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Comment by clarionbell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

The new crop will be grapes of wrath

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.

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.

> Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US

Well, nobody important.

US rates of malnutrition: https://worldmetrics.org/malnutrition-in-the-united-states-s...

Increase in deaths from malnutrition: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/29/why-are-m...

> To be sure, we wouldn’t yet call it commonplace. But while it accounts for fewer than 1 in 100 deaths, its toll is rising so fast that it’s now in the same league as arterial disease, mental disorders and deaths from assault.

Am I reading the charts correctly that 20% of under-54s have "marginal, low or very low food security" with it being over 30% of under-14s? If so, focusing only on deaths is missing a huge part of this.

That looks right to me. Of course, the definition of food security can be disputed, but it seems like improving people's diets or access to quality food should be a priority.

> The source we used, a supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, has been canceled by the Agriculture Department. The upcoming release could be the last.

That doesn't sound encouraging.

Wow. What a powerful text. Where is it from?

The Grapes of Wrath.

While SNAP is gutted

Amazing. I hadn't read the book in years, but immediately could remember the style.

Edit: I thought you had adapted this to what's described in the TFA, but seems like it's an actual excerpt.

For those who might not understand the problem: deflation in combination with sticky prices makes it look like there is a glut of products for the supplier. Deflation also makes it harder to earn an income from work rather than sitting on your money, making it harder to buy foods.

Deflation is an opportunity cost to running a business. If you can earn x% from sitting on your money, then any business activity must earn more than x% before you consider the investment. The easiest way to raise the return on investment to match the opportunity cost is to sell at a higher price, but remember, you have deflation, so you can't pass on the cost to the consumers. Supply must shrink until the price is high enough to justify production again.

Reducing the supply of products also shrinks the demand for labor that is used in the production process, leading to more unemployment with sticky prices or reduced income with flexible prices. Reduced income means people have less money to buy products, which means producers see a lack of demand and reduce production even further. The downward spiral feeds itself.

Deflation is bad because it has acute symptoms. Inflation is the least bad option, because it's a manageable slow burn. Of course with acute symptoms you will see more action towards fixing the problem, whereas with a slow burn humans tend to drag it along forever.

> 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.

If rotten fruit was exceptionally valuable, then people would be paying exceptional amounts of money for it instead of wondering where they can get truckloads of it for free.

Right? It's not exceptionally valuable. It has some nonzero value doubtful that matches the cost to collect it and get it to the people who want it.

Someone needs to put them in tanks for long time and make something very valuable like this:

https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...

> A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_

> 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.

I would pay for it - I meant this in the context that people here are getting paid to destroy value. Also don't get the downvotes, improving soil efficiently in large quantities is an interesting question a lot of tech people (being city people) never have to care about.

> 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.

If you try to force production and sale hard enough, the sale price can even go negative.

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.

If you turn all them peaches into high proof alcohol they take up significantly less space...

Similarly, in 1790s America, farmers west of the Appalachians were growing plenty of corn, but because of bad roads the only feasible way to transport it to the much larger markets east of the mountains was as whiskey. When Alexander Hamilton imposed a tax on distilled spirits, the result was a "Whiskey Rebellion" in which George Washington himself rode out at the head of an army against other American citizens.

This type of trivia is why I found Bill Bryson’s “At Home” so entertaining. Tariff on windows? People cover them with bricks. Tariff on glass? Windows made of other materials. Tariff on… well, maybe stop designing tariffs if you can’t predict the outcome!

Or Reason's Great Moments in Unintended Consequences series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBuns9Evn1w9XhnH7vVh_7C65...

There’s more than enough ethanol inputs already, corn.

Internal combustion engines may not have tastebuds, but I do.

Super-contango

The price of oil going below zero during the pandemic was one of the most astounding economic events in my life. I wonder if anybody did try to instantly create some storage to take advantage of it.

Oh no. Lower costs for consumers? Oh the humanity!

Yes, lower prices for a while, then very high prices and little availability for a long time. Think ahead.

Or just permanently lower prices because the previous prices were artificially high.

A glut is not permanent.

As for artificially high, when was the last time you heard someone complain about those awful, expensive canned peaches?

>Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.

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...

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).

TFA mentions 20-year contracts between Del Monte and farmers. That seems to have worked so well that we have too many peach trees. Like, to me the present situation itself should assuage your fears. Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts? Where will they get their peaches?

> 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 because it's not clear that another distributor will look at these farms and think "You know what, I can pick up where that company went bankrupt".

> Where will they get their peaches?

Will they get peaches? That's really the question. They might just decide it's too unpopular and the price would have to be too high to support selling peaches.

Del Monte was a big reason why peaches are available. Similar to how Dole is a big reason we have bananas year round. If Dole goes bankrupt, we likely won't see bananas on the shelves. And we know this because there's more than just 1 variety of banana in the world. We have access to only 1 because there's only one distributor of bananas in the US.

We are moving into an era of private equity doing fast turn around profits on everything. The old way of business thinking that you can have a 20 year contract is likely dying. 1 year contracts are going to be much more likely because that's where a lot of the investment is going. And Del Monte is the poster child for why a business would shy away from doing a 20 year contract.

The bananas I buy at Aldi are not Dole. Unless Dole sells under different brand names. But Dole is obviously the big player.

> 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. :)

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.

No, not typically. And I know this because I grew up around farmers and farmers that had orchards. Trees would be cut down and replaced, usually if the tree was sickly. But not because this year plums are doing better on the market.

As I said, trees take a long time to bear fruit. It's not typical that a farmer will cut down a tree in their orchard in response to market pressure as that tree represents a huge investment.

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?

Do you actually have farming experience?

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. Much ado about nothing.

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 even mid year if you were crazy enough.

I'd also point out that the first fruiting isn't exactly a bumper crop. It takes several more years after that first fruiting before you get to the point where a tree is fully productive.

You're not making any sense. I never claimed that a bunch of farmers have mixed orchards. Some farmers have too many peach trees right now because Del Monte got their forecasts wrong so now those farmers will chop down the peach trees and probably plant something else. Olive oil demand is still trending up so that might be a possibility in some cases, there are lots of options. That's just how farming works: you have to place your bets and then work for years to see if they pay off.

> I never claimed that a bunch of farmers have mixed orchards.

You claimed

> Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand.

What do you mean responding to "costs and market demand"?

You also claimed

> They forecast future trends as best they can and will replace trees (or other crops) when it seems profitable.

Both those statements would imply that you have orchard farmers who are growing and harvesting multiple types of crops. Unless you are trying to say that it's common for a fruit farmer to completely destroy an orchards and replace with with a new crop.

Both, frankly, are ridiculous claims which are quickly dispatched with "Why aren't there more olive trees".

If the reaction to market forces was that fast, the expectation is that last 10 years of raised olive prices would have caused a lot of these farmers to uproot and plant olive trees. It's currently a very lucrative crop and California is certainly amenable to growing olives.

> That's just how farming works: you have to place your bets and then work for years to see if they pay off.

I agree with this statement. Farming is a game of placing bets on the future of the market. But I disagree that orchard farmers are commonly just diving head first into switching crops in any sort of fashion. It takes a severe event, like their primary distributor going bankrupt, to move an orchard farmer towards new crops. That is not common or business as usual.

You're still not making any sense. If you drew some sort of implication about mixed orchards then you really need to work on basic reading comprehension.

Then explain what you meant.

I contend this is not "routine and seldom makes the news." and I back that up by claiming that it's uncommon for orchard farmers to change crops.

What part of that doesn't make sense?

Agree with the other commenter that there is no implication of mixed orchards in their comments.

It is commonplace to decide that a particular plot of land needs to be either maintained or moved to production of another crop. When those production change decisions are made, it is in response to an assessment of the market and the properties of the plot of land. (The assessment may be wrong or short sighted of course.)

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.

People have this image of farmers as ignorant bumpkins, when owners of even small family farms are some of the most intelligent, objective, and economically-motivated businesspeople I've known.

The first IBM PC I ever used was in the home office of a farmer who was using it for economic forecasting. And I grew up in the middle of a large city (for reference, I had an Atari 800 at home, regularly used Apple ][s at school, my friends were raving about the newly-introduced Commodore 64, and the most impressive tech I had ever seen was a VAX 11/780).

Not to mention, the tech in modern tractors and all the other farm equipment these days is insane.

Who made the claim that farmers are ignorant bumpkins?

There’s not a lot of overlap between prime citrus and prime olive farmland.

What does citrus have to do with anything?

> Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand

I'll admit my experience is more with vineyard than orchards, but at least for grape, this isn't true. You only cut down old, unproductive vines, and market demand is not a factor. You never know how much you will produce YoY, so basically you try to only produce what your domain can handle. (The english translation for the following will be rough i realize).

On the "planting" side, you're wrong: a limited stock of "rootstock" (if this is the correct translation of "porte-greffe") is produced each year. As those are specific to a certain type of soil and take time to grow, you don't produce a ton each year. And vines "rootstock" are _a lot_ easier to grow than other trees (you have a mother-vine that you don't prune, you bury its branch in the soil, and over a year it will develop roots). My guess is that for orchards, your rootstock should take 3-4 years, so it isn't that easy.

Grape vines have a longer productive lifespan than most fruit trees so I don't know what point you're trying to make. Lots of wine grape vines are being torn out in California. Competition is intense, we're well past "peak wine" (consumers aren't drinking as much), and honestly a lot of it was kind of garbage anyway.

Ever wondered why there are few merlot vineyards in Napa these days? Dozens of vineyards are uprooted and replanted each year in that tiny valley alone in response to market demand.

> 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.

> Has canned fruit actually lost popularity?

Compared to Del Monte's heyday in the previous century? Absolutely.

A remarkable amount of fruit is available all year, or most of the year now. I cant imagine eating canned fruit by choice.

I forgot it was even a thing.

Another thing in short supply these days is actually being able to buy an actually good Apple pie or Peach pie. Oh well…

I shall try and see if I can get a Peach or an Apple pie. This weekend you know the old-fashioned pie that actually tastes good and is well made.

That’s another thing that’s in short supply along with actually getting any good baked goods unless you can go to a small Bakery somewhere if you can find one they usually cost a more but not that much more than what you could find in the supermarket times have been changing for the worst when comes to baked goods.

Del Monte in recent times was passed between four equity companies. One of those equity companies actually bought them twice. Del Monte was on the pathway to hell.

Hopefully some of those trees can be transplanted within a 50 mile radius of where they are. If I lived up in that area. I would seriously try to see if I could transplant a few.

A well-made, old-fashioned peach pie. With good vanilla ice cream on top. McConnell’s, Häagen-Dazs or the best you can find locally or maybe homemade.

> 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.

Groceries stores with canned fruit being harder to find is entirely consistent with it being less popular. Pushing you to go to another store for something is bad, if you're a grocery store. That's a great way to drive off customers. There's a lot of shelf space at my local grocery stores still dedicated to fairly-redundant products or high amounts of extra copies of items, so I don't think they're being pushed out because something else is way more profitable. (My local stores have much larger selections of canned beans than canned peaches, for instance.)

I think it's just generational trends. Generally health-conscious consumers these days are more skeptical of canned vs fresh, and non-health-conscious have more junk food options than ever. It's also gotten easier to source fresh fruit across seasons than thirty or forty years ago, further squeezing canned options.

> Has canned fruit actually lost popularity?

Yes. Global supply chains have improved, so it's easier to get fresh fruit year round (or closer to it) than it used to be. If they can, people will choose fresh over canned, for obvious reasons.

> people will choose fresh over canned, for obvious reasons

Not at all obvious. A lot of "fresh" produce in the US was refrigerated for more than a week before it arrived in the supermarket, from varieties that were designed to hold up to transport rather than flavor. Fruit that was canned at the height of the season is often much more flavorful than "fresh" off-season fruit.

The US has a problem with packing fruit in added sugar, which is sad but not inherent to canned fruit.

Where I live peaches are rare. It's all pears, oranges, and fruit cocktail. Not joking, there's five different variants of pears on the shelf at the grocery store, from sugar free to light syrup, and from three different brands. Canned plums? Nope. Apples? Nope. Strawberries? Nope. Cherries? Only around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

At the very least I can get all of those fresh and not canned, but honestly I'd prefer having canned versions as well because of all of the import uncertainty that ended up affecting things this past winter.

> Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?

Do grocery stores make their own decisions about what goes on their shelves? I thought they mostly rented the shelf space to food vendors who were responsible for that.

For example, a while ago I complained on HN that a particular flavor of Triscuits was reliably out of stock whenever Safeway discounted Triscuits, and I was told that the way to address that, were I so minded, is to reach out to Nabisco on Twitter, because they - and not Safeway - make the stocking decisions.

> 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

Peach trees take 2-3 years to bear fruit specially with grafting.

Stone fruit (like peaches) are all typically grafted. And that 2 to 3 years is when the trees first fruit, not when you get a full harvest from the tree. The 10 to 20 years is when the tree is fully mature and producing it's max amount of fruit.

That first fruiting you are looking at something like 2 or 3 lbs of fruit. Full grown you are looking at about 20 lbs of fruit yearly.

You can push up maturity by using a dwarf root stock and get to full fruiting in 6 to 8 years.

I didn't say you'd get full harvest at 2 years, otherwise I don't think anything we've both said is incompatible

That's fair, I was mostly trying to point out that the first fruiting is very much not something you could really count on for a profit. You wouldn't want an orchard filled with trees that are first fruiting.

>Full grown you are looking at about 20 lbs of fruit yearly.

Just from the poorly cared peach trees that grow around my house it has to be much more than 20 lbs of fruit yearly. That's only like 100 peaches. I've been to a pick your own peaches orchard and it was easy to fill a 5 gallon bucket from a single part of a tree. I know there are a lot of varieties but it has to be a lot more than 20lbs.

If you don’t trust farmers to make the decision, who do you think should be making it?

Peach trees last at most 15 years on commercial farms and are often replaced after only 10 years. The peak production years are from 5 to 10 years and I doubt any trees being cut down under this program are in that stage.

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.

> 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.

I find good stone fruit to be very fragile, and hence the economics probably don't support their sale outside of the stone fruit's season and an acceptable radius to where they grow. Peaches/nectarines/plums are easily one of the worst returns on investment when I buy fruit, and this is within a days' drive to California and PNW.

The peaches have similar problem with fungal diseases like bananas. The best tastiest varieties can't be mass grown anymore.

Del Monte sells mostly canned peaches and those plastic snack packs so they’re picked a lot riper than fresh peaches at the grocery store.

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

> 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.)

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

I would much rather there be a surplus of food production (driven by subsidies or whatever) even if it causes inefficiencies given that the alternative is significantly worse.

Regular surpluses can cause famines. This is what happened in East Africa in the 1980s. Cheap grains from elsewhere (Europe, US) caused farming to become unprofitable. Domestic/regional traditional farming of grains largely ceased as farmers moved to the cities. This happened very quickly, so consolidation and mechanization of farming to become competitive never happened. When cheap imported grains became unavailable in the 80s, for various reasons, it was too late. (The war in Ethiopia is often cited as the immediate cause, but people have always managed to farm through wars, usually at least enough to avoid the Ethiopian situation.)

It's an extreme case, but that same sort of pattern has happened repeatedly throughout history. Keeping some amount of farming economically sustainable is important. You don't necessarily need direct public subsidies, but you definitely want to avoid long periods where prices are too cheap to make farming of important crops not economically viable.

> The war in Ethiopia is often cited as the immediate cause, but people have always managed to farm through wars, usually at least enough to avoid the Ethiopian situation.

This isn’t true. See the Thirty Years War. There have been many wars in the past that have led to mass starvation by making the work of agriculture impossible. See also the depopulation of Sichuan during the Ming- Qing transition.

Separately the Ethiopian war was subsidised by western food aid and other aid to the Dengists.

Farmers provide food, banks scalp the interest between you and the government. They aren't the same at all. Farmers, even if they are megacorps are indispensable. Banks on the other hand serve basically no function in the modern era of financial activity.

Is wood that useless that they need to be paid to remove it ?

The lack of a crop next year is why they are receiving a subsidy. It’s to bridge the gap until they plant a new crop on that land.

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.

They are, but it is only 40% of what was previously contracted to be purchased.

> 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...

That doesn't change the fact that there isn't enough demand for canned peaches. If there were enough demand for peaches the farmers would sell the peaches, rather than destroy the peach trees.

The wholesale buyer is in bankruptcy, unable to pay the interest on debt inherited from the leveraged buyout.

I am confident that if a gold mine existed, and their wholesale purchaser went bankrupt, someone else would buy the gold.

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 get paid by the thing for the privilege of being bought.

But that’s exactly what happens when someone buys a Hummer with an auto loan?

You put 10% down (say $10,000) and the bank lends you $90,000 based on the lien they have on the hummer.

No different than a leveraged buyout - PE firm buys a company with cash down and takes on debt for the rest of the purchase using the assets of the company as collateral.

It makes a lot more sense if you think of it in steps - negotiate buyout agreement with owners, close purchase with cash and take ownership, then as CEO have the company take on debt and use the loan proceeds to close the deal.

Just like if you went to a dealership and negotiated a deal where you purchased the hummer for $10k, they transfer ownership to you, then you go to the bank and get a loan using vehicle as collateral then pay the dealership the loan proceeds to close the deal.

Where I think you’re confused is the “how do they take a loan on an asset they don’t own?”. The answer is they don’t. It’s multiple steps and they own the company they use as collateral.

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.”

That's crazy talk. The car should take on the debt, and if it can't pay it then it should declare bankruptcy and leave you unscathed.

> 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?

delays between increasing capacity to produce and bringing production to market naturally lead to cycles of over and under production. https://thesystemsthinker.com/balancing-loops-with-delays/

> 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?

> 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?

"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.

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.

> The problem is not that the government is helping the problem is that private capital is getting the benefits instead of all the citizens.

The government is giving them money -- to do something stupid. There is no apparent non-corrupt reason to do that. It wouldn't be better if the government was also offering ordinary people cash money to destroy productive fruit trees.

Whereas if the government was to help "all of the citizens" then they would all be getting the money and not have to do something stupid in order to get it. But the thing that looks like is either just lowering their taxes to begin with, or doing a UBI if the point of it is redistribution. In neither case is paying anyone to do economically inefficient nonsense a good policy.

> 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 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.

> 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.

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.

Better idea:

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...

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.

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.

They will be replaced with something else, don't feel bad for the trees, they had a good run.

Did they? How long have they been around?

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.

Exactly. That is what is missing in this discussion. If you want to cut down the trees, fine, but those people who profited should pay for it.

I always wonder where consumer surplus fits into arguments about profit.

Although in this particular situation clearly the consumer surplus wasn't enough to keep consumers buying Del Monte products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus

If we measure consumer surplus as a percentage, how would it compare to business profits as a percentage?

Edit:

  Nobel laureate William Nordhaus studied the historical data of the U.S. economy and concluded that innovators and corporations capture only a tiny fraction of the total social value they create. Consumers capture ~98% of the value in the form of surplus. Producers capture ~2%.

I think that notion is mostly meaningless to actual humans.

I'm not sure I understand your point? If you are private equity and do a leveraged buyout, the company is priced as if you could extract the current value of the company out of the acquisition. As if the company were a consumable basically, because that's how you're going to pay off the loan. If consuming the company requires mistreating customers (getting rid of consumer surplus), then that's what's going to happen. The way you're talking about this sounds like the cause is a lack of consumer surplus when that's just a symptom of a leveraged buyout.

Also Nordhaus being a Sveriges Riksbank price laureate tells you how silly and meaningless the Sveriges Riksbank price in economics is. His work on climate change is so bad it's embarassing.

I'm trying to explore how we decide on root causes, and how many seem to want deserving victims to punish.

Is "those people who profited should pay for it" a desire to guillotine[1] those "executives walking away with millions".

Who profited? Do we blame the executives? Should we search for culprits of modern capitalist systems? How much is my fault or responsibility?

Sorry for the horrid quote - it was there to illustrate the question about consumer surplus - but it is too close to trolling.

> consuming the company requires mistreating customers (getting rid of consumer surplus)

I don't think you are using surplus meaningfully

Byrne Hobart[0] calls such acquisitions strip-mining of goodwill. Essentially extracting money from intangibles by destroying a brand. He uses brutally vivid metaphors, but with solid economics.

Yeah the Sveriges Riksbank prize seems ignoble.

[0] Byrne Hobart writes The Diff. Worthwhile subscribing to the free tier, although there is a lot of referencing to paid tier content. https://diff.substack.com/

[1] I've just read «A Tale of two cities» which uses the French revolution for English entertainment.

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?

By that logic, all "injustice" is "I don't like it when X happens" - there is nothing more.

Actually, for me, I primarily dislike needless waste. A bunch of resources were dedicated to growing this orchard which will all go to naught. It's better to destroy the orchard than sink even more effort into it if it'll be wasted in the end but the lack of forethought and planning is concerning.

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.

>but the lack of forethought and planning is concerning.

How did you determine this? Do you expect every single venture with forethought and planning to "succeed" (however you define that)?

Is it not prudent to assume that when the farmers made the decision to plant those trees, they did so with the best available information and "forethought" they had?

They are going to naught now, so that the resources (land) can be better used. The trees were productive during their life.

The waste would have been continuing to use large amounts of water to grow a crop with declining popularity.

Did it have declining popularity?

Yes

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.

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.

My opinion is that it's mainly unjust to have invested so much in growing it to destroy it. Mistakes happen and this is the right decision for now given the situation but it is wasteful.

I see people finding too often that change is injustice, and this is strange.

I think I just have a strange personal definition of injustice - but the effort put into growing this orchard to destroy is could have gone to better projects. The fact that so much of an investment is being wasted is, to me, a misallocation of resources that were unjustly allotted to this failed venture. A more just outcome would have been these resources and efforts going to projects that actually yielded benefits to people.

I've noted this elsewhere but "injustice" was semantically baked into the OP so I retained that wording but my brain really stretched the term here to align better with "wasteful". I can certainly argue to their equivalence but I think if multiple people have gotten hung up on the term I've committed a semantic misstep.

It is important to not think of failure as injustice. Something not working out is not immoral. Carelessly wasting resources can be, but doing everything in good faith and something ending not at the absolute optimal time isn't wrong. No plan survives contact with reality perfectly.

The effort required to maintain the orchard when its fruit would go to waste would be even more destructive and wasteful, no? Which is really the greater injustice?

Yes - I absolutely endorse destroying the orchard at this point.

Well then the solution is simple: people need to stop making mistakes. We should all have perfect foresight, and never guess wrong about counterparty risk or changes in consumer tastes.

Agreed. And the single best way to avoid making mistakes is to stay at home and complain on the internet about everyone else's.

As someone close to agriculture this is the only true response in this thread and anyone understand fruit business knows this.

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.

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 guys just didn't discover the beauty of fermentation and distillation, one can process rather large quantities and all you need is bunch of vats. Private smaller distilleries I believe work as a service in US too (as in you bring your stuff in and they process it professionally so no methanol inside).

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Although you have a point regarding this specific situation; the real, bigger issue is this industrial scale, low quality, high quantity food production system.

Then why do they use so much land in the first place?

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.

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.

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.

Not really. I buy bare-root tree from home depot, throw it into the ground, and get fruit in a few years. No fertilizer, no anything, just give it water and sun. It's not rocket science.

Firstly, half the produce we buy does not grow well in our climate. Secondofly, my parents both grew up on farms and have gardened most of their lives. They struggle to get a good yield between growing conditions, adjusting irrigation, and keeping the birds, hogs, deer, raccoons away.

Don't forget the bugs. My parents planted a cherry tree thinking the birds would be the biggest pest. Then we found every single cherry on the tree had a cherry fruit fly larva inside it. If you don't cover or spray them at the right time, the entire crop is ruined.

It's definitely science, and it definitely doesn't work that way for most people. Also, "a few years" is a long time between deciding you want fruit and getting to eat it.

> Also, "a few years" is a long time between deciding you want fruit and getting to eat it.

The best time to plant was a few years ago, the next-best time to plant is today.

This feels like a weird argument; you can decide you want to grow your own fruit today, plant that tree, and continue to buy fruit for the next few years until it's ready. This isn't rocket science. For most people it's not particularly likely that they're going to decide in the next few years that they don't like apples or lemons or whatever anymore.

Your lack of desire to either plan ahead or be patient doesn't invalidate the approach.

I wasn't making an argument against growing your own fruit, I was just helping explain why a lot of people don't do it. Personally, I am trying to grow blueberries.

Not just deer, but a number of insects will thank you for your generosity. And you will have to learn when and how to fight them in order to get a decent harvest.

As an owner of an apple tree: that's great for about two months, but I don't have commercial quantities of cold storage.

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.

My parents have the biggest walnut tree I've ever seen in their yard. It's a similar situation as you described with the lemon tree. During fall we would get dumped with walnuts, filling multiple boxes; more than any of us care to eat in a year. So for many years, we've been sharing our walnuts with the neighbors, some of them I've only ever seen, when they ring to ask for the walnuts. In return they bring us some of their produce every now and then: cherries, onions, eggs, apples, apple cider, freshly baked cakes and jam. I would have loved to trade you some walnuts for those lemons.

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.

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%.

I think for some types of produce, a home garden is an easy win when it comes to cost. Sure there are things that are very difficult (labor intensive, water intensive, etc.) to grow, so avoid those. But tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, beans, potatoes, peas, and beans are pretty easy to grow, and seed stock can be purchased cheaply. I haven't done this as an adult because I am so excessively lazy (but it's on my to-do list for this year, finally), but we had a vegetable garden when we were kids, and between my mom, my sister, and I, it was very manageable, and we ended up growing more than we could use, and gave some away to neighbors.

Local deer everywhere agree: this is the solution

Seems like an opportunity to form a coop. I guess I’m being naive though. I just don’t know how

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.

>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.

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.

This idea sounds like continued misallocation

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.

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.

My understanding is that it's all bred to be easier and faster to grow. Flavour isn't first in the value equation.

And longer shelf life. And flavor isn't in the top 10

Yes. Flavour isnt the main factor, its easier and faster growing, not spoiling, basically all the factors that are what a supermarket asks for. Here in southern europe flavor is the main concern. The flavorless produce doesnt fly here because nobody would buy that crap. We have standards. When I was living in the US I was shopping in wholefoods only and buying the most expensive varieties of the produce, and it still sucked xD

That's so odd to me. You can buy cheap, cost-optimized fruit in the US. You can also buy amazing produce that would blow your mind. My wife and I look forward to our annual road trip to Monterey partly because of the fruit stands we pass along the way where we'll get cherries so dark they're nearly black, and strawberries the size of my fist (no, really, I have pictures) that are sweet as sugar and incredibly delicious.

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

Strawberries are not the size of fists. Ever wonder what they put in those?

Perhaps you haven't had the pleasure of eating fresh-picked strawberries from Watsonville on your drive down PCH 1. Strawberries that are shipped across the US (Watsonville produces something like 40%) are picked under-ripe and will not sweeten more along the way.

Ripe, Watsonville farm-stand strawberries are something else entirely. They can indeed be fist sized. I encourage you to try them yourself.

Alternatively, you can go to pick your own places along the way - also fantastic.

Yep, those are the ones. Those Watsonville strawberries are to die for.

They are in Japan.

I've had a similar experience when shopping at a gas station store that bought produce from a local strawberry patch. Unfortunately, it was on a road trip.

There used to be an amazing upick organic strawberry farm just past La Selva. I saw exactly what they put in them. Eating huge strawberries perfectly ripe, picked a half hour ago from there was incredible.

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.

Moving back to your home continent is easier than staying at a foreign continent though, so if the new continent was worse you of course leave and go back.

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.

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. Apples, blueberries, raspberries, and cranberries are all fantastic. Oranges, peaches, sweet cherries, avocados, and many other things are mediocre at best. Getting great in-season fruit and produce is the primary reason why I now have a very large garden, but I need to temper my expectations even for some of the things I grow. Outside of a farmer’s market, this is the ONLY way to get a decent tomato in Massachusetts.

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.

The Midwest also has tart cherries which are quite wonderful! Except the tree in my own yard, I rarely encounter these outside the Midwest. If you want a great cherry pie, tart cherries are the way.

I was buying the "flavor-bombs" cherry-tomatoes-type varieties, they were the most expensive at like $6-ish per lbs, and even these had less flavor than the average cheap tomato in my native country during summer :D

> strawberries the size of my fist

No thanks. The most wonderful strawberries I ever tasted were wild ones picked on a disused Welsh railway line, probably a centimetre or so in size.

No doubt they were delicious - fruit picked while walking is always special.

But here in California, we have tremendous strawberries in our markets: Camarosa, Albion, Gaviota. Each is different in size, texture, flavor-profile.

I usually buy a "flat" of strawberries from the local farmer's market during peak season every weekend. They go in my oatmeal, my smoothies and in my lunches.

E.g: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/07/13/farmers-market-pops-up...

Not sure why you’re downvoted. The bigger the fruit the less sugars / nutrition it has per gram. A big reason why wild strawberries are so tasty is because theyre so small. I’ve had the fortune to forage for wild mountain strawberries in my native country in the balkans and their taste is nothing comparable to the farmed ones. Its like two different fruits. Once you try wild strawberries you will remember that experience forever

I’m glad we don’t have to decided between fat, bland berries and small, tasty ones. The fist-sized berry was as good as I’ve ever had anywhere.

I dont know if where you live you have access to areas where wild berries grow by themselves, not with agriculture. But I highly suggest to try to find something nearby, go for a hike, and specifically go looking for the berries and forage. Theyre so delicious its honestly not even anyhow comparable to the ones us humans grow. Its insane how delicious they are. Like doesnt even come close.

OK, here's the deal: I grew up in the countryside. Our "garden" was basically the square of wilderness we'd clawed back into semi-civilization, and it was thick with the gnarled blackberry vines my mom had transplanted. I grew up playing in the woods every single day, munching on wild berries that my parents had taught me to eat, from sweet little raspberries to gooseberries (my personal favorite!) that popped when you bit them and made your mouth pucker.

I tell you all this in hopes you'll understand what I mean when I say that the strawberries you can buy along the northern California coast are freaking amazing. I don't say that because I don't know any better. I say that because I've had S-tier wild fruit, and know from personal experience that these were every bit as delicious.

As someone who also lived in northern California a long time there actually is a taste difference. The wild strawberries usually aren't the same species as the commercial ones and there is a fair bit of variation.

Some of the wild species taste better than the commercial species but those also tend to be too delicate to be commercially viable. It is a common problem for berries generally.

Subway (and McDonald's et al.) did run a bunch of local diners, restaurants, and cafeterias out of business, though. The ones that sold the middle ground between "optimized slop" and "bespoke actual food made by expensive chefs."

It's hard to vote with your dollar when market economics are such that only a handful of (massive) firms sell almost all of thing you're protesting. What leverage does one have in the age of oligopolistic enshittification?

This is a funny statement in that California has probably the best agricultural produce on the planet. If you were in say Texas or Georgia - you could be forgiven for your statement.

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.

It’s bit like complaining that they had plenty of skiing opportunities in Switzerland, but when they moved to Florida there weren’t any.

There's plenty of skiing in Florida. It's just on melted snow, and you gotta be good enough to dodge the 'gators

That's funny specifically about peaches that you call out Georgia. Also, I am in Texas, and some of the best peaches I've had are from East Texas. Not really sure why you picked those two states. Sounds like you haven't been to either and are way out over your skis here.

California maybe has best produce in the US, but far from the best produce on the planet. Not sure how you came to this conclusion. The Mediterranean region is uncontested #1. The cuisines of the mediterranean are so good because the produce we had here was so good, not the other way around.

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 strawberries that were really sweet, and this vendor had a lot more business even though their berries were $1 more expensive. However, the ones that the vendor actually sold were much bigger than the sample strawberries. I was suspicious, but bought them anyways. Sure enough, when I tried them, they tasted like Safeway strawberries. 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.

> 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.

I live in NorCal and agree with you that we have great produce, but it's a little weird to single out Texas and Georgia (the latter especially on an article about peaches!). There's plenty of good produce to be had in both of those places, though I'm sure quality varies across a state as large as Texas (just like it does in California to some extent).

See my other comment: in 20+ years in the Bay Area, compared to 25 in SW Ontario (Canada): the BEST peach I've had in 20+ years in the Bay Area wouldn't even make it as "a good one" of the bunches we had every summer in Canada. Not sure where they came from, but from personal experience, Bay Area peaches suck REALLY hard. I've WANTED to find some good ones, because I miss them, and they're always super hard or already rotten.

Agree. California peaches are horrible. Southern peaches (Georgia, Carolinas) are indescribably better.

I love California, but it's funny/sad the extent to which many Californians deny that other parts of the USA have us beat in some regards.

White peaches in California in stone fruit season are delicious. Pluots also pretty darn good. Freestone peaches in Niagara are the best on the continent bar none. Georgia has pretty good peaches probably on par or maybe a bit better than california, but smaller and mixed bag whenever I have had them in June.

You are comparing fruit in a prime stone fruit-growing region to the US.

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.

Fill up the jet with 20,000 tons of peaches ... your price per peach will be different.

Assuming you mean 20 tons=40k lbs, this is around 120k peaches.

You would need revenue to cover such an expensive mode of transportation. Flying will probably be on the order of $20k. So you need $0.5/lb just for flight costs even if you can sell all of your peaches.

I live in Canada. For reasons you might be aware of, me and my neighbors avoid buying any wine, fruits or vegetables that come from the USA nowadays. The USA are not our friends anymore.

Today I bought very nice oranges from Spain, and super sweet and tasty fresh blueberries from Morocco. Price was same as usual in the supermarket.

I am sure the californian peaches could be sold at a reasonable profit , somewhere in the world, if there was actual demand. The problem I see : no demand for US produce.

I've stopped buying peaches from the supermarkets. They just are not worth it. To get peaches with actual flavor, I have to get them from special vendors that know they have better peaches and charge accordingly.

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

Same with Maui Gold pineapples. I can't eat the Dole crap you get everywhere else. The ones at the markets in Maui are a completely different fruit, they're like candy. Whenever I go I eat them until my tongue burns from the citric acid.

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.

> Whenever I go I eat them until my tongue burns from the citric acid.

Been to Maui once, and this was pretty much my exact experience as well. Thought I was the only weird one to do that. I only slowed down though until it got really bad before stopping. Wish I was smarter to stop earlier ::face-palm::

Not sure that's citric acid doing that, it's probably bromelain, which can be used as a meat tenderizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromelain

Exactly. I can see a lot of US apple juice bottles that contain a liquid resembling piss.

It's disgusting.

Real apple juice is dark brown and tastes nothing like the golden liquid mentioned above.

They sell "real" apple juice in the US. It's just called apple cider and you can find it at any supermarket.

"Apple cider is raw, unfiltered, and often unpasteurized apple juice, resulting in a cloudy, dark appearance and rich, tart flavor. Apple juice is filtered to remove pulp, pasteurized for a longer shelf life, and often sweeter. Cider is usually seasonal and refrigerated, whereas juice is shelf-stable"

Europeans consistently visit a gas station and conclude this must be all there is to eat in America.

> 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 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Iowa is a gigantic field corn, soybean, and pig farm with a few colleges, windmills, and one “city”. Commodity crops, not vegetables.

The one thing Iowa is known for is “loose meat sandwiches”, which is a Sloppy Joe with no tomato based sauce. Cuisine is not on the menu there ;)

I've observed the same thing; But my theory is taste in food is shaped by how recently a families lineage transitioned to processed foods and industrialized agricultural practices. e.g. I've observed a deterioration in taste in South Asia over the past 20 years, which I attribute to the same effect.

> Its just mind boggling how Americans dont revolt against this, stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice.

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.

>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).

Then please explain to me how trees work.

I think they're fusing different fruit tree cuttings to a common trunk.

Grafting is how nearly 100% of many fruit varieties are grown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting

If the tree that is being grafted into is still producing these rock hard never ripining peaches, then the tree still needs to be eradicated. Not really sure what GP's problem with the solution was.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tree+grafting

Yes, trees are magical, but there are better peaches to grow of these are the ones being grown

> 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.

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

I'll trade you for some Palisade peaches. Looking at year average temperatures the climates seem pretty similar, so I bet they are bomb!

Haven't heard of them, but I'll make a point to try!

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.

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.

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.

I’m an agronomist and while I don’t directly deal with that level of things, what you wrote sounds roughly like what goes on for the hazelnut industry here in Oregon.

https://www.hazelnutbargaining.com/

He saw demand falling or what? What did he swap to?

He saw demand falling, exports falling due to the strong dollar and increased productivity in international farming, mismanagement at the canneries with executives cashing out using leveraged buyouts and saddling the companies with unsustainable debt, and trouble finding enough labor (peaches are harvested by hand, almost entirely by migrant workers from Mexico because no native Californian is willing to climb up and down ladders all day in 110 degree heat and 100% humidity, and it's hard to ensure legality).

He switched to almonds and walnuts, which are less labor intensive and have better management on the processing side. But they are an export-heavy market and have also been hammered by the strong dollar. Inflation-adjusted crop prices are near all time lows while costs are at all-time highs. Farming is a hard business!

Smart man! LBOs are such a plague we need better regulation.

Farming is hard. I heard Urea prices are up 2x since the start of the year. How many farmers will go out of business because of that…

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.

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.

Farmers are literally subsidized to over-produce for food security.

Which of course is not enough due to other expenses:

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.

> for food security

They overproduce for votes. Countries without farmer blocks swinging elections stockpile non-perishables for food security.

For both. With or without the voting block, they still serve the purpose of over-producing.

> With or without the voting block, they still serve the purpose of over-producing

Overproduction is the method. Food security the aim. If they weren’t a swing voting block, the overproduction loses purpose.

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.

The government would step in and take over operations. This is why we don't need profit-driven companies responsible for food supply. By all means let Del Monte's managers try their hand in some other industry if they couldn't make it work (or not, because they couldn't make it work).

Do you really want a world without any fast food or snack foods? I mean, I think we consume way too much as a society, but I'd rather not have the government decide what I'm allowed to eat.

Have a conversation with someone who grew up in communist USSR/Russia sometime... It definitely isn't cool.

If we had govt controlled food supply, we'd never have the likes of hot sauce (sriracha, pace, etc) and would likely never have seen a lot of options form. For better and far, far worse.

>but I'd rather not have the government decide what I'm allowed to eat.

I don't know how it'd get to that if we had even more supply. I'm saying we'd be better off dealing with the problems of overproduction rather than the problems of unprofitable businesses and killing production capacity because it isn't profitable in the short-term.

I also never said you couldn't have non/not-for-profit food production, just that they shouldn't be for-profit.

It's difficult because a lot of the margins have been pressed out, and capital funding is often done in a way that doesn't allow for a market to shrink and respond to over-production or a reduction in demand.

If the government was responsible for running the farms, we would not have near the variety we have today... and for that matter, it would be much closer to soviet communism. I'm absolutely opposed to that.

And how do you know we would be better off? What would you do with oversupply? We had mountains full of cheese for decades from oversupply.. and that's a single product. Canned fruit doesn't even last that long before breaking down. The alternative is waste year after year, vs. cutting back and planting something else, which is what is happening... part of the market was allowed to fail (Del Monte) and part is being bailed out (farms) in defense of being able to have ongoing production, even if the product is different.

That seems far better than having mountains full of rotten peaches in cans.

Uh, didn't they have "Southern sauce" for lack of a better translation?

What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?

Also which government? Because there are at least 3-5 relevant ones here, maybe more.

>What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?

That'd actually be quite easy for this particular federal government actually (current administration aside). And probably California too.

The government is able to do all of this for an entire literal army of people, spread across the entire world. And for an additional smaller army we call the Marines. Only difference is we add peaches on top of the canning of lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_City_Army_Ammunition_Plan...

> What makes you think the government is remotely qualified to run a canning operation, a logistics operation, a warehousing operation, an HR operation, and a finance operation for peaches?

The DoD (for one) runs lots of logistics, warehousing, HR (2.8M), and finance stuff.

Have you ever looked at the prices they pay? Government is the last place I'd look for competent management, anyone good/noncorrupt would be making 10x in the private sector.

I'm not saying this is a good idea, but the government doesn't need to know how to micromanage these operations. The company already has employees who can do these things. All they need is to get paid. If the government decided that the final harvest of peaches needed to be canned, they could take over the business and pay to make it happen.

edit: Actually, they don't even need to take over the business. Another company is already operating it. The government could simply sign a contract to buy the 50,000 tons of canned peaches and the company would can them. Again, not to endorse the idea, but it is very straightforward logistically.

If nobody else wants to buy 50,000 tons of canned peaches, why should the government use other people's tax revenue to buy those peaches? Why not just get rid of them (which is what we're doing)?

I never said the government should buy the peaches. I pointed out that your argument didn't work.

You said the government shouldn't do this because they lacked the expertise and (implicitly) would balls it up. I pointed out that it didn't require any expertise. That is all.

When governments take over food production the people starve.

>The government would step in and take over operations.

No. A government shouldn't do this unless canned peaches are especially important for national security or something like that.

That's how we got mountain bunkers filled with cheese over the course of decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvLMH0wb_0k

Of course if they did then what's about to happen with the peach trees, you'd end up killing the dairy cows, which I'm guessing the people in this thread would have a problem with.

And how we ended up feeding roughly a third of US-grown corn to cars.

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