Yes. Always. At all levels. I might provide a limit below which that doesn't happen (like $50 million in revenue), but as soon as you cross that limit, scrutiny should be automatic.

> This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider: - insurance companies - banking

There is no advantage to horizontal integration for consumers in those industries. If anything, the value is negative. The fact that people are quite a bit happier about credit unions than Chase says everything you need to know.

Sure, there are "efficiencies" to be gained by horizontal integration. What we have seen is that the horizontal integration is so strong that the industries are sclerotic in the face of crisis or change (see: toilet paper manufacturers in Covid who couldn't switch gears). It has become repeatedly clear that we need resilience and competition more than we need efficiency.

> utilities

Should be limited to natural monopolies and strongly controlled by the government. We have seen what happens when you create hybrid-type utilities that try to have some existence in the market (rather than being solidly government regulated) and the result is poor (see: PG&E).

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#306

Post by Tade0 »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #56
sophacles wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And conversely you can't grow enough food local to a large population center to feed everyone.

Christopher Alexander figured this one out in A Pattern Language: https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...

You'd have to either waste good soil by putting buildings on it, or use a lot of fertilizer.

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#307

Post by [deleted] »

nradov wrote: post #234
cogman10 wrote: post #163

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#309

Post by hn_acc1 »

raddan wrote: post #201
milch wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME there is a large difference in quality in what is available at the super market. Sure I can do a once a year road trip to Monterey. The average organic heirloom tomato at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's is worse than the average organic heirloom tomato at Spar

There are also huge regional differences. When I interned one summer in the Bay Area I was stunned by the quality of the fruit available in California. I realized that, coming from Massachusetts, I had literally never experienced ripe versions of these things before (avocados stand out prominently in my mind). That’s not to say that we can’t get amazing fruit in Massachusetts, but the selection is quite different. Ap…

Agreed that fruit selection is very region-dependent. I grew up in the great lakes area - and we had super juicy peaches every summer. I have yet to find ONE peach in California in 20 years that measured up. Even when they're "ripe" and somewhat juicy, the texture is still rough/coarse and severely lacking in flavor.

Re: California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy

#310

Post by Jiro »

jfengel wrote: post #152
msarrel wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow. That's really applicable, nearly a century later.

No, it isn't. The book was written during the Great Depression. We're not in the Great Depression now. Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US and nobody is dying of pellagra specifically, because we've invented fortifying food with vitamins.

But the big difference is that the peach trees are being destroyed because nobody wants the peaches. That's the exact opposite of the quote, in which there are starving people clamoring for the food and the food is being destroyed to raise the price.

Post reply on HN