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Comment by VladVladikoff | Hacker News Reader

Some local meat smoker is going to be very happy about all that peach wood. holy smokes!

There's a good chance of that, yes! Farmers tend to be very good at getting every bit of value out of things. I live in the Sierras, uphill from many of these peach trees. Near the peach trees are lots and lots of almond trees. Almond trees are rotated (removed and replaced with young trees) every couple of decades or so, so 3-5% are taken out every year.

A lot of the removed almond tree wood is sold to people like me up in the Sierras where we heat with it in the winter. Almond has significantly more energy per unit of volume that most other species of trees in our area. I don't like the smell of burning almond wood. I bet peach wood smells a lot better, but it would take a lot more space to store the same energy.

This is rapidly changing. As almond orchards get taken over by corporate farmers instead of smaller family farmers, they just chip the almond wood and discard it instead of dealing with waiting for various people to come in and get the almond wood.

(Source: my relatives in the Sac. Valley don’t heat with almond wood anymore.)

A lot of people are using pellet stoves/bbq; seems like you could sell the chipped wood to someone?

Placing it at the root of the trees makes a ton of sense as it increases yields and lowers need for inputs. Also helps with the compaction from all the mechanization in the orchards.

Selling it as fuel is maybe some added revenue in the short term but really just doesn't make sense. Now if you were getting a premium (lumber, specialty hardwood, etc), then processing and selling could make sense

The parent suggested it would be discarded; chipping it for mulch to be used on site isn't really discarding and I agree it's most likely better than selling it.

They just leave it in place mostly. Sometimes in big mounds that become berms over a few years. Discarding wood chips is actually very expensive.

"Could" is different than "will" or "would" which seems to be the point here.

The extra effort to do something with the wood byproducts isn't worth it to the large, corporate, scaled-up farms. It means more labour to try to gather up the material and then selling wood pellets actually requires significant quality control; it's not like they can just scoop it up off the ground and sell it.

Another casualty of what happens during the shift from independent, family-run farms that often sold to grower's cooperatives to much larger, scaled-up operations that focus on wringing every last dollar out of efficiency and standardisation.

That's going to make for some very interesting smoked cheeses. I'd love to try a smoked brie with this wood.

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