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.
Man I keep a great quote from that book in a note on my phone. Gonna have to add this as well.
"And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on."
"They were careless people,they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
•F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
We are and the 100 year cycle is
coming upon us rapidly. Wallstreets endless greed is about to create the next great depression.
Crazy thing is republicans are actively trying to suppress these books calling them woke and pulling them from schools (they don’t fit the “education” they feel kids deserve)
I mean, the suppress the Triangle Factory Fire and every other bit of the labor rights movement during this time. This is why you shouldn’t let Texas have a fucking monopoly on school textbooks, too. It’s by design.
Also noteworthy is the triangle factory isn't to terribly far from the "twin Towers" and still standing, funny how a building full of bankers and money people die and it's a national tragedy. A building full of common workers die and it is lucky to get a metal placard.
This is completely fabricated. Each of these books has been banned in a total of two schools. All but one of the schools are in progressive areas of the country.
Two of the bans were put in place in 1987 and 1939. Only one even happened this century. It’s also the only one that isn’t in a progressive area. It’s in Alaska.
But while we’re in the topic, you should look in to who banning *To Kill a Mockingbird*.
About a year or two ago, a former coworker who lives in a smaller, semi-rural district in west Michigan said that her daughter's school system had banned To Kill a Mockingbird but Mein Kampf remained available for reading.
I can't remember the exact cited reason for banning Harper Lee, but the gist was something about the "the uncomfortable racial themes" in the book. My jaw was on the floor.
Tell me you haven't read the book without actually telling me.
No they're not. Nobody is calling for Steinbeck to be banned or Great Gatsby. Stop lying.
They're calling for books going into explicit detail about sex to not be in elementary schools. Books like "Gender Queer" "this book is gay" " all boys aren't blue" " out of darkness" etc. You can look these titles up and get an understanding of theur content. But nobody is calling for Steinbeck to be banned.
This article is about a ban put in place in 1939 in one singular school district. How on earth are you making the leap to active efforts to ban said book all across America?
According to French Economist Gabriel Zucman, we have actually surpassed the wealth disparity of the gilded age.
The richest 0.01% - around 18,000 U.S. families - have also surpassed the wealth levels reached in the gilded age.
"These families hold 10% of the country's wealth today. By comparison, in 1913, the top 0.01% held 9% of U.S. wealth, and a mere 2% in the late 70s."
I say it's time to sharpen those guillotine blades... NOT, and let me be perfectly clear on this, because I'm advocating violence against the insanely wealthy who put their disgusting need to hord wealth above anything else including human lives, the well being of their own country and the world in general, but because it is a well known fact that guillotines are unsurpassed when it comes to slicing watermelons and it's almost melon season y'alll🍉🍉!!!
Absolutely, and way more people should know about that and why the labor rights and activism portion isn’t taught in schools. More folks should know we’ve been here before.
Like, if you re-read the famous “Bread and Roses” speech, it could be a substack article today with the same content.
It's not a cycle that's innate to the nature of living on planet earth so it will eventually change. The question is how much suffering we will perpetuate in the mean time.
It's a cycle arising from power. Imbalance or greed leads some to have more power than others. And to protect it they need more, and those who covet the power of others must get their own to challenge them. And whatever rules or regulations or alliances that are set up to prevent this from happening, those are slowly eroded until the one kind holds all. But no king can hold all so when it topples there is a brief moment of equality before the tower arises anew.
The cycle is broken when power is absolute, or the rules water tight, or when no one seeks power or are satisfied with just enough. So the cycle never breaks.
It is a cycle caused by elevating the egos of people who have money.... Once they begin seperating themselves in their own mind from the rest of humanity they get in their head that they ALONE are chosen by god.... and in that sin they build monuments to themselves when they could have built Stability.
I mean that's just a problem with your time scale. At the very least we could give it a couple hundred years and we are all dead or living in abundance.
My mom had a thing for making me read well known and classic books, but didn't quite have the media literacy to understand what was being said in them.
I took a liking to Steinbeck and she kept getting his books for me. And now she's so confused why I have the political and social views I do
But it's not a description about the excesss of capitalism, the destruction of food was a New Deal policy meant to reduce the surplus of food that had glutted the agricultural market.
Like Florida and Oranges. We are being set up to literally have zero food resources to pull from with cattle issues, bird flues affecting poultry, now farms by the fists full going belly up. Yeah, when the WEF said “they will have nothing and like it.” They were serious. Wind farms are being turned away, our nation parks are for sale to the highest bidder, fresh water sources can be polluted at will by corporations, our current food offerings at grocery stores have begun to be semi-spoiled by the time they get on the shelves, meat has become substandard with exorbitant price increases. Everyone in the US needs to take this seriously. Please build up deep pantries, learn gardening skills, even container gardening. We have to learn more self sufficiency and how to be a community again. It’s going to take a village.
> the animated movie starring Seth Rogen as the talking grape
produced by a company owned by jeff bezos, in which we learn that while capitalism may have its excesses, communism would mean we're all slaves in a warehouse pissing in bottles
Thinking about this quote, and what happened in Ireland, it reminds me that John Steinbeck’s pen-strokes and FDR’s policies, may have prevented the deaths of millions of Americans.
It makes no sense. Even if a single harvest from several farms went free to people who need it, there will always be more hungry people and people will be hungry again the next day. Aside from grotesque lack of compassion, the effort to stop people doesn’t seem worth it.
I get that. But food is a very different type of product. There is ALWAYS demand. A sudden burst of surplus isn’t going to impact long-term demand or prices. It would be very short-lived.
Seems like spending resources to avert that temp drop in prices would never pay dividends.
Yeah but is it the kind of demand that makes them rich? They believe that scarcity is the best way to maintain profits. They loathe true competition. They’re too weak for long term building and they were never trained to do so.
Seriously, I’m not trying to be shitty here. They literally don’t have that kind of training and focus for producing long term growth and profit because they’ve all been trained on the PE model, which focuses on short term profits and using loopholes to leave someone else with the bag once all value has been extracted.
That’s exactly my point. The price of oranges is traded on a global scale, with orange futures trading daily and the sales of oranges locked in months in advance. A regional surplus of several orchards isn’t going to affect commodity futures for more than a day’s trading and quickly revert to fair value.
Even the farmers who sell oranges wouldn’t be affected because they sell to mass distributors through futures contracts.
The only people who would feel any real impact would be local grocers who would see that week or months stock go without purchase. And then everything would return to normal.
A sudden burst of surplus absolutely impacts long term demand and prices but more importantly it impacts the farm. The decision of what to grow with land year over year is heavily influenced by what was profitable the year before.
In surplus years during the Great Depression era - and even though countries have a fuck ton of price controls and trade remedies on farm commodities today, it still happens- prices can fall so low as to shutter a farm or plantation, or prevent them from investing or planting the next year. This is a fact from which flows the price controls and trade remedies and commodities futures tradings and a whole lot of other fun economic mechanisms.
The example is citing farms that already went out of business. Governments also provide subsidies in bad years. This notion that a one time surplus in a single region would somehow affect global orange prices over the long haul is ludicrous.
It was and is a real practice. The alternative- them handing out free oranges- is a practice which would affect orange prices in the region. Supply affects demand and shocks can take years to settle out and the process of settling out involves people on the margins losing jobs and farms on the margins going out of business. If not the farm in question - if that one had gone out of business, the supply would be burned to protect the existing ones nearby which the investors and workers and buyers will now have to use.
If the price of oranges in the region plummets, and the investors in the orange industry in the region use that price to math out the expected earnings for next year, they will end up with a figure which will tell them to invest less or not at all in the area. If a farm has a bad year of production (or burns surplus) but the price stays high then that’s different math- that’s a one year loss- and investment in the region will continue. Dumping and spiking the oranges to protect the orange price follows a logic which is why it is a practice.
It makes sense to me. The cannery has gone bust, presumably due to reduced global demand or because it's being undercut by overseas canneries. There is now excess supply of peaches in the area and farmers are going to be throwing them away for years, because it's too expensive to ship fresh peaches (which bruise easily) all over the country.
It's natural to see the destruction of these trees as a shame and a waste when viewing it emotionally or subjectively, but planting some other crop now means that crop can be used to meet demand and feed people who want to eat that crop. Apples or cherries or something.
One thing I find interesting is the role of alcohol. Alcohol is a pretty good value store: you can take excess food production (grain, fruit, whatever) that you cannot feasibly sell (because everyone locally has more than they can use before it goes bad, it travels poorly, it is too expensive to transport vs demand, it stores poorly, etc) and you can ferment it to significantly extend its useful lifespan and you cab distill it to extend it even more (almost to infinity if stored in glass etc.) Not only that but it also massively shrinks the total weight/volume, while being value-add.
So economically you would hope they can mush all the fruit, turn it into peach wine, or peach brandy. At worst, a peach based neutral spirit.
The problem in modern times is that it's fairly expensive to set up or hire a distillery or brewery, and there aren't necessarily small breweries or distilleries locally available to deal with the volume. The cost of labor is very high compared to the cost of food today vs a couple hundred years ago, and regulations preventing ad-hoc brewing/distillation in any sort of volume are myriad.
Also, while it massively reduces waste, it also doesn't feed anyone. Alcohol is a good value store, and a pretty poor calorie store (well, useful calories anyways - plenty of calories in booze but you can't really live off it, eh.) Not to mention it's not very attractive to a large percentage of the population.
The obvious modern alternative for a value and nutrition store is canning/jarring or freezing but again. High cost of labor, significant equipment and storage space needed, regulations add cost, and then you still need to ship it and sell it without losing money doing so. Nobody works for free, and charity unfortunately won't absorb enormous but rare excesses - we're just poorly set up for it. Plus in this case it's literally a canning company going bankrupt, so......
It's more profitable to sell 10 for $10 than it is to sell 100 for $1, even if it's cheaper to make 100. Destroying 90 raises the bidding on the 10 remaining to that $10.
So was this before or after they did this in Florida? There are no more native Florida citrus trees, they made it illegal for them to just grow naturally.
We could use this to help feed the hungry. Instead tons of food are being destroyed in order to protect the profits of a handful of wealthy people. What the fuck is wrong with this country?
We all know the issue, the only thing that matters is making a profit. We could feed the hungry but then it'd hurt some company's bottom line. We could provide healthcare but then it'd hurt come company's bottom line. Repeat ad infinitum.
This wasn't a case of people not wanting to buy them, it was a case of the processor going bankrupt. I buy a ton of canned and freeze dried peaches for recipes all the time. Availability during certain times of the year was already poor.
Doubtful they plant something people like better and plant something that they can simply charge more for. Probably alfalfa that they will just ship overseas. Farming has never been lucrative. Losing farms like this without a clear path forward just means things will get more expensive and people starve.
I mean they could sell actual peaches instead of tinned. I could eat peaches for hours. Also ever made your own peach whiskey? Delicious. I wouldn’t have minded one or two adult trees. But no, destroyed.
This comment pisses me off on so many levels as an individual who grew up partially on free meals from the public. Starvation doesn't drive people to innovate, it drivers them to death. It's shown to hurt the development of children and their academic growth. Let's see you try and learn on an empty stomach. Hence why the world's most prosperous countries produce the most billionaires and millionaires. Go and look at the countries with the highest starvation rate and tell me the trend you see.
"over 90%" It's 90.2% (saying over 90% feels very misleading here) and 70% of total agricultural output (family owned farms tend to be smaller).
Really besides the point though, it doesn't change the fact that the money from this program was put in place due to big agra lobbying and in this case we are basically paying for higher peach prices instead of paying to arrange another processor for these peaches to maintain prices, or for money to farmers to process themselves, or any number of other potential solutions. It's the lazy and corporate favoring policy we employee across the board. We treat food as a product and low prices as a failure when we could be feeding people.
Sure, but then why are they overproducing to such a degree? That’s still their fault for being shitty business owners. They knowingly farmed fruits that are over-produced and only able to stay profitable by a allowing a major corporation to fix the prices via artificial scarcity. In a hypothetical economy wherein they were all family-owned farms without the billion-dollar corporations there to intervene and manipulate the market, then these farmers would’ve chosen to plant different crops instead of going balls-to-the-walls on peaches, almonds, and alfalfa, etc..
Were they over-producing? The article just stats that their process went bankrupt. Realistically this will increase peach prices as it's taking peaches out of the market,
Explain it then. Because if I'm a farmer and my contract fell through, I'm going to brokers and pitching the harvest to other buyers, not begging for money to rip trees out.
Adjustments for bad, good or just odd harvests are made every year between farmers, brokers and buyers. This article makes it sound like the system is set in stone. Hell, the fact that they even had a contract in the first place surprises me. Usually this would be done in rounds every year with a flurry of POs.
I think part of the problem is that del monte ate up a lot of smaller processor. That said, it definitely makes more sense for the government to pay farmers for equipment to process their peaches or as seed more for other processers to step in.
Paying them to get rid of the supply, which will cause a price increase as this was not over-supply, is a policy put in place by big-agra.
You’re right, I’m not an expert on agriculture or farming. However, anyone with a basic understanding of basic economics knows that if supply goes up without an equivalent increase in demand, then prices go down. If prices only stay profitable by “creating” a shortage, then it seems like there’s a high degree of market manipulation going on. Perhaps the business owners don’t know how/don’t want to change their product to pivot to the new demand, however, destroying hundreds do thousands of peach trees to stay profitable means that hundreds of thousands of peach trees weren’t necessary in the first place, or if they are, that the market mechanism is so broken that producers (farmers) are unable to reach the markets without a middleman (Del Monte). Again, surely grocery stores like Publix, Giant, Safeway, or regional ones would still be able to buy said produce and can it under their own private labels, do something with it.
Waste is the result of overproduction, no matter how you slice it.
Del Monte was a canning operation, tooled specifically for canned peaches. They gave out 20 year contracts to farmers to grow canning peach varieties, not the same peaches grocers would purchase and sell on shelves.
A farmer gets a 20 year contract from Del Monte to offset or secure financing for the initial planting costs and first 3-4 years that the trees aren’t producing. In return for that initial offset and/or secured financing, Del Monte gets the crop for the productive life of the orchard and gets to profit on the canned peaches. Farmers plant those acres because they’ve got a buyer set.
Del Monte closes, and farmers have to pull trees because no one left has the capacity to can all of the peaches. Pacific Coast Producers, now essentially a monopoly, can only take on so many more acres. Those that don’t get picked up have to be destroyed to prevent abandoned acres from becoming hotbeds for pests and disease.
I’m sure there are other intricacies, but that’s a general breakdown as far as I understand it.
I assumed something as much is what happened here. There’s similar stories about farmers being beholden to Monsanto for using Monsanto’s seeds.
Nevertheless, this is a problem with our agricultural industry, specifically, monopolization and cartelization. We have farmers that can’t exist without a monopoly, and a system wherein it’s more beneficial for them to destroy hundreds of thousands of crops than it is for them to try and find different buyers. That’s a market failure of epic proportions.
What’s more, I still place a large amount of blame on the farmers. After all, they chose to sign that contract with Bel Monte, so they knowingly entered a “too big to fail” situation. It’s not necessarily like Monsanto where, realistically, you’ve got no one else to turn to.
In a very petty and vindictive manner, I can’t help but feel happy that farmers are suffering. Farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump and overwhelmingly support the GOP. The very party that they’re complaining about taking away their illegal laborers, the very party that’s using oil barons to write our environmental policies while farmers then complain about the increasing rate and severity of extreme weather, the very farmers that voted for a platform of maximum tariffs and then complain about rising prices. I can’t help but feel a sort of Pyrrhic victory here, yes we suffer, but finally, finally, this over-subsidized and extremely coddled sector (and voting base) is reaping what they sow.
Yep, I look forward to the corporate operations swooping in with their Ivy MBAs to rectify the failings of these terrible business owners and save our food chain.
This muddies the truth. There's alot of small farms but they aren't the ones producing the majority, and "family-run" farms which is simply how the ownership is structured - as in massive farms owned by a person (family) not a corporation.
You are trying to make it seem like the majority of the food is being produced by small humble farms, when this is not the case and perversion of the truth
The ones producing the most are also typically well diversified and not wholly reliant on a single contract. Small farmers are disproportionately impacted by this closure, regardless of where the majority of canning peaches are produced.
People are reacting (quite logically) to the insane waste that fuels capitalism. Central Valley farmers (nearly all of them MAGA) whine incessantly about not getting enough water from liberal CA and 'Newscum' to 'feed America,' but then turn around and waste metric tons of it.
Do you realize how much water, fertilizer, fuel, and energy in general it took to get these peach orchards producing? The water they've wasted on this crop is a scarce public resource. Destroying the yield and pulling out the mature trees is a criminal waste of shared natural resources. It's not as though the market for canned peaches has disappeared. It just isn't fetching as much money as it used to. In a world where millions of people die of starvation every year (and in a nation where 13% of children don't know where their next meal will come from), it should be criminal to destroy edible food.
Fruit Trees are very high maintenance and quickly drop off in productivity if not properly maintained. If you’re not getting paid to maintain because you don’t have a buyer for the fruit, you’re going to take them down and do something more profitable.
Who is going to grow and maintain the farms? Do we expect them to do this for free? How will they afford machinery, labor, fertilizer?
Ultimately the demand for peaches isn't there. We can't just force people to consume a product that isn't viable, in order to keep the product viable? Like other commenters, I definitely encourage you read the article.
Love the sentiment but in this situation it’s not realistic.
Someone has to buy all these peaches to make it economically viable for farmers to maintain the trees, including harvesting the peaches. So, either the state or federal government makes it economically viable for the farmers to keep farming peaches or an organization does.
They could all donate the peaches, but that’s a one-time event. Without continued money coming in buying the peaches, the farms go bankrupt.
On the plus side, destroying all of these peaches trees helps the state and farmers because it requires a lot of water to maintain them, more than many other crops that could replace the trees. In a state that frequently is in a drought, this is not a bad thing.
I would agree with you if they weren't going to be able to sell this year's peaches because there wasn't enough demand in the market. But the problem isn't demand for the product it's distribution. The customer didn't go away, just the middleman. Nature and economies abhor a vacuum. Somone will fill that role eventually. Trees aren't a production line that can be toggled on or off at will. Why spend money killing an asset that will just need to be replaced when the distribution problem is worked out but that can't be restored to its current capacity without several years of growth?
The state, instead of paying tax dollars to kill the trees, could pay for this year's harvest and donate the food. The trees would still be alive and productive in a year or two once the distribution problem has been worked out, and the farmers wouldn't go bankrupt.
The alternative is to have tax payers pay to get rid of the temporarily less valuable trees in favor of what? Fallow land doesn't make a profit and the farmers will have to use their water rights or they'll loose them. Is the state going to pay to clear peach trees just so they can be replaced with almonds or alfalfa for export?
I understand that ag bailouts are occasionally necessary. My family has been farming the same land for over 180 years. But sometimes they aren't as much necessary to keep farms going as they are to maximize profit for those wealthy enough to have some pull with the agencies who cut the checks. Maybe that's not what's happening here. But it certainly doesn't look good.
> I would agree with you if they weren't going to be able to sell this year's peaches because there wasn't enough demand in the market.
That is exactly the issue. That's also why Del Monte went bankrupt.
>Maybe that's not what's happening here. But it certainly doesn't look good.
You could, you know, read the article and stop guessing?
Del Monte used to buy 70,000 tons of peaches to be canned at this facility. People weren't buying the canned peaches. The successor to bankrupt Del Monte is buying 50,000 tons less.
Farmers are removing the trees to plant something that people will buy.
Fuck them and their farms. No one is surviving on peaches. They are robbing the state of its water and I don’t want my tax dollars helping rat farmers who only destroy the land and then go and vote republican
What, you were gonna buy those peaches ?? Shoulda buy more of em so they didn't go bankrupt.
What, you weren't gonna buy em ? But you want them for free ? So you want em to pick/harvest, clean, cut, process, pack, deliver, and all that for free as well ? Or do you suggest those workers get fked for you to get free peaches ?
Pick one man.
Remember those chicks that got drowned in water because price plummeted, or something something from a while back ? What, you wanted em ? But weren't gonna pay profitable price for em ? So.... who was gonna magically get those chickens into meat for you for free ?
Do you know what to call ppl who don't know when to cut their loss ? Idiots.
Capitalism. Pure and simple. And it’s so engrained in the US that anyone who thinks otherwise-socialism, communism-is PURE EVIL. Despite the fact that people’s needs are being met better in those systems. Nothing in the constitution says capitalism needs to be the only or prevalent economic system. But the leaders sure act like it does. It’s disgusting. You’re basically a Nazi to the right if you don’t follow capitalism. It’s to the level of a cult religion. Money and greed run the US at all costs.
Capitalism requires losers to sustain the optics of "winners".
Winners eat, losers starve.
We created economies around products necessary to sustain life, but it was never meant to last this long. For the wealthiest country in the world, raw food should be free, subsidized by the wealth and excess of so many. With modern technology, we could be growing so much food that nobody anywhere on earth would starve. But we don't.
Because Capitalism requires losers. To die. This is the only threat that makes people compliant. Death.
Yep. I remeber the one where workers in the fields on the hills fetch a pineapple. The Del Monte man shows up dressed in a white suit and his white hat, slices it, tastes it and agrees that it's ready. The voice in the background goes "the Del Monte man said yes!"
In other news, the band Presidents of the United States of America just saw their self-titled album unexpectedly hit trending status on both Spotify and Apple Music…
I don't think most of these highly upvoted comments realize the logistical infrastructure to get food from farm to table.
When you remove a couple layers of it, the farmers have nothing they can do. Why in many less developed countries over half of the food rots before it reaches consumers.
Probably blame the consolidation of American food processing in forcing smaller brands out of business. Blame changing preferrences and imported food prices.
1/3 of the total that went to one processing facility was purchased. the other 2/3 wasn't.
Also the article mixes up tons and acreage. 3000 acres, 50,000 tons are I believe the correct figures.
This sum is to help the farmers pay some of the cost of switching. They likely will miss a year or several years of harvest off the switch.
Del Monte didnt have much "premium" was the problem. OceanSpray and Dole kept with the price being they also did fresh fruit or dried fruit which set them apart from the low cost products (say Store Brand), but Del Monte didnt and also change in newer gen eating habits (ie less canned stuff). Thats my view on it....
Well good luck with the farmers that needed those contracts, hope they can figure something out.
People weren't buying those peaches and so the infrastructure collapsed. Sure the trees are being destroyed, but those peaches weren't going to feed anyone anyways. This is making room for a new produce that is more likely to go on to actually feed people.
People act like this is some permanent loss of food capacity. It's just the process of a shift. Happens all the time.
Almonds get too much hate when cow milk/beef in general require so much more. Oat milk doesn't require as much either, plants help clean the air, there's many more pros than cons.
Right, but there's context to this. I was born and raised in Bakersfield, which is hot and dry. Why does Bolthouse have to grow their almonds here of all places, where the climate doesn't support it?
Isn't a big reason for AG in California because of our rich soil? I doubt pulling a bunch of plants and trees would improve the climate in that area, would probably be worse.
Since you are born and raised in Bakersfield you should know the climate is perfect for growing almonds. 80% of the world’s almond supply comes from the Central Valley.
Everything except the water is perfect. Our water usage is insane, in a state that has regular droughts. In the 1970s, Bakersfield's mayor negotiated long term water rights that were about triple what he needed, in expectation of future growth. The water here is cheaper than it should be, by a long shot.
Yeah, I hate these knee jerk reactions based on headlines.
If you leave the trees be, the fruit doesn't magically get to homeless people. People have to pick it, process it, and ship it. All of whom are expected to get paid to do so. If the price can't support those wages, then the government needs to subsize it (but if we are going to do that, it should probably be something more nutritional/economically impactful than peaches).
How?'who would pay for the peaches? If there were willing buyers, they wouldn't have to destroy it in the first place. You expect the farmers to grow and harvest it for free and give it away?
Billions upon billions to distract from the Epstein files with ICE raids and wars of aggression, yet nothing to provide good jobs, food, and healthcare at home.
If people don't recognize what's happening at this point, there's truly no hope for them.
I didn’t even know Del Monte went bankrupt. And why not give the food away this whole thing is ridiculous. From keeping people from picking it like we should’ve had all along to destroying what’s on the vine.
Are t the peaches part of the bankruptcy estate a d shouldn't they be sold to pay creditors. What sense does it make to use tax dollars to pay the debtor to destroy its assets. How does this make any sense.
There is more nuance to these things than evil men seeking profits only. It does cost money to harvest the fruit/commodity. The grower makes the decision to harvest (put in money) based upon the prospect of turning a profit. If the market doesn’t produce adequate return of profit, risk, etc, it makes more sense to “walk away” (or disc, till, etc) from that field and plant something else or sell.
It’s more polarizing to say some evil ghoul is behind this, but most don’t consider how much $ it takes to raise and harvest a backyard garden, much less scaled up many times over.
Example:
If it cost you $500 to grow something and it costs you about $300 to harvest it, would you harvest knowing your return is going to be $100? $500? Even break even $800? Or, cut your loss and move on.
Why cant the state pay them for the peaches and distribute them to schools throughout the state to give as free snack to the kids?
Or something along those lines.
That's actually how a lot of federal and state food programs work. The government just straight up buys a lot of supplies and distributes them to people in need, food programs, foreign aid, all sorts of things. The USA government actually has a giant bunker filled with cheese! It's good that you're asking questions like this. Look into food programs. I bet a lot of governments would buy up massive amounts of stock and distribute it. A lot of cans of peaches would definitely end up in food banks, homeless shelters, halfway houses, school lunches, jail/prison meals, or foreign and domestic places dealing with famine.
More than likely the primary issue with governments and organizations getting these supplies is that the company doesn't want to deal with parting with them at cost and government agencies are so strapped that they wouldn't have the lump sum that the company would probably want up front as well as the ability to move, relabel, transport, and store them at the speed the company would want them to.
It's just a big cluster-fork of problems that ends up with perfectly good and viable food stuffs being left to rot and both the companies and our governments are at fault. Always good to know how the programs your taxes are paying for work, though! Keep asking questions. :)
the trees are being destroyed and a new crop is going in because no one was buying canned peaches. what are you on about beyond missing the point of this entirely?
> this is flagrantly wasteful in a society full of hungry and desperate people.
Well yes and no.
The reason Del Monte filed for bankruptcy in the first place is because people aren't buying their canned foods anymore.
These thousands of peach trees are growing peaches for canning, so they're not going to look good (or sell well) in grocery stores.
I guess the government could have stepped in and bought the canning plant and started a government owned canned peach strategic reserve (like they did with cheddar and mozzarella cheeses), but again, people weren't buying the canned peaches in the first place.
How can these peaches be eaten if the infrastructure that ensured they were picked, processed, and canned collapses? These farmers can't just pay out of pocket to go through all the motions of harvesting a crop that have nowhere to go. It's a hugely labour and capital intensive process. even if they went to through the trouble of finding some way to prepare the years crop for human consumption (packing, cleaning, transport, etc.) What food bank would accept thousands of pounds of quickly spoiling fruit?
The food depositories that support those food banks would probably take them. I know Chicagoland has a huge logistical operation to package loose fruit for food banks and the families they support.
Plenty of farms and farm co-ops partner with organizations like food banks. In this situation its probably best for the farmers to cut their losses and get rid of the trees well before this seasons fruit ripens. Making a decision like this is hard enough and the financial burden of missing a harvest is already steep.
They get donations and they do also buy food using cash donations. They buy in huge bulk and repackage it onsite. Oh and they use mostly volunteer labor. I’ve volunteered there quite a few times through different groups in college and corporate life. I still keep my monthly cash donations going to them too. Wonderful organization.
Imagine stating with confidence that the US isn't filled with hungry desperate people when we have a "homeless problem" that makes the news every election since 1902. Every election in my lifetime has had some variation of "people SHOULD go hungry because of xyz" as a primary running position.
You're getting caught on the detail of peaches, rather than the detail of food.
Food logistics is hugely complex and involves a lot of people, most of whom are not compensated in princely wages.
Understandably, those people collectively don’t want to give away their labor for free. It’s better and easier to support at the consumer end than from the middle. Instead of giving people free food and then figuring out how to pay all the people in the middle, just give people money to buy food with, which we do (granted with a lot of rules and so on, which is less than ideal).
Stuff like free school lunches is vastly more feasible than forcing people to grow food that nobody wants.
No, people are hungry because we have a great deal of excess that is wasted in the name of profit efficiency, which only adds to the growing problem of inflation.
Then buy those peaches or get the government to, do you expect people to labor for years, then pick and process food nobody is willing to buy? There are major cost associated with harvesting, processing, transporting, storing, and distributing agricultural products and nobody is going to do it for free.
This is a sad situation for all involved. Harvesting the fallen fruit is noble but not actually practical except for locals. The farmers are setup to move through distribution channels not direct sales. There is an environmental upside that these fruit trees are not native to the area and need lots of water to thrive. So sad upside but an upside.
However that’s not my concern but rather this argument for financial support: “They argued that it was necessary to aid these farmers or risk “long-term structured damage to our nation’s agricultural base.”
First these farmers made a choice and signed 20 yr contracts. They made an economic choice to run a business. Destroying the trees means avoiding more cost. Which is understandable. But “long term structure damage” is utter bullshit. These trees are being destroyed. Their impact is contained to these farmers and their workers who will likely never see a dime except to destroy the trees. The food supply will not be disrupted. These are luxury crops.
If I want a peach, I’d buy a fresh one, not a can. Why didn't Del Monte shift to growing fresh fruit instead of canning? John Steinbeck made his career writing about farmers and migrant workers in Salinas and Central Valleys. California has huge farmland, but many only see its glamorous Hollywood side, not its agricultural roots.
Peaches meant to be canned within a couple of days are not peaches that will store well for a several weeks travel and still look fresh when they get there.
These won’t do well as fresh produce. They’d need to switch to different peach trees.
I’m sorry, the canned peaches taste better than most fresh ones. It’s the same story with a lot of canned and flash frozen products. “Fresh” produce you see at the store is very far from fresh by the time it gets there.
My guess is due to copyright and these peaches cannot be sold fresh. ( brand protection) So, Del Monte would need to change their contract to allow these farmers to sell it as fresh fruit.
Not enough money to keep in business, but more than enough money to destroy food producing trees so they can't be used to feed people. If that doesn't highlight how fucked up society's priorities are then I don't know what will
How did people get this way? Im not talking about the peaches. Im talking about the thread full of people freaking out about farmers planting crops people actually want to buy.
Because they have no idea how their food is grown or any farming practices. Which to me is scary. Just a bunch of people who wouldn't know what to do if food just stopped going to their grocery stores.
This will massively decrease the supply of peaches, nationally. I expect that we might see peaches at multiples of what we're paying today - for both fresh and canned.,
buckyball60 | 19 hours ago
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
x1000Bums | 19 hours ago
Man I keep a great quote from that book in a note on my phone. Gonna have to add this as well.
"And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on."
br_k_nt_eth | 17 hours ago
Christ, that book is relevant today. Hot damn. I need to re-read some Steinbeck.
GoofManRoofMan | 17 hours ago
I mean, are we not in the second gilded age?
Viva_La_Revolucion- | 17 hours ago
"They were careless people,they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
•F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
We are and the 100 year cycle is coming upon us rapidly. Wallstreets endless greed is about to create the next great depression.
bajazona | 16 hours ago
Crazy thing is republicans are actively trying to suppress these books calling them woke and pulling them from schools (they don’t fit the “education” they feel kids deserve)
br_k_nt_eth | 15 hours ago
I mean, the suppress the Triangle Factory Fire and every other bit of the labor rights movement during this time. This is why you shouldn’t let Texas have a fucking monopoly on school textbooks, too. It’s by design.
Icy-person666 | 10 hours ago
Also noteworthy is the triangle factory isn't to terribly far from the "twin Towers" and still standing, funny how a building full of bankers and money people die and it's a national tragedy. A building full of common workers die and it is lucky to get a metal placard.
dust4ngel | 14 hours ago
> trying to suppress these books calling them woke
keeping slaves through violence is expensive - it's much cheaper to convince people to sign up
Isaybased | 8 hours ago
It's both parties supporting consolidation of wealth to the top
DarkElation | 11 hours ago
This is completely fabricated. Each of these books has been banned in a total of two schools. All but one of the schools are in progressive areas of the country.
Two of the bans were put in place in 1987 and 1939. Only one even happened this century. It’s also the only one that isn’t in a progressive area. It’s in Alaska.
But while we’re in the topic, you should look in to who banning *To Kill a Mockingbird*.
SmellsLikeShame | 26 minutes ago
About a year or two ago, a former coworker who lives in a smaller, semi-rural district in west Michigan said that her daughter's school system had banned To Kill a Mockingbird but Mein Kampf remained available for reading.
I can't remember the exact cited reason for banning Harper Lee, but the gist was something about the "the uncomfortable racial themes" in the book. My jaw was on the floor.
Tell me you haven't read the book without actually telling me.
Bluegrass6 | 13 hours ago
No they're not. Nobody is calling for Steinbeck to be banned or Great Gatsby. Stop lying.
They're calling for books going into explicit detail about sex to not be in elementary schools. Books like "Gender Queer" "this book is gay" " all boys aren't blue" " out of darkness" etc. You can look these titles up and get an understanding of theur content. But nobody is calling for Steinbeck to be banned.
Stop lying.
Princessformidable | 13 hours ago
Oh look a source.
https://www.npr.org/2008/09/30/95190615/grapes-of-wrath-and-the-politics-of-book-burning
Princessformidable | 13 hours ago
https://ilovelibraries.org/article/u-s-book-challenges-update-march-2026-edition/
DarkElation | 11 hours ago
This article is about a ban put in place in 1939 in one singular school district. How on earth are you making the leap to active efforts to ban said book all across America?
So dishonest.
Vegetable-Board-5547 | 13 hours ago
Retired high school English teacher, taught Gatsby for junior English. Amazingly well written book. I reread it every year and kept getting better.
chester219 | 10 hours ago
And the kids still love it. I teach HS history and my students read Gatsby in English class and they love to talk about it. Still relevant.
TrevorBo | 5 hours ago
On purpose
messiahspike | 14 hours ago
According to French Economist Gabriel Zucman, we have actually surpassed the wealth disparity of the gilded age.
The richest 0.01% - around 18,000 U.S. families - have also surpassed the wealth levels reached in the gilded age. "These families hold 10% of the country's wealth today. By comparison, in 1913, the top 0.01% held 9% of U.S. wealth, and a mere 2% in the late 70s."
I say it's time to sharpen those guillotine blades... NOT, and let me be perfectly clear on this, because I'm advocating violence against the insanely wealthy who put their disgusting need to hord wealth above anything else including human lives, the well being of their own country and the world in general, but because it is a well known fact that guillotines are unsurpassed when it comes to slicing watermelons and it's almost melon season y'alll🍉🍉!!!
br_k_nt_eth | 15 hours ago
Absolutely, and way more people should know about that and why the labor rights and activism portion isn’t taught in schools. More folks should know we’ve been here before.
Like, if you re-read the famous “Bread and Roses” speech, it could be a substack article today with the same content.
Top_Agency1370 | 15 hours ago
We are, though the first Gilded Age was around 1870-1900, and Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939
MephistoHamProducts | 14 hours ago
So we're in The Second Roaring 20s!
That sounds pretty sweet. I hope someone knows some boss flappers I can hang out with!
x1000Bums | 17 hours ago
The fact it was written almost a century ago is what really gets me. Somethings gotta break the cycle.
NaBrO-Barium | 16 hours ago
Doubt it. It’s cyclical for a reason and we are human after all.
x1000Bums | 16 hours ago
It's not a cycle that's innate to the nature of living on planet earth so it will eventually change. The question is how much suffering we will perpetuate in the mean time.
andresni | 16 hours ago
It's a cycle arising from power. Imbalance or greed leads some to have more power than others. And to protect it they need more, and those who covet the power of others must get their own to challenge them. And whatever rules or regulations or alliances that are set up to prevent this from happening, those are slowly eroded until the one kind holds all. But no king can hold all so when it topples there is a brief moment of equality before the tower arises anew.
The cycle is broken when power is absolute, or the rules water tight, or when no one seeks power or are satisfied with just enough. So the cycle never breaks.
No-Profession5134 | 15 hours ago
It is a cycle caused by elevating the egos of people who have money.... Once they begin seperating themselves in their own mind from the rest of humanity they get in their head that they ALONE are chosen by god.... and in that sin they build monuments to themselves when they could have built Stability.
x1000Bums | 16 hours ago
I mean that's just a problem with your time scale. At the very least we could give it a couple hundred years and we are all dead or living in abundance.
NaBrO-Barium | 16 hours ago
According to Buddhism, life is suffering, so probably for a while I’d imagine.
x1000Bums | 16 hours ago
Thats an odd reference to back up your argument, but also it's desire that causes suffering not life itself. Tanha
NaBrO-Barium | 12 hours ago
Isn’t it human nature to desire though?
x1000Bums | 12 hours ago
There's no such thing
Tijuana_Pikachu | 16 hours ago
yeah that was a crazy asspull
dust4ngel | 14 hours ago
> According to Buddhism, life is suffering
buddhists didn't unionize to get us the 40 hour week, so
Ornery_Flounder3142 | 17 hours ago
Yes.
Icy-person666 | 10 hours ago
Might as well add "the jungle" back into rotation too. The only thing no obsolete in the book is the street cars have been replaced with busses.
martin | 14 hours ago
I hear ya, but can we all just wait til I get a little bit more?
blastomite | 12 hours ago
I also have this one saved. Its a good one.
gOldMcDonald | 7 hours ago
Steinbeck will always be one of the greats
petit_cochon | 19 hours ago
I thought of this exact passage when I read the headline.
MootRevolution | 19 hours ago
One of the most poignant descriptions of the excesses of capitalism. This book had a profound effect on me.
thisisthatacct | 11 hours ago
My mom had a thing for making me read well known and classic books, but didn't quite have the media literacy to understand what was being said in them.
I took a liking to Steinbeck and she kept getting his books for me. And now she's so confused why I have the political and social views I do
Defiant_Shoe3053 | 3 hours ago
But it's not a description about the excesss of capitalism, the destruction of food was a New Deal policy meant to reduce the surplus of food that had glutted the agricultural market.
argparg | 18 hours ago
Despite the wealth inequity, there is still bread. This is why there will be no contemporary revolution
No-Permit-9331 | 16 hours ago
Like Florida and Oranges. We are being set up to literally have zero food resources to pull from with cattle issues, bird flues affecting poultry, now farms by the fists full going belly up. Yeah, when the WEF said “they will have nothing and like it.” They were serious. Wind farms are being turned away, our nation parks are for sale to the highest bidder, fresh water sources can be polluted at will by corporations, our current food offerings at grocery stores have begun to be semi-spoiled by the time they get on the shelves, meat has become substandard with exorbitant price increases. Everyone in the US needs to take this seriously. Please build up deep pantries, learn gardening skills, even container gardening. We have to learn more self sufficiency and how to be a community again. It’s going to take a village.
BasvanS | 13 hours ago
*Own nothing. You’ll have a lot available to you, but you will never own it, only consume at a price.
gwenver | 2 hours ago
Or just don't vote Republican...
PinaColada-PorFavor | 18 hours ago
Damn…absolutely devastating. Makes want to cry understanding the similarity.
Old_timey_brain | 19 hours ago
> John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Way back in the late 1960's I was forced to read this in Jr. High School, and it put me into a long term depression. Fuck I hated that book!
Thin-Entertainer3789 | 19 hours ago
Good that was the intent of the book. To feel sorry and then wrath….
Old_timey_brain | 19 hours ago
Maybe a more mature audience would have been a good idea.
b-cereus | 19 hours ago
Learning how the world around us really works is a big part of maturing in the first place.
huehuehuehuehuuuu | 17 hours ago
Mature audience would be too jaded to care. The young at least have a reaction.
kettal | 19 hours ago
i'm not going to read it. I'll wait for the animated movie starring Seth Rogen as the talking grape
Wetness_Pensive | 15 hours ago
Steinbeck also wrote "In Dubious Battle", which is much shorter, very brisk, and tells a similar story. Worth checking out.
cstmoore | 18 hours ago
And Salma Hayek as the peach.
12ozSlug | 18 hours ago
Inshallah
dust4ngel | 14 hours ago
are you confusing salma hayek and anne hathaway? both hot but... different ladies
dust4ngel | 14 hours ago
> the animated movie starring Seth Rogen as the talking grape
produced by a company owned by jeff bezos, in which we learn that while capitalism may have its excesses, communism would mean we're all slaves in a warehouse pissing in bottles
BroughtBagLunchSmart | 17 hours ago
Right wingers being terrified of facts about capitalism has been going on for quite some time I guess huh?
Old_timey_brain | 16 hours ago
As a relatively innocent 13 year old, I didn't really care for the story.
TheCollinsworthSlide | 15 hours ago
let's all bend society to account for your one single experience with a book
Old_timey_brain | 14 hours ago
You're quite an extreme thinker, aren't you?
How did you like the book?
DontDeleteusBrutus | 19 hours ago
One does not speak of the tortoise.
Fair-Search-2324 | 18 hours ago
Was it a Great Depression?
Old_timey_brain | 16 hours ago
The Greatest! The most wonderful. Nobody ever had better!
buckyball60 | 18 hours ago
Yes, the book is set during the Great Depression.
NaBrO-Barium | 16 hours ago
Brought on by excessive tariffs…
buckyball60 | 18 hours ago
In the 90s we read it in high school. Jr. High seems far too early for that book.
Old_timey_brain | 16 hours ago
> Jr. High seems far too early for that book.
I thought so as well.
omglia | 16 hours ago
One of the best books of all time
plassteel01 | 16 hours ago
I was thinking yea this is how my Dad described the great depression
Bmor00bam | 14 hours ago
Thinking about this quote, and what happened in Ireland, it reminds me that John Steinbeck’s pen-strokes and FDR’s policies, may have prevented the deaths of millions of Americans.
LuckyPlaze | 19 hours ago
It makes no sense. Even if a single harvest from several farms went free to people who need it, there will always be more hungry people and people will be hungry again the next day. Aside from grotesque lack of compassion, the effort to stop people doesn’t seem worth it.
Flyen | 19 hours ago
They're manipulating supply vs demand
tpounds0 | 15 hours ago
The government could control supply as well. Government run food pantries.
Milk and dairy farmers already basically subside on school purchases anyways.
We subsidize inedible corn for ethanol, and high fructose corn syrup.
Imagine if we moved ethanol funding to broccoli, and spinach, and healthy greens. Instead of government cheese we could provide government salads.
lost_horizons | 10 hours ago
So much of the answer to all our myriad problems is in the tax code. But there’s no will to do it right, and lots of corruption to prevent it.
LuckyPlaze | 18 hours ago
I get that. But food is a very different type of product. There is ALWAYS demand. A sudden burst of surplus isn’t going to impact long-term demand or prices. It would be very short-lived.
Seems like spending resources to avert that temp drop in prices would never pay dividends.
br_k_nt_eth | 18 hours ago
Yeah but is it the kind of demand that makes them rich? They believe that scarcity is the best way to maintain profits. They loathe true competition. They’re too weak for long term building and they were never trained to do so.
Seriously, I’m not trying to be shitty here. They literally don’t have that kind of training and focus for producing long term growth and profit because they’ve all been trained on the PE model, which focuses on short term profits and using loopholes to leave someone else with the bag once all value has been extracted.
lost_horizons | 10 hours ago
Welcome to the commodities markets!
LuckyPlaze | 8 hours ago
That’s exactly my point. The price of oranges is traded on a global scale, with orange futures trading daily and the sales of oranges locked in months in advance. A regional surplus of several orchards isn’t going to affect commodity futures for more than a day’s trading and quickly revert to fair value.
Even the farmers who sell oranges wouldn’t be affected because they sell to mass distributors through futures contracts.
The only people who would feel any real impact would be local grocers who would see that week or months stock go without purchase. And then everything would return to normal.
Expert-Computer1316 | 17 hours ago
A sudden burst of surplus absolutely impacts long term demand and prices but more importantly it impacts the farm. The decision of what to grow with land year over year is heavily influenced by what was profitable the year before.
In surplus years during the Great Depression era - and even though countries have a fuck ton of price controls and trade remedies on farm commodities today, it still happens- prices can fall so low as to shutter a farm or plantation, or prevent them from investing or planting the next year. This is a fact from which flows the price controls and trade remedies and commodities futures tradings and a whole lot of other fun economic mechanisms.
LuckyPlaze | 17 hours ago
The example is citing farms that already went out of business. Governments also provide subsidies in bad years. This notion that a one time surplus in a single region would somehow affect global orange prices over the long haul is ludicrous.
Expert-Computer1316 | 16 hours ago
It was and is a real practice. The alternative- them handing out free oranges- is a practice which would affect orange prices in the region. Supply affects demand and shocks can take years to settle out and the process of settling out involves people on the margins losing jobs and farms on the margins going out of business. If not the farm in question - if that one had gone out of business, the supply would be burned to protect the existing ones nearby which the investors and workers and buyers will now have to use.
If the price of oranges in the region plummets, and the investors in the orange industry in the region use that price to math out the expected earnings for next year, they will end up with a figure which will tell them to invest less or not at all in the area. If a farm has a bad year of production (or burns surplus) but the price stays high then that’s different math- that’s a one year loss- and investment in the region will continue. Dumping and spiking the oranges to protect the orange price follows a logic which is why it is a practice.
strolls | 15 hours ago
It makes sense to me. The cannery has gone bust, presumably due to reduced global demand or because it's being undercut by overseas canneries. There is now excess supply of peaches in the area and farmers are going to be throwing them away for years, because it's too expensive to ship fresh peaches (which bruise easily) all over the country.
It's natural to see the destruction of these trees as a shame and a waste when viewing it emotionally or subjectively, but planting some other crop now means that crop can be used to meet demand and feed people who want to eat that crop. Apples or cherries or something.
Maybe you could show me where I'm wrong?
gimpwiz | 11 hours ago
One thing I find interesting is the role of alcohol. Alcohol is a pretty good value store: you can take excess food production (grain, fruit, whatever) that you cannot feasibly sell (because everyone locally has more than they can use before it goes bad, it travels poorly, it is too expensive to transport vs demand, it stores poorly, etc) and you can ferment it to significantly extend its useful lifespan and you cab distill it to extend it even more (almost to infinity if stored in glass etc.) Not only that but it also massively shrinks the total weight/volume, while being value-add.
So economically you would hope they can mush all the fruit, turn it into peach wine, or peach brandy. At worst, a peach based neutral spirit.
The problem in modern times is that it's fairly expensive to set up or hire a distillery or brewery, and there aren't necessarily small breweries or distilleries locally available to deal with the volume. The cost of labor is very high compared to the cost of food today vs a couple hundred years ago, and regulations preventing ad-hoc brewing/distillation in any sort of volume are myriad.
Also, while it massively reduces waste, it also doesn't feed anyone. Alcohol is a good value store, and a pretty poor calorie store (well, useful calories anyways - plenty of calories in booze but you can't really live off it, eh.) Not to mention it's not very attractive to a large percentage of the population.
The obvious modern alternative for a value and nutrition store is canning/jarring or freezing but again. High cost of labor, significant equipment and storage space needed, regulations add cost, and then you still need to ship it and sell it without losing money doing so. Nobody works for free, and charity unfortunately won't absorb enormous but rare excesses - we're just poorly set up for it. Plus in this case it's literally a canning company going bankrupt, so......
RetardedWabbit | 19 hours ago
It's more profitable to sell 10 for $10 than it is to sell 100 for $1, even if it's cheaper to make 100. Destroying 90 raises the bidding on the 10 remaining to that $10.
Xerxero | 16 hours ago
Such a great book
Tex-Rob | 16 hours ago
So was this before or after they did this in Florida? There are no more native Florida citrus trees, they made it illegal for them to just grow naturally.
ReddYoshi | 12 hours ago
I feel like this is a book I missed in high school and I have to go back and get it
aznology | 6 hours ago
Great book might read it again
Lifekraft | 13 minutes ago
Thats what i was thinking. If only they could make peach juice and market it to the world as a healthy alternative once again.
thewimsey | 16 hours ago
You understand that this has nothing to do with what is happening in California?
Here2Go | 19 hours ago
We could use this to help feed the hungry. Instead tons of food are being destroyed in order to protect the profits of a handful of wealthy people. What the fuck is wrong with this country?
dak-sm | 18 hours ago
Yep - Real Grapes of Wrath vibes.
The_Demolition_Man | 12 hours ago
People dont want to buy canned peaches therefore we're basically in the great depression. Reddit just cracks me the fuck up.
evernessince | 18 hours ago
We all know the issue, the only thing that matters is making a profit. We could feed the hungry but then it'd hurt some company's bottom line. We could provide healthcare but then it'd hurt come company's bottom line. Repeat ad infinitum.
dookieshoes97 | 14 hours ago
Meanwhile, French grocery stores are required to give all unsold food away. It's wild.
Ray192 | 13 hours ago
They're removing those trees so that they can plant some other crops that people actually want to buy.
Is there a universe where farmers can't be allowed to change what crops they grow?
evernessince | 9 hours ago
This wasn't a case of people not wanting to buy them, it was a case of the processor going bankrupt. I buy a ton of canned and freeze dried peaches for recipes all the time. Availability during certain times of the year was already poor.
Ray192 | 7 hours ago
Why did the processor go bankrupt?
... because people weren't buying the product they were producing. Which means people didn't want what these peaches were made into.
It's not really not that complicated.
Geno_Warlord | 7 hours ago
More like they couldn’t afford it. Gotta feed the fat wealthy bastards above all amirite?
Ray192 | 6 hours ago
Kid, are you really gonna blame the farmers for wanting to plant something else that people like better?
Geno_Warlord | 6 hours ago
Doubtful they plant something people like better and plant something that they can simply charge more for. Probably alfalfa that they will just ship overseas. Farming has never been lucrative. Losing farms like this without a clear path forward just means things will get more expensive and people starve.
IPredictAReddit | an hour ago
But people do like other things better. That's what demand and willingness to pay shows you.
I agree it's a shame that these trees are being ripped out, but people just aren't buying canned peaches like they used to.
Geno_Warlord | an hour ago
I mean they could sell actual peaches instead of tinned. I could eat peaches for hours. Also ever made your own peach whiskey? Delicious. I wouldn’t have minded one or two adult trees. But no, destroyed.
dust4ngel | 14 hours ago
> We could feed the hungry but then it'd hurt some company's bottom line
also without the threat of starvation, what will motivate those poor people to start their own businesses and become rich?
evernessince | 9 hours ago
This comment pisses me off on so many levels as an individual who grew up partially on free meals from the public. Starvation doesn't drive people to innovate, it drivers them to death. It's shown to hurt the development of children and their academic growth. Let's see you try and learn on an empty stomach. Hence why the world's most prosperous countries produce the most billionaires and millionaires. Go and look at the countries with the highest starvation rate and tell me the trend you see.
campydirtyhead | 9 hours ago
I think they were joking
ca2mt | 17 hours ago
Sure, save for the fact that 90% of California farms, and 97% of US farms, are family owned.
evernessince | 15 hours ago
"over 90%" It's 90.2% (saying over 90% feels very misleading here) and 70% of total agricultural output (family owned farms tend to be smaller).
Really besides the point though, it doesn't change the fact that the money from this program was put in place due to big agra lobbying and in this case we are basically paying for higher peach prices instead of paying to arrange another processor for these peaches to maintain prices, or for money to farmers to process themselves, or any number of other potential solutions. It's the lazy and corporate favoring policy we employee across the board. We treat food as a product and low prices as a failure when we could be feeding people.
ca2mt | 14 hours ago
Edited to not be misleading, wasn’t my intention.
evernessince | 9 hours ago
fair enough, thank you.
zedazeni | 16 hours ago
Sure, but then why are they overproducing to such a degree? That’s still their fault for being shitty business owners. They knowingly farmed fruits that are over-produced and only able to stay profitable by a allowing a major corporation to fix the prices via artificial scarcity. In a hypothetical economy wherein they were all family-owned farms without the billion-dollar corporations there to intervene and manipulate the market, then these farmers would’ve chosen to plant different crops instead of going balls-to-the-walls on peaches, almonds, and alfalfa, etc..
evernessince | 15 hours ago
Were they over-producing? The article just stats that their process went bankrupt. Realistically this will increase peach prices as it's taking peaches out of the market,
SnooJokes4916 | 15 hours ago
You don't understand how farming and crop yeilds work.
HerroCorumbia | 15 hours ago
Explain it then. Because if I'm a farmer and my contract fell through, I'm going to brokers and pitching the harvest to other buyers, not begging for money to rip trees out.
Adjustments for bad, good or just odd harvests are made every year between farmers, brokers and buyers. This article makes it sound like the system is set in stone. Hell, the fact that they even had a contract in the first place surprises me. Usually this would be done in rounds every year with a flurry of POs.
evernessince | 15 hours ago
I think part of the problem is that del monte ate up a lot of smaller processor. That said, it definitely makes more sense for the government to pay farmers for equipment to process their peaches or as seed more for other processers to step in.
Paying them to get rid of the supply, which will cause a price increase as this was not over-supply, is a policy put in place by big-agra.
zedazeni | 15 hours ago
You’re right, I’m not an expert on agriculture or farming. However, anyone with a basic understanding of basic economics knows that if supply goes up without an equivalent increase in demand, then prices go down. If prices only stay profitable by “creating” a shortage, then it seems like there’s a high degree of market manipulation going on. Perhaps the business owners don’t know how/don’t want to change their product to pivot to the new demand, however, destroying hundreds do thousands of peach trees to stay profitable means that hundreds of thousands of peach trees weren’t necessary in the first place, or if they are, that the market mechanism is so broken that producers (farmers) are unable to reach the markets without a middleman (Del Monte). Again, surely grocery stores like Publix, Giant, Safeway, or regional ones would still be able to buy said produce and can it under their own private labels, do something with it.
Waste is the result of overproduction, no matter how you slice it.
ca2mt | 14 hours ago
I’m not a peach farmer, but do know some.
Del Monte was a canning operation, tooled specifically for canned peaches. They gave out 20 year contracts to farmers to grow canning peach varieties, not the same peaches grocers would purchase and sell on shelves.
A farmer gets a 20 year contract from Del Monte to offset or secure financing for the initial planting costs and first 3-4 years that the trees aren’t producing. In return for that initial offset and/or secured financing, Del Monte gets the crop for the productive life of the orchard and gets to profit on the canned peaches. Farmers plant those acres because they’ve got a buyer set.
Del Monte closes, and farmers have to pull trees because no one left has the capacity to can all of the peaches. Pacific Coast Producers, now essentially a monopoly, can only take on so many more acres. Those that don’t get picked up have to be destroyed to prevent abandoned acres from becoming hotbeds for pests and disease.
I’m sure there are other intricacies, but that’s a general breakdown as far as I understand it.
zedazeni | 13 hours ago
I assumed something as much is what happened here. There’s similar stories about farmers being beholden to Monsanto for using Monsanto’s seeds.
Nevertheless, this is a problem with our agricultural industry, specifically, monopolization and cartelization. We have farmers that can’t exist without a monopoly, and a system wherein it’s more beneficial for them to destroy hundreds of thousands of crops than it is for them to try and find different buyers. That’s a market failure of epic proportions.
What’s more, I still place a large amount of blame on the farmers. After all, they chose to sign that contract with Bel Monte, so they knowingly entered a “too big to fail” situation. It’s not necessarily like Monsanto where, realistically, you’ve got no one else to turn to.
In a very petty and vindictive manner, I can’t help but feel happy that farmers are suffering. Farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump and overwhelmingly support the GOP. The very party that they’re complaining about taking away their illegal laborers, the very party that’s using oil barons to write our environmental policies while farmers then complain about the increasing rate and severity of extreme weather, the very farmers that voted for a platform of maximum tariffs and then complain about rising prices. I can’t help but feel a sort of Pyrrhic victory here, yes we suffer, but finally, finally, this over-subsidized and extremely coddled sector (and voting base) is reaping what they sow.
ca2mt | 15 hours ago
Yep, I look forward to the corporate operations swooping in with their Ivy MBAs to rectify the failings of these terrible business owners and save our food chain.
Elendils_Bear | 15 hours ago
Family owned doesnt mean 'small' or 'poor' in this case
ca2mt | 14 hours ago
Up to 85% of farms in California are considered to be small family-run farms.
Outrageous_Desk8966 | 10 hours ago
This muddies the truth. There's alot of small farms but they aren't the ones producing the majority, and "family-run" farms which is simply how the ownership is structured - as in massive farms owned by a person (family) not a corporation.
You are trying to make it seem like the majority of the food is being produced by small humble farms, when this is not the case and perversion of the truth
ca2mt | 8 hours ago
The ones producing the most are also typically well diversified and not wholly reliant on a single contract. Small farmers are disproportionately impacted by this closure, regardless of where the majority of canning peaches are produced.
thewimsey | 16 hours ago
> What the fuck is wrong with this country?
People like you not reading the article, not understanding what is happening, and then providing stupid solutions to non-existent problems.
That's the problem. You and people like you, who are too ignorant and lazy to even read the article you're commenting on.
Del Monte went bankrupt. It went bankrupt because people weren't buy enough canned peaches.
The company that bought DM is buying 50,000 tons less of peaches from this area.
The farmers are removing the trees so they can plant something else. Something that people will buy.
Fresh-Possibility-75 | 9 hours ago
People are reacting (quite logically) to the insane waste that fuels capitalism. Central Valley farmers (nearly all of them MAGA) whine incessantly about not getting enough water from liberal CA and 'Newscum' to 'feed America,' but then turn around and waste metric tons of it.
Do you realize how much water, fertilizer, fuel, and energy in general it took to get these peach orchards producing? The water they've wasted on this crop is a scarce public resource. Destroying the yield and pulling out the mature trees is a criminal waste of shared natural resources. It's not as though the market for canned peaches has disappeared. It just isn't fetching as much money as it used to. In a world where millions of people die of starvation every year (and in a nation where 13% of children don't know where their next meal will come from), it should be criminal to destroy edible food.
The_Demolition_Man | 12 hours ago
Noooo people choosing to buy something else is a sign that capitalism is crumbling! This is an injustice.
mewalkyne | 4 hours ago
Where did you see that they're going to be planting something else?
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
Fruit Trees are very high maintenance and quickly drop off in productivity if not properly maintained. If you’re not getting paid to maintain because you don’t have a buyer for the fruit, you’re going to take them down and do something more profitable.
Stratiform | 14 hours ago
Who is going to grow and maintain the farms? Do we expect them to do this for free? How will they afford machinery, labor, fertilizer?
Ultimately the demand for peaches isn't there. We can't just force people to consume a product that isn't viable, in order to keep the product viable? Like other commenters, I definitely encourage you read the article.
rusty_programmer | 12 hours ago
The government does it with milk and corn all the time, but those subsidies are for keeping business afloat and not keeping people fed.
Fresh-Possibility-75 | 9 hours ago
louder for the people in the back!
Stlouisken | 17 hours ago
Love the sentiment but in this situation it’s not realistic.
Someone has to buy all these peaches to make it economically viable for farmers to maintain the trees, including harvesting the peaches. So, either the state or federal government makes it economically viable for the farmers to keep farming peaches or an organization does.
They could all donate the peaches, but that’s a one-time event. Without continued money coming in buying the peaches, the farms go bankrupt.
On the plus side, destroying all of these peaches trees helps the state and farmers because it requires a lot of water to maintain them, more than many other crops that could replace the trees. In a state that frequently is in a drought, this is not a bad thing.
Here2Go | 16 hours ago
I would agree with you if they weren't going to be able to sell this year's peaches because there wasn't enough demand in the market. But the problem isn't demand for the product it's distribution. The customer didn't go away, just the middleman. Nature and economies abhor a vacuum. Somone will fill that role eventually. Trees aren't a production line that can be toggled on or off at will. Why spend money killing an asset that will just need to be replaced when the distribution problem is worked out but that can't be restored to its current capacity without several years of growth?
The state, instead of paying tax dollars to kill the trees, could pay for this year's harvest and donate the food. The trees would still be alive and productive in a year or two once the distribution problem has been worked out, and the farmers wouldn't go bankrupt.
The alternative is to have tax payers pay to get rid of the temporarily less valuable trees in favor of what? Fallow land doesn't make a profit and the farmers will have to use their water rights or they'll loose them. Is the state going to pay to clear peach trees just so they can be replaced with almonds or alfalfa for export?
I understand that ag bailouts are occasionally necessary. My family has been farming the same land for over 180 years. But sometimes they aren't as much necessary to keep farms going as they are to maximize profit for those wealthy enough to have some pull with the agencies who cut the checks. Maybe that's not what's happening here. But it certainly doesn't look good.
thewimsey | 16 hours ago
> I would agree with you if they weren't going to be able to sell this year's peaches because there wasn't enough demand in the market.
That is exactly the issue. That's also why Del Monte went bankrupt.
>Maybe that's not what's happening here. But it certainly doesn't look good.
You could, you know, read the article and stop guessing?
Del Monte used to buy 70,000 tons of peaches to be canned at this facility. People weren't buying the canned peaches. The successor to bankrupt Del Monte is buying 50,000 tons less.
Farmers are removing the trees to plant something that people will buy.
IndependentMinute129 | 15 hours ago
Asking him to read? How dare you.
Fuck them and their farms. No one is surviving on peaches. They are robbing the state of its water and I don’t want my tax dollars helping rat farmers who only destroy the land and then go and vote republican
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
I am adamantly pro-business and pro-free market, but no.
If these are viable produce there must be a way to not simply destroy them.
This is abhorrent.
omegadirectory | 17 hours ago
Well, considering this company went bankrupt they weren't experiencing any profits
Drak_is_Right | 15 hours ago
Try reading the article. Comment reactionary on headline only.
If you are going to blast the decision, then actually bothering to add something about the processing company that went out of business.
PyrZern | 13 hours ago
What, you were gonna buy those peaches ?? Shoulda buy more of em so they didn't go bankrupt.
What, you weren't gonna buy em ? But you want them for free ? So you want em to pick/harvest, clean, cut, process, pack, deliver, and all that for free as well ? Or do you suggest those workers get fked for you to get free peaches ?
Pick one man.
Remember those chicks that got drowned in water because price plummeted, or something something from a while back ? What, you wanted em ? But weren't gonna pay profitable price for em ? So.... who was gonna magically get those chickens into meat for you for free ?
Do you know what to call ppl who don't know when to cut their loss ? Idiots.
Idiots don't know when to quit.
rosneft_perot | 18 hours ago
You know what's wrong.
julbia | 15 hours ago
It's not just "this country".
Two/three years ago, here in Brazil, the price for milk went too low. What farmers did? They blocked a major road, and dumped the milk on it.
Let me repeat: They. Dumped. Milk. On. A. Road.
No-Permit-9331 | 11 hours ago
The people who are running it. It’s not one side or another. They all have their pockets lined, both sides of the isle.
sometimelater0212 | 5 hours ago
Capitalism. Pure and simple. And it’s so engrained in the US that anyone who thinks otherwise-socialism, communism-is PURE EVIL. Despite the fact that people’s needs are being met better in those systems. Nothing in the constitution says capitalism needs to be the only or prevalent economic system. But the leaders sure act like it does. It’s disgusting. You’re basically a Nazi to the right if you don’t follow capitalism. It’s to the level of a cult religion. Money and greed run the US at all costs.
vertigo3pc | 15 hours ago
Capitalism requires losers to sustain the optics of "winners".
Winners eat, losers starve.
We created economies around products necessary to sustain life, but it was never meant to last this long. For the wealthiest country in the world, raw food should be free, subsidized by the wealth and excess of so many. With modern technology, we could be growing so much food that nobody anywhere on earth would starve. But we don't.
Because Capitalism requires losers. To die. This is the only threat that makes people compliant. Death.
Good-Bandicoot-2152 | 15 hours ago
Capitalism.
Dchama86 | 14 hours ago
And we will continue to do nothing about it, but mark off our bingo cards in a game that none of us will win.
Ok_Island_1306 | 19 hours ago
“The man from Del Monte says NO”! (I was just shown an old Del Monte commercial by a friend and in it the man from del monte says yes)
https://youtu.be/BUNmNLdffaM?si=5lpTElWTXHTt8TFv
Zestyclose_Eye_3571 | 18 hours ago
Yep. I remeber the one where workers in the fields on the hills fetch a pineapple. The Del Monte man shows up dressed in a white suit and his white hat, slices it, tastes it and agrees that it's ready. The voice in the background goes "the Del Monte man said yes!"
PantherCityRes | 19 hours ago
In other news, the band Presidents of the United States of America just saw their self-titled album unexpectedly hit trending status on both Spotify and Apple Music…
WalkingSpanishh | 18 hours ago
I read that like an idiot and thought there was a new album.
PantherCityRes | 18 hours ago
“Lump lingered last in line for brains
And the one she got was sorta rotten and insane”
Couldn’t help myself lol
porizj | 11 hours ago
A new album? They are not going to make it.
Drak_is_Right | 15 hours ago
I don't think most of these highly upvoted comments realize the logistical infrastructure to get food from farm to table.
When you remove a couple layers of it, the farmers have nothing they can do. Why in many less developed countries over half of the food rots before it reaches consumers.
Probably blame the consolidation of American food processing in forcing smaller brands out of business. Blame changing preferrences and imported food prices.
1/3 of the total that went to one processing facility was purchased. the other 2/3 wasn't.
Also the article mixes up tons and acreage. 3000 acres, 50,000 tons are I believe the correct figures.
This sum is to help the farmers pay some of the cost of switching. They likely will miss a year or several years of harvest off the switch.
Zef-Daytrade | 12 hours ago
Del Monte.... canned peaches.
Del Monte didnt have much "premium" was the problem. OceanSpray and Dole kept with the price being they also did fresh fruit or dried fruit which set them apart from the low cost products (say Store Brand), but Del Monte didnt and also change in newer gen eating habits (ie less canned stuff). Thats my view on it....
Well good luck with the farmers that needed those contracts, hope they can figure something out.
Nytshaed | 17 hours ago
People weren't buying those peaches and so the infrastructure collapsed. Sure the trees are being destroyed, but those peaches weren't going to feed anyone anyways. This is making room for a new produce that is more likely to go on to actually feed people.
People act like this is some permanent loss of food capacity. It's just the process of a shift. Happens all the time.
McBuck2 | 17 hours ago
Just don't make it almonds. They take so much water that it's not sustainable with the almond crops now.
xbleeple | 16 hours ago
It’ll be pistachios or maybe we’ll come full circle back to oranges
Only-Worldliness2006 | 6 hours ago
Can't grow oranges. Oranges in CA are the verge of total collapse due to Huanglongbing virus
NoNDA-SDC | 15 hours ago
Almonds get too much hate when cow milk/beef in general require so much more. Oat milk doesn't require as much either, plants help clean the air, there's many more pros than cons.
Laiko_Kairen | 14 hours ago
Right, but there's context to this. I was born and raised in Bakersfield, which is hot and dry. Why does Bolthouse have to grow their almonds here of all places, where the climate doesn't support it?
NoNDA-SDC | 14 hours ago
Isn't a big reason for AG in California because of our rich soil? I doubt pulling a bunch of plants and trees would improve the climate in that area, would probably be worse.
Sawpo | 14 hours ago
Since you are born and raised in Bakersfield you should know the climate is perfect for growing almonds. 80% of the world’s almond supply comes from the Central Valley.
Laiko_Kairen | 6 hours ago
Everything except the water is perfect. Our water usage is insane, in a state that has regular droughts. In the 1970s, Bakersfield's mayor negotiated long term water rights that were about triple what he needed, in expectation of future growth. The water here is cheaper than it should be, by a long shot.
McBuck2 | 11 hours ago
They need to figure out a better way to grow almonds that don’t take so much water.
Supreme_Mediocrity | 11 hours ago
Yeah, I hate these knee jerk reactions based on headlines.
If you leave the trees be, the fruit doesn't magically get to homeless people. People have to pick it, process it, and ship it. All of whom are expected to get paid to do so. If the price can't support those wages, then the government needs to subsize it (but if we are going to do that, it should probably be something more nutritional/economically impactful than peaches).
IgnatiusRileyFreeman | 17 hours ago
They could hypothetically feed people, just not if profits are prioritized
NitroLada | 17 hours ago
How?'who would pay for the peaches? If there were willing buyers, they wouldn't have to destroy it in the first place. You expect the farmers to grow and harvest it for free and give it away?
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
Not just that, who’s going to pay the people picking and packing and transporting them?
Reddit seems to thrive on donating the time and effort of third parties without their consent.
IgnatiusRileyFreeman | 16 hours ago
The same people who are paying for children in Iran to be blown up. Priorities could be different. Not everything has to be about guzzling profits
Caracalla81 | 16 hours ago
If we're going to do that, and we should be, the we shouldn't be doing it with peaches.
The_Demolition_Man | 12 hours ago
Can you explain in detail why you think the US government should be buying peaches with tax payer dollars?
Even if you think the government should give everyone free food, why peaches? Why not something people want?
TrontRaznik | 16 hours ago
Take literally one economics class. Just one.
AndChewBubblegum | 14 hours ago
Economics, in /r/Economics? No thank you, I would rather just be mad.
Fresh-Possibility-75 | 9 hours ago
Billions upon billions to distract from the Epstein files with ICE raids and wars of aggression, yet nothing to provide good jobs, food, and healthcare at home.
If people don't recognize what's happening at this point, there's truly no hope for them.
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
People didn’t want canned peaches…
Also, how generous of you to donate someone else’s money lol.
IgnatiusRileyFreeman | 14 hours ago
How generous of the US military to give everyone's money to defense contractors. Oh well, at least children get blown up.
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
If you were a truck driver would you drive the truck for free? You’ve still got to pay for fuel and maintenance.
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
People didn’t want canned peaches…
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
People didn’t want canned peaches…
zback636 | 9 hours ago
I didn’t even know Del Monte went bankrupt. And why not give the food away this whole thing is ridiculous. From keeping people from picking it like we should’ve had all along to destroying what’s on the vine.
Prestigious_Load1699 | 3 hours ago
Harvest the damn peaches and then switch to a more productive crop.
This is a disgrace. There must be a better way.
elseworthtoohey | 10 hours ago
Are t the peaches part of the bankruptcy estate a d shouldn't they be sold to pay creditors. What sense does it make to use tax dollars to pay the debtor to destroy its assets. How does this make any sense.
96speed | 16 hours ago
There is more nuance to these things than evil men seeking profits only. It does cost money to harvest the fruit/commodity. The grower makes the decision to harvest (put in money) based upon the prospect of turning a profit. If the market doesn’t produce adequate return of profit, risk, etc, it makes more sense to “walk away” (or disc, till, etc) from that field and plant something else or sell.
It’s more polarizing to say some evil ghoul is behind this, but most don’t consider how much $ it takes to raise and harvest a backyard garden, much less scaled up many times over.
Example:
If it cost you $500 to grow something and it costs you about $300 to harvest it, would you harvest knowing your return is going to be $100? $500? Even break even $800? Or, cut your loss and move on.
No one gets to make that call except the grower.
Own_Pop_9711 | 11 hours ago
How about the taxpayer who is paying to literally cut the losses?
TyroPirate | 12 hours ago
Why cant the state pay them for the peaches and distribute them to schools throughout the state to give as free snack to the kids? Or something along those lines.
adonias_d | 11 hours ago
That's actually how a lot of federal and state food programs work. The government just straight up buys a lot of supplies and distributes them to people in need, food programs, foreign aid, all sorts of things. The USA government actually has a giant bunker filled with cheese! It's good that you're asking questions like this. Look into food programs. I bet a lot of governments would buy up massive amounts of stock and distribute it. A lot of cans of peaches would definitely end up in food banks, homeless shelters, halfway houses, school lunches, jail/prison meals, or foreign and domestic places dealing with famine.
More than likely the primary issue with governments and organizations getting these supplies is that the company doesn't want to deal with parting with them at cost and government agencies are so strapped that they wouldn't have the lump sum that the company would probably want up front as well as the ability to move, relabel, transport, and store them at the speed the company would want them to.
It's just a big cluster-fork of problems that ends up with perfectly good and viable food stuffs being left to rot and both the companies and our governments are at fault. Always good to know how the programs your taxes are paying for work, though! Keep asking questions. :)
Famous_Owl_840 | 18 hours ago
Are the resniks behind this?
It seems like a ghoulish and hateful thing to do. Very resnik like. They will probably salt the earth and poison the wells as well.
joedartonthejoedart | 14 hours ago
the trees are being destroyed and a new crop is going in because no one was buying canned peaches. what are you on about beyond missing the point of this entirely?
The_Demolition_Man | 10 hours ago
Changing crops is capitalist and evil. The government should seize the land and force people to grow the peaches. Then it should force us to eat them.
Thats justice.
PetriDishCocktail | 19 hours ago
This really isn't news. Each section of fruit trees contains nearly 70,000 trees...(110 trees per acre x 640 acres).
Realistically, this is only six sections of farmland.
Remember, California has nearly 2200 sections of almond trees alone.
kylogram | 19 hours ago
You're missing the point.
The point is that this is flagrantly wasteful in a society full of hungry and desperate people.
TeaKingMac | 18 hours ago
> this is flagrantly wasteful in a society full of hungry and desperate people.
Well yes and no.
The reason Del Monte filed for bankruptcy in the first place is because people aren't buying their canned foods anymore.
These thousands of peach trees are growing peaches for canning, so they're not going to look good (or sell well) in grocery stores.
I guess the government could have stepped in and bought the canning plant and started a government owned canned peach strategic reserve (like they did with cheddar and mozzarella cheeses), but again, people weren't buying the canned peaches in the first place.
argparg | 18 hours ago
I’m now in the mood for canned fruit
TeaKingMac | 16 hours ago
Loved that shit when I was 7
_lIlI_lIlI_ | an hour ago
I'd buy them if the quality (half peaches, half corn syrup) actually reflected the price.
Drak_is_Right | 15 hours ago
Maybe if the damn things weren't in heavy syrup I would buy them. Not sure the brand, but whatever Aldis carries is often in heavy syrup.
angry_wombat | 13 hours ago
> people aren't buying their canned foods anymore.
yeah because they are all filled with corn syrup, not fruit!
kylogram | 18 hours ago
And so we take the extra financial step of destroying the trees, just to make sure.
thewimsey | 16 hours ago
They are removing the trees so they can plant something else there.
Bunnyhat | 14 hours ago
So when no one wants a crop a farmer is growing their only choice is what? Move? They can't change crops ever?
The_Demolition_Man | 12 hours ago
The only choice is the government purchasing the land and forbidding the crops from ever switching
CanuckIeHead | 18 hours ago
How can these peaches be eaten if the infrastructure that ensured they were picked, processed, and canned collapses? These farmers can't just pay out of pocket to go through all the motions of harvesting a crop that have nowhere to go. It's a hugely labour and capital intensive process. even if they went to through the trouble of finding some way to prepare the years crop for human consumption (packing, cleaning, transport, etc.) What food bank would accept thousands of pounds of quickly spoiling fruit?
BetFinal2953 | 17 hours ago
The food depositories that support those food banks would probably take them. I know Chicagoland has a huge logistical operation to package loose fruit for food banks and the families they support.
thewimsey | 16 hours ago
>The food depositories that support those food banks would probably take them.
For free, sure. But will they buy them?
CanuckIeHead | 15 hours ago
Plenty of farms and farm co-ops partner with organizations like food banks. In this situation its probably best for the farmers to cut their losses and get rid of the trees well before this seasons fruit ripens. Making a decision like this is hard enough and the financial burden of missing a harvest is already steep.
BetFinal2953 | 11 hours ago
They get donations and they do also buy food using cash donations. They buy in huge bulk and repackage it onsite. Oh and they use mostly volunteer labor. I’ve volunteered there quite a few times through different groups in college and corporate life. I still keep my monthly cash donations going to them too. Wonderful organization.
Redpanther14 | 11 hours ago
And are they going to harvest and process those crops as well as just doing some final packaging, probably not.
thewimsey | 16 hours ago
The US isn't filled with hungry and desperate people.
And if it were, canned peaches aren't really the solution.
The_Demolition_Man | 12 hours ago
Let them eat canned peaches
Lmao this thread is cracking me up
kylogram | 15 hours ago
Imagine stating with confidence that the US isn't filled with hungry desperate people when we have a "homeless problem" that makes the news every election since 1902. Every election in my lifetime has had some variation of "people SHOULD go hungry because of xyz" as a primary running position.
You're getting caught on the detail of peaches, rather than the detail of food.
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
Food logistics is hugely complex and involves a lot of people, most of whom are not compensated in princely wages.
Understandably, those people collectively don’t want to give away their labor for free. It’s better and easier to support at the consumer end than from the middle. Instead of giving people free food and then figuring out how to pay all the people in the middle, just give people money to buy food with, which we do (granted with a lot of rules and so on, which is less than ideal).
Stuff like free school lunches is vastly more feasible than forcing people to grow food that nobody wants.
shanem | 18 hours ago
This is not why people are hungry though. We have plenty of food, we just aren't willing to give it for free.
kylogram | 18 hours ago
No, people are hungry because we have a great deal of excess that is wasted in the name of profit efficiency, which only adds to the growing problem of inflation.
juliankennedy23 | 13 hours ago
This took place ion the United States. Which has its problems but is certainly not "a society full of hungry and desperate people."
kylogram | 13 hours ago
Suffering is pushed out of view as often as possible.
Redpanther14 | 11 hours ago
Then buy those peaches or get the government to, do you expect people to labor for years, then pick and process food nobody is willing to buy? There are major cost associated with harvesting, processing, transporting, storing, and distributing agricultural products and nobody is going to do it for free.
Sad_Resolve_4888 | 19 hours ago
Isn't losing the almond orchards a positive overall since they have been a major drain on California's aquifers for many years?
chitoatx | 18 hours ago
550 million dollars in lost revenue is a material amount of loss and is most definitely news worthy.
joepez | 11 hours ago
This is a sad situation for all involved. Harvesting the fallen fruit is noble but not actually practical except for locals. The farmers are setup to move through distribution channels not direct sales. There is an environmental upside that these fruit trees are not native to the area and need lots of water to thrive. So sad upside but an upside.
However that’s not my concern but rather this argument for financial support: “They argued that it was necessary to aid these farmers or risk “long-term structured damage to our nation’s agricultural base.”
First these farmers made a choice and signed 20 yr contracts. They made an economic choice to run a business. Destroying the trees means avoiding more cost. Which is understandable. But “long term structure damage” is utter bullshit. These trees are being destroyed. Their impact is contained to these farmers and their workers who will likely never see a dime except to destroy the trees. The food supply will not be disrupted. These are luxury crops.
TGAILA | 19 hours ago
If I want a peach, I’d buy a fresh one, not a can. Why didn't Del Monte shift to growing fresh fruit instead of canning? John Steinbeck made his career writing about farmers and migrant workers in Salinas and Central Valleys. California has huge farmland, but many only see its glamorous Hollywood side, not its agricultural roots.
evernessince | 18 hours ago
Canned is more accessible and cheaper. Not everyone has access to fresh.
ERagingTyrant | 18 hours ago
Peaches meant to be canned within a couple of days are not peaches that will store well for a several weeks travel and still look fresh when they get there.
These won’t do well as fresh produce. They’d need to switch to different peach trees.
kaplanfx | 19 hours ago
Peaches come in a can.
They were put there by a man.
In a factory downtown.
Sorge74 | 7 hours ago
Personally I'd eat peaches everyday.
Mayor__Defacto | 14 hours ago
I’m sorry, the canned peaches taste better than most fresh ones. It’s the same story with a lot of canned and flash frozen products. “Fresh” produce you see at the store is very far from fresh by the time it gets there.
banditoreo | 18 hours ago
My guess is due to copyright and these peaches cannot be sold fresh. ( brand protection) So, Del Monte would need to change their contract to allow these farmers to sell it as fresh fruit.
Paradoxjjw | 16 hours ago
Not enough money to keep in business, but more than enough money to destroy food producing trees so they can't be used to feed people. If that doesn't highlight how fucked up society's priorities are then I don't know what will
thewimsey | 16 hours ago
They are removing the trees to replace them with something that people will buy.
The_Demolition_Man | 12 hours ago
How did people get this way? Im not talking about the peaches. Im talking about the thread full of people freaking out about farmers planting crops people actually want to buy.
Enbaybae | 4 hours ago
Because they have no idea how their food is grown or any farming practices. Which to me is scary. Just a bunch of people who wouldn't know what to do if food just stopped going to their grocery stores.
opinionsareus | 11 hours ago
This will massively decrease the supply of peaches, nationally. I expect that we might see peaches at multiples of what we're paying today - for both fresh and canned.,