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

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

#461

Post by rayiner »

dctoedt wrote: post #448
rayiner wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its just mind boggling how Americans dont revolt against this, stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice.m There’s a large swath of America that has a deeply ingrained mentality of “food is for fuel, not enjoyment.” It’s a Protestant idea that entered the culture and became ingrained to the point where nobody remembers the origins but are still influenced by it. I was in Iowa a few years ago, and the food…

> I was in Iowa a few years ago, and the food is awful. ... I suspect it’s always been awful, and people just don’t care about it very much as long as they get the calories they need. Um: My dad grew up in Iowa, so I'd be there seeing family every so often. Years ago it struck me how many Iowans I saw there were ... not svelte.

A lot of Iowans stuck to high calorie farmer’s diets even though they weren’t working in the fields all day. They eat a lot, but it doesn’t strike me that they value food quality.

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

#462

Post by hakfoo »

duxup wrote: post #259
shadedtriangle wrote: post #196

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 th…

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 ...

Well, we famously filled caves full of cheese to keep the dairy industry afloat.

Why not just send every American household a few tins of free fruit every month? It might be the closest thing to nutritious food some people get?

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

#463

Post by AnthonyMouse »

IAmBroom wrote: post #443
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The industry has captured the government and is doing a corruption" is the thing consistent with the theory. The non-corruption/capture reason for the government to pay for it is supposed to be what?

An ideal solution, but not what is happening.

It seems like all you're doing is agreeing that there is no plausible non-corrupt reason to do that.

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

#464

Post by AnthonyMouse »

quickthrowman wrote: post #449
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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? Del Monte didn’t grow peaches, they contracted with farmers (long term, 20 year contracts) who grew peaches and then Del Monte canned the peaches. Del Monte was purchased with an LBO that loaded their books with debt. Del Monte blew up and left farmers holding th…

> Paying the farmers to convert their land to grow something else prevents fire sales of the existing land.

There is no fire sale of land. There is enormous demand for land, especially productive agricultural land which is essentially traded as a fungible commodity.

> The farmers may have mismanaged their risk, but I’m fine with compensating farmers that end up with worthless trees because of a leveraged buyout.

Even then, why are you paying them to destroy productive trees instead of e.g. buying their peaches and donating them to food pantries or stocking the cafeterias at government facilities?

> If these farmers were forced to sell their land, some giant ag business would end up with the land.

That's just cynical speculation. If they sell the land it goes to anyone who wants to buy it. You're also assuming that the ones getting the money aren't already some giant ag business.

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

#465

Post by quotz »

kstrauser wrote: post #164
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

Maybe so, but I’d still think it’s more convenient to occasionally visit a local farmers market than to move to another continent.

I was living in NYC. The farmers markets I visited were a joke. The produce was double the price, and it was more of a "lifestyle" decision to go to a farmers market and post on instagram rather than actually do shopping there. In my native country, farmers markets are default, most people do their produce shopping there, and the farmers markets are found everywhere.

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

#466

Post by xbmcuser »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #463
IAmBroom wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ideal solution, but not what is happening.

It seems like all you're doing is agreeing that there is no plausible non-corrupt reason to do that.

The problem is not that the government is helping the problem is that private capital is getting the benefits instead of all the citizens. I think Americans have after decades of propaganda are stuck with government bad narrative as both parties are captured by capitalist that won't allow the their bought politicians to do anything for citizens. Mamdani in NY will be an interesting case study in the future.

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

#467

Post by vintermann »

dragonwriter wrote: post #125
dylan604 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Remember that allocation of resources, whether it's fuel or peaches or oranges, can only be good or bad with respect to a specific distribution of wealth. If you accept the distribution of wealth during the great depression, you should also accept that it was a good allocation of resources - at that point at least, once the overproduction was already done - to douse mountains of oranges with paraffin and leave them to rot in the sun, as Steinbeck recounted in "The grapes of wrath".

(Even with the ideal foresight to not produce those oranges in the first place, the people who wanted to eat them still wouldn't be able to eat them.)

You should realize - even when they themselves don't - that when people complain about wasteful destruction of e.g. food, what they're really complaining about is the distribution of wealth that made this destruction the sensible thing to do.

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

#468

Post by ToucanLoucan »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #441
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody really good at the economy needs to explain to me how a PE firm buys a company using the company it’s buying as collateral for that financing, and then somehow, that acquired company is the entity that debt is attached to. Imagine if us poors could buy a Hummer EV financed against itself and then the truck had to self-drive for uber to pay its own payment, under penalty of being put in a crusher. Oh and you…

Yes, it is the same way you buy a home mortgage or get an auto loan. You find a bank that thinks there it can make money from interest payments or collecting the asset. it really is that simple. If self driving trucks were a good bet, banks would be happy to loan entrepreneurs money to buy them.

It’s entirely different. When I buy a car, as I’ve done a few times now, that debt is mine. I’m responsible for it. When I bought my corvette, despite the fact that I can’t drive it about four months out of every year, I’m still responsible for those payments. And if those payments were to stop:

- the asset would be repossessed

- the bank would wreck my credit

And most importantly IMO, to really spotlight it: I am paying that loan. I took out a loan for however much, with a payment schedule to pay it back. That is completely different and much more reasonable than “I borrowed money to buy a thing and now that debt is on that thing.”

And that’s before you even get into their various “fees.”

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

#469

Post by Larrikin »

distances wrote: post #399
kelnos wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to have a lemon tree. When it was producing, 80% of it went to waste. When it wasn't producing, we had to buy. It was still worth it, though. It required very little maintenance (pruning once a year, replace the batteries on the auto-irrigation system a couple times a year), so it was basically free.

What do you do with that many lemons anyway? Lemonade? Asking as a person who buys about 4 lemons per year.

Sour flavor can cut down on the richness of very savory dishes. You can use it in sauces, directly on fish and meat. It will function similarly to vinegar. If you grill or broil it, the sour flavor mellows out.

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

#470

Post by rekabis »

clarionbell wrote: post #20

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 r…

Another issue here is that these are clingstone peaches.

Clingstones are best for mechanized processing, which needs the peach to physically hold itself together while the machine does its thing.

Consumers overwhelmingly prefer freestone peaches due to the ease at which they can be quartered and de-stoned by hand without making a total mess.

So on a personal level, my calm was greatly enhanced once I came across the full description of the crop type. There isn’t much use for clingstone outside of mechanized processing, as consumers just don’t want clingstone peaches due to how difficult they are to cut apart cleanly.

Source: orchardist in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, Canada’s western-end orchard region. I grow apples, but I know many other orchardists, including peach growers.

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