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.
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.
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?
Because why pay for something when you can get someone else to pay for it?
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 the bag. Paying the farmers to convert their land to grow something else prevents fire sales of the existing land.
Considering the market that Del Monte made for canned peaches, someone was going to grow peaches for them. 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. If these farmers were forced to sell their land, some giant ag business would end up with the land.
Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
If your warehouse is full of peaches nobody wants, you might be forced to sell them for negative dollars to take them away. It's either that, or you pay to have the waste management company dispose of them. So the price effectively goes negative from trying too hard to force something to happen.
We run into something similar every year here in India. One recent example [1] This year it is the Middle East crisis. Last year it was probably a glut because there was shortage the year previously.
[1] https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/video-offered-rs-4-per-kg-ma...
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).
Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
Peach trees take 2-3 years to bear fruit specially with grafting.
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...
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 get paid by the thing for the privilege of being bought.
Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.
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.)
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 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?
Maybe if grocery store peaches weren't a fibrous, tasteless representation of a real fresh peach, they'd still be in business.
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.
> right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free.
These two statements contradict each other. If you are pushing to get something for free (and seems like you wouldn't pay for them, or wouldn't pay much for them, instead opting to do without), then they are absolutely not exceptionally valuable from the sell side.
https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...
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.
1. Find a random large, barren public land nearby
2. Dump all fruit there.
3. Wait 15 years
4. New enchanted forest available for public use [1]
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/costa-rica-let-jui...
A local university professor did a study on homesteading in my state and determined that even then the land offered to immigrants was actually to small to regularly turn a profit, to some extent that seems to continue to this day at times.
I 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.
This isn't pristine old growth forest, it has no great ecology.
It's a bit awkwardly worded but unjust isn't the word I'd specifically choose, it was inherited from the OP so maybe their view of what "injustice" meant was different and I just hijacked it. Dunno. I interpreted is as an unjust allocation of resources that could have been put to more productive uses.
Uneducated rice farmers in Bangladesh would understand the problem better than the people complaining about this.
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.
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.
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.
Its quite popular in some parts of central Europe (say Czech republic) and resulting drink, in say 45% content of alcohol its fruity sweet and smooth and has absolutely nothing to do with cheap flavored chemical crap from potato/sugar beet one can buy in shops.
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.
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.
Bankrupt everyone who grows peaches then?
There are actual costs in growing, harvesting, and delivering produce to market you know.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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).
The existence of Subway doesn't mean you can't get phenomenal deli sandwiches. It does mean you probably need to look around a little more and don't settle for the first sandwich place you see.
Edit: This is my wife holding one of those strawberries. We took that picture from the sheer absurdity of it. The pack of berries hardly survived the rest of the drive. We'd eaten almost all of them by the time we arrived at the B&B. https://share.icloud.com/photos/0ebgyxOMT9LpyjhfKuLQWD0kw
Bay area produce is unparalleled - Tomatoes, peaches, figs, strawberries, etc.
More organic growers if thats what you care about - high quality growers. There is also massive commercial growers doing high volume low cost but you do need to know where to look.
The suppliers don't notice when the numbers that stop are rounding errors. The vast majority of people don't have any experience with anything other than supermarket produce and don't know there's a choice. Growing up as a kid, I didn't know there were so many varieties of apples. Our store only carried red delicious, golden, and granny smith. It wasn't until I moved out of the sticks and saw more varieties. Some people never move, so they only know what they know and never experience new
This is what happens when you optimize your food supply for profit instead of being edible; varieties are selected for yield, longevity and shipping rather than flavor or nutrients. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
The US is big and fruit needs to be refrigerated to be transported. Refrigeration kills aromatics.
I assume you would have a similar experience buying plums in Germany. Similarly, if you bought stone fruit in California where it is grown, it would taste good.
> stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice
Unless you are willing to pay $30/peach for them to be flown next day on a jet, peaches in New York are not going to taste as good as they do off the tree.
How would most Americans know there's a difference? A large plurality will never leave the country in their lifetime, and many won't even leave the area where they grew up in.
Even for those who travel to some extent, eating as a tourist will rarely give you the experience of going to a grocery store, buying fresh produce, and eating it.
And even if a tourist ends up with some really amazing produce in another country, they'll likely chalk it up to a lucky, isolated incident, and not think much of it. Or it's just the "everything is better when you're on vacation" phenomenon. They'll go back home and be back to eating what they're used to.
To be fair, though, there is plenty of wonderful, flavorful produce in the US. There are a few problems, though:
1. Some areas in the US truly are underserved and have bad produce. And by "areas" that can even mean small pockets here and there, where you may only have to drive an extra 20 minutes to get good produce, but it doesn't even occur to you to try, because you assume it will be the same.
2. In the US we seem to believe that we should be able to get every single kind of produce year-round, regardless of what's in season. So you might see something on the shelves all year, but it's only actually really good for a month or three. The experience during the rest of the year will tend to dominate your opinion.
3. You're more likely to get better quality at a more expensive, boutique-like grocer, or at a farmer's market. Most Americans just don't shop at places like those when there's a cheaper, large chain grocery store available. Farmer's markets can be especially difficult when they're only open a day or two per week, and busy people/families need more flexibility.
For reference, I live in northern California, and there's plenty of fantastic produce here. Yes, when I go to something like Safeway (part of a huge grocery chain), I don't expect anything terribly amazing. It's fine, but nothing special. But I have a small local grocery a couple blocks away from me that usually has great produce (though sometimes it can be hit-or-miss with some items), and they also make an effort to stock many items based on growing season. I've been to various places in Europe many times, and have even been to grocery stores and bought produce so we could cook dinners in an Airbnb. I've generally had a good experience with the produce there, but I wouldn't say it's notably better than where I live in the US.
It's disgusting.
Real apple juice is dark brown and tastes nothing like the golden liquid mentioned above.
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 is awful. I don’t think the food in Iowa used to be great “100 years ago before modern factory farming,” etc. 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.
And I don’t think it’s just “U.S. consumerism blah blah” either. The Anglo food in Canada and the UK sucks too. They just don’t care.
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 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.
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/farm-bankruptcies-continued-...
https://www.adamsandreese.com/the-ledger/rising-farm-distres...
And those farms get bought up and folded into for-profit operations. You simply can't fix this in the current system.
They overproduce for votes. Countries without farmer blocks swinging elections stockpile non-perishables for food security.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Weird Al's straight cover. Al should just do an album like that, would be kinda neat.
As it turned out, aluminum poisoning can cause dementia-like symptoms, but you can't get aluminum poisoning from cookware or cans.
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.
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.
https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...
What if they can't make much money doing so?
This is out of touch. Growing fruit is one of the most difficult tasks in farming.
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.
This is what happens when the federal government uses a 1940s era plan to manage the economy.
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.
(Source: my relatives in the Sac. Valley don’t heat with almond wood anymore.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
If anything would have been profitable spun off, it would have been spun off in the bankruptcy.
"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.
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?
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?
Napkin math suggest 500 tankers of peach juice, which makes me sad.
Won't they at least sell the fruit to customers through grocery stores, where possible? I can see replacing the crops based on reduced future demand from the canneries, but surely the current fruit is usable.
“The 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.”
Nor are we destroying food while people go hungry; we produce more food than we eat by a considerable margin. What hunger remains in the world is a distribution problem, not a supply problem.
It's hygroscopic as all hell and I can only buy food grade stuff in 10 kilogram quantities. But I need like half a gram per dozen rolls, so I'd have to make around 50 batches of rolls a day to use it up before it goes off.
My electric bill is going to be hellish.
Similar with the Spirit bankruptcy, nobody wanted to save the company... they wanted to sell the assets to reduce losses.
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...
“ 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
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.
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.
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.
https://interestingengineering.com/lists/7-mighty-machines-f...
It’s actually cheaper just to buy new fruit tree stock and you can get better quality (ie flavorful varieties vs mass farmable ones). Source: worked at an ornamental tree farm, done the math in spreadsheets and have planted peach trees in my yard as well - once loaded a trailer wrong and did a 180 in a loaded flatbed with trees, which went all over the interstate.
