6 ms·

A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article). Del Monte went o

A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article). Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. The company that purchased their assets is continuing to buy 24,000 tons of peaches, but the previous unsustainable business was buying a lot more. It's the excess fields that need to be repurposed to growing something that the market will absorb. The reason the trees are being destroyed is so they can grow something else on the land. Something that comes with a sustainable business model for the current market demands. Yes, the trees are technically going to waste, but if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying. In the article you can even see that the farm lobby was so powerful that they got the USDA to pay for the tree removal. The comments talking about farmers not being organized enough or powerful enough must be unaware of how powerful the farm lobby is and how much money they're able to secure from the government every year.

HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago
The new crop will be grapes of wrath
- msarrel 6mo 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.
  - jfengel 6mo ago
    Wow. That's really applicable, nearly a century later.
    - Jiro 6mo ago
      No, it isn't. The book was written during the Great Depression. We're not in the Great Depression now. Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US and nobody is dying of pellagra specifically, because we've invented fortifying food with vitamins. But the big difference is that the peach trees are being destroyed because nobody wants the peaches. That's the exact opposite of the quote, in which there are starving people clamoring for the food and the food is being destroyed to raise the price.
      - ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
        > Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US Well, nobody important. US rates of malnutrition: https://worldmetrics.org/malnutrition-in-the-united-states-statistics/ https://worldmetrics.org/malnutrition-in-the-united-states-s... Increase in deaths from malnutrition: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/29/why-are-malnutrition-deaths-soaring-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/29/why-are-m... > To be sure, we wouldn’t yet call it commonplace. But while it accounts for fewer than 1 in 100 deaths, its toll is rising so fast that it’s now in the same league as arterial disease, mental disorders and deaths from assault.
        duskdozer 6mo ago
        Am I reading the charts correctly that 20% of under-54s have "marginal, low or very low food security" with it being over 30% of under-14s? If so, focusing only on deaths is missing a huge part of this.
        ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
        That looks right to me. Of course, the definition of food security can be disputed, but it seems like improving people's diets or access to quality food should be a priority. > The source we used, a supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, has been canceled by the Agriculture Department. The upcoming release could be the last. That doesn't sound encouraging.
rf15 6mo ago
> A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article). And a very low understanding of basic biology. A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_ in many parts of the world. There's a million things you can do with it, alcohol, fertilizer... edit: me right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free. Trying to figure out the most economic way to get a rather barren place some soil.
- gdhkgdhkvff 6mo ago
  If rotten fruit was exceptionally valuable, then people would be paying exceptional amounts of money for it instead of wondering where they can get truckloads of it for free.
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    Right? It's not exceptionally valuable. It has some nonzero value doubtful that matches the cost to collect it and get it to the people who want it.
- yread 6mo ago
  Someone needs to put them in tanks for long time and make something very valuable like this: https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunkovice-18y-0-5l-50/ https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  [dead]
- kelnos 6mo ago
  > A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_ > right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free. These two statements contradict each other. If you are pushing to get something for free (and seems like you wouldn't pay for them, or wouldn't pay much for them, instead opting to do without), then they are absolutely not exceptionally valuable from the sell side.
gblargg 6mo ago
> if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying. Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  If you try to force production and sale hard enough, the sale price can even go negative. If your warehouse is full of peaches nobody wants, you might be forced to sell them for negative dollars to take them away. It's either that, or you pay to have the waste management company dispose of them. So the price effectively goes negative from trying too hard to force something to happen.
  - p1necone 6mo ago
    If you turn all them peaches into high proof alcohol they take up significantly less space...
    - MassPikeMike 6mo ago
      Similarly, in 1790s America, farmers west of the Appalachians were growing plenty of corn, but because of bad roads the only feasible way to transport it to the much larger markets east of the mountains was as whiskey. When Alexander Hamilton imposed a tax on distilled spirits, the result was a "Whiskey Rebellion" in which George Washington himself rode out at the head of an army against other American citizens.
      - port11 6mo ago
        This type of trivia is why I found Bill Bryson’s “At Home” so entertaining. Tariff on windows? People cover them with bricks. Tariff on glass? Windows made of other materials. Tariff on… well, maybe stop designing tariffs if you can’t predict the outcome!
cogman10 6mo ago
The big thing I fear about this sort of destruction is that it takes a very long time for tree bearing fruit to start turning a profit. That means someone that wants to plant new trees needs to do so with the notion that they won't get any sort of return on investment for a decade. My fear is that institutional farming does not have the long term fortitude to ever start growing a tree bearing crop. Once these trees are destroyed, they are gone for good regardless how the demand shifts. A downturn of 2 or 3 years or crazy political maneuvers which kill off exports puts access to these fruit in jeopardy. And once they are out of the diet, it's very hard to get them reintroduced. That's a big part of the reason why the US has such a limited fruit diet in the first place (the other being that many fruits are very hard to ship).
- junofan 6mo ago
  TFA mentions 20-year contracts between Del Monte and farmers. That seems to have worked so well that we have too many peach trees. Like, to me the present situation itself should assuage your fears. Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts? Where will they get their peaches?
  - cogman10 6mo ago
    > Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts? That's exactly what I'm thinking. There are few crops where someone might want to lock in a 20 year contract. It's a major gamble for all involved. It's a gamble for the distributor because tastes might shift in 20 years (almost certainly a big part of why Del Monte went bankrupt) and it's a risk for the farmer because it's not clear that another distributor will look at these farms and think "You know what, I can pick up where that company went bankrupt". > Where will they get their peaches? Will they get peaches? That's really the question. They might just decide it's too unpopular and the price would have to be too high to support selling peaches. Del Monte was a big reason why peaches are available. Similar to how Dole is a big reason we have bananas year round. If Dole goes bankrupt, we likely won't see bananas on the shelves. And we know this because there's more than just 1 variety of banana in the world. We have access to only 1 because there's only one distributor of bananas in the US. We are moving into an era of private equity doing fast turn around profits on everything. The old way of business thinking that you can have a 20 year contract is likely dying. 1 year contracts are going to be much more likely because that's where a lot of the investment is going. And Del Monte is the poster child for why a business would shy away from doing a 20 year contract.
gorgoiler 6mo ago
I don’t know about peaches but ‘round my way the cider apple farmers spank the living daylights out of their high density dwarf trees. They get grubbed up and replanted in under a decade. Fruit trees have a naturally short lifetime but mega yield modern species are something else — the arboreal equivalent of a 40 day broiler. Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.
suzzer99 6mo ago
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. Maybe if grocery store peaches weren't a fibrous, tasteless representation of a real fresh peach, they'd still be in business.
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  I find good stone fruit to be very fragile, and hence the economics probably don't support their sale outside of the stone fruit's season and an acceptable radius to where they grow. Peaches/nectarines/plums are easily one of the worst returns on investment when I buy fruit, and this is within a days' drive to California and PNW.
- rini17 6mo ago
  The peaches have similar problem with fungal diseases like bananas. The best tastiest varieties can't be mass grown anymore.
- throwup238 6mo ago
  Del Monte sells mostly canned peaches and those plastic snack packs so they’re picked a lot riper than fresh peaches at the grocery store.
BlueRock-Jake 6mo ago
Great point, hoping whatever replaces them uses less water. Ag pulls ~40% of California's water and it feels like 3 out of every 4 years is a drought
kelnos 6mo ago
> The comments talking about farmers not being organized enough or powerful enough must be unaware of how powerful the farm lobby is and how much money they're able to secure from the government every year. Most people don't realize how powerful farmers are in the US. We (rightly!) complain about Wall Street and bank bailouts when they happen, but I'd wager that we've given significantly more money to farmers over time, through bailouts (like this one) and regular subsidies. Maybe that's a good use of tax dollars, maybe not. It feels bad, but I'm not an economist. (And before anyone says that farmers are much more sympathetic characters than bankers, remember that "farmers" in the US overwhelmingly means gigantic corporate farming conglomerates; the individual family with a few hundreds or thousands of acres of land and hearts of gold is sadly increasingly uncommon.)
- ssl-3 6mo ago
  Farmers switching from peaches to elsewise due to a lack of buyers represents a bailout?
  - Vvector 6mo ago
    Paying farmers to make the transition from peaches is a bailout
- DarmokJalad1701 6mo ago
  I would much rather there be a surplus of food production (driven by subsidies or whatever) even if it causes inefficiencies given that the alternative is significantly worse.
  - wahern 6mo ago
    Regular surpluses can cause famines. This is what happened in East Africa in the 1980s. Cheap grains from elsewhere (Europe, US) caused farming to become unprofitable. Domestic/regional traditional farming of grains largely ceased as farmers moved to the cities. This happened very quickly, so consolidation and mechanization of farming to become competitive never happened. When cheap imported grains became unavailable in the 80s, for various reasons, it was too late. (The war in Ethiopia is often cited as the immediate cause, but people have always managed to farm through wars, usually at least enough to avoid the Ethiopian situation.) It's an extreme case, but that same sort of pattern has happened repeatedly throughout history. Keeping some amount of farming economically sustainable is important. You don't necessarily need direct public subsidies, but you definitely want to avoid long periods where prices are too cheap to make farming of important crops not economically viable.
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
Is wood that useless that they need to be paid to remove it ?
- quickthrowman 6mo ago
  The lack of a crop next year is why they are receiving a subsidy. It’s to bridge the gap until they plant a new crop on that land.
jojobas 6mo ago
There might be not enough demand to match the capacity they contracted and invested to can, but surely there is some demand. You'd think someone would buy out some of the contracts and the canning capacity at a discount and continue some sort of operation.
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  They are, but it is only 40% of what was previously contracted to be purchased.
musicale 6mo ago
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches They appear to have gone out of business because of massive debt from a leveraged buyout, combined with other issues. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-private-equity-overcooked-del-monte-breakdown-bharat-bezawada-pah9f https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-private-equity-overcooke...
- graeme 6mo ago
  That doesn't change the fact that there isn't enough demand for canned peaches. If there were enough demand for peaches the farmers would sell the peaches, rather than destroy the peach trees.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - musicale 6mo ago
    The wholesale buyer is in bankruptcy, unable to pay the interest on debt inherited from the leveraged buyout.
    - graeme 6mo ago
      I am confident that if a gold mine existed, and their wholesale purchaser went bankrupt, someone else would buy the gold.
- ToucanLoucan 6mo ago
  Somebody really good at the economy needs to explain to me how a PE firm buys a company using the company it’s buying as collateral for that financing, and then somehow, that acquired company is the entity that debt is attached to. Imagine if us poors could buy a Hummer EV financed against itself and then the truck had to self-drive for uber to pay its own payment, under penalty of being put in a crusher. Oh and you get paid by the thing for the privilege of being bought.
  - 6mo ago
UncleOxidant 6mo ago
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches How did this happen? It takes a long time before a peach tree seedling gets to the point where it can bear a significant amount of fruit. I'm going to guess about 10 years. Given that kind of delay, how did they get into a situation where there was this much over-production?
- lacunary 6mo ago
  delays between increasing capacity to produce and bringing production to market naturally lead to cycles of over and under production. https://thesystemsthinker.com/balancing-loops-with-delays/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/balancing-loops-with-delays/
AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. Things are often more complicated than that. Del Monte was founded a long time ago and fruit trees take a long time to grow. As a result, as the originator of those trees, you're at a disadvantage because you have to pay for many years of maintenance and interest on capital before the trees bear fruit, and are then sitting on a load of debt from the unproductive years that you can't service if the market price is low after the trees are producing. But bankruptcy (or new ownership) clears the old debt, and then you're left with a productive asset that might not have been worth the cost to create at current prices, but could easily be worth the cost to continue using now that growing the trees is a sunk cost, which requires a much lower market price to be sustainable. > In the article you can even see that the farm lobby was so powerful that they got the USDA to pay for the tree removal. That sounds a lot like a cartel acting through regulatory capture to limit supply. Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy?
- happymellon 6mo ago
  > Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy? Because why pay for something when you can get someone else to pay for it?
  - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
    "The industry has captured the government and is doing a corruption" is the thing consistent with the theory. The non-corruption/capture reason for the government to pay for it is supposed to be what?
    - IAmBroom 6mo ago
      An ideal solution, but not what is happening.
      - 6mo ago

HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago

The new crop will be grapes of wrath

msarrel 6mo 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.
- jfengel 6mo ago
  Wow. That's really applicable, nearly a century later.
  - Jiro 6mo ago
    No, it isn't. The book was written during the Great Depression. We're not in the Great Depression now. Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US and nobody is dying of pellagra specifically, because we've invented fortifying food with vitamins. But the big difference is that the peach trees are being destroyed because nobody wants the peaches. That's the exact opposite of the quote, in which there are starving people clamoring for the food and the food is being destroyed to raise the price.
    - ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
      > Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US Well, nobody important. US rates of malnutrition: https://worldmetrics.org/malnutrition-in-the-united-states-statistics/ https://worldmetrics.org/malnutrition-in-the-united-states-s... Increase in deaths from malnutrition: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/29/why-are-malnutrition-deaths-soaring-america/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/29/why-are-m... > To be sure, we wouldn’t yet call it commonplace. But while it accounts for fewer than 1 in 100 deaths, its toll is rising so fast that it’s now in the same league as arterial disease, mental disorders and deaths from assault.
      - duskdozer 6mo ago
        Am I reading the charts correctly that 20% of under-54s have "marginal, low or very low food security" with it being over 30% of under-14s? If so, focusing only on deaths is missing a huge part of this.
        ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
        That looks right to me. Of course, the definition of food security can be disputed, but it seems like improving people's diets or access to quality food should be a priority. > The source we used, a supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, has been canceled by the Agriculture Department. The upcoming release could be the last. That doesn't sound encouraging.

rf15 6mo ago

> A situation like this bring out many comments that reveal a very low understanding of basic economics (and a low rate of reading the article). And a very low understanding of basic biology. A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_ in many parts of the world. There's a million things you can do with it, alcohol, fertilizer... edit: me right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free. Trying to figure out the most economic way to get a rather barren place some soil.

gdhkgdhkvff 6mo ago
If rotten fruit was exceptionally valuable, then people would be paying exceptional amounts of money for it instead of wondering where they can get truckloads of it for free.
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  Right? It's not exceptionally valuable. It has some nonzero value doubtful that matches the cost to collect it and get it to the people who want it.
yread 6mo ago
Someone needs to put them in tanks for long time and make something very valuable like this: https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunkovice-18y-0-5l-50/ https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...
redsocksfan45 6mo ago
[dead]
kelnos 6mo ago
> A bunch of rotten fruit is _exceptionally valuable_ > right now I'm in a position where I could really use truckloads of rotten, inedible peaches if I could get them for free. These two statements contradict each other. If you are pushing to get something for free (and seems like you wouldn't pay for them, or wouldn't pay much for them, instead opting to do without), then they are absolutely not exceptionally valuable from the sell side.

gblargg 6mo ago

> if we had forced the peaches to be grown and canned (as many comments are suggesting) then that would be a different kind of waste as they'd sit in warehouses while the land, resources, and labor were used to produce something people weren't buying instead of being used to produce foods they were buying. Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.

Aurornis 6mo ago
If you try to force production and sale hard enough, the sale price can even go negative. If your warehouse is full of peaches nobody wants, you might be forced to sell them for negative dollars to take them away. It's either that, or you pay to have the waste management company dispose of them. So the price effectively goes negative from trying too hard to force something to happen.
- p1necone 6mo ago
  If you turn all them peaches into high proof alcohol they take up significantly less space...
  - MassPikeMike 6mo ago
    Similarly, in 1790s America, farmers west of the Appalachians were growing plenty of corn, but because of bad roads the only feasible way to transport it to the much larger markets east of the mountains was as whiskey. When Alexander Hamilton imposed a tax on distilled spirits, the result was a "Whiskey Rebellion" in which George Washington himself rode out at the head of an army against other American citizens.
    - port11 6mo ago
      This type of trivia is why I found Bill Bryson’s “At Home” so entertaining. Tariff on windows? People cover them with bricks. Tariff on glass? Windows made of other materials. Tariff on… well, maybe stop designing tariffs if you can’t predict the outcome!

cogman10 6mo ago

The big thing I fear about this sort of destruction is that it takes a very long time for tree bearing fruit to start turning a profit. That means someone that wants to plant new trees needs to do so with the notion that they won't get any sort of return on investment for a decade. My fear is that institutional farming does not have the long term fortitude to ever start growing a tree bearing crop. Once these trees are destroyed, they are gone for good regardless how the demand shifts. A downturn of 2 or 3 years or crazy political maneuvers which kill off exports puts access to these fruit in jeopardy. And once they are out of the diet, it's very hard to get them reintroduced. That's a big part of the reason why the US has such a limited fruit diet in the first place (the other being that many fruits are very hard to ship).

junofan 6mo ago
TFA mentions 20-year contracts between Del Monte and farmers. That seems to have worked so well that we have too many peach trees. Like, to me the present situation itself should assuage your fears. Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts? Where will they get their peaches?
- cogman10 6mo ago
  > Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts? That's exactly what I'm thinking. There are few crops where someone might want to lock in a 20 year contract. It's a major gamble for all involved. It's a gamble for the distributor because tastes might shift in 20 years (almost certainly a big part of why Del Monte went bankrupt) and it's a risk for the farmer because it's not clear that another distributor will look at these farms and think "You know what, I can pick up where that company went bankrupt". > Where will they get their peaches? Will they get peaches? That's really the question. They might just decide it's too unpopular and the price would have to be too high to support selling peaches. Del Monte was a big reason why peaches are available. Similar to how Dole is a big reason we have bananas year round. If Dole goes bankrupt, we likely won't see bananas on the shelves. And we know this because there's more than just 1 variety of banana in the world. We have access to only 1 because there's only one distributor of bananas in the US. We are moving into an era of private equity doing fast turn around profits on everything. The old way of business thinking that you can have a 20 year contract is likely dying. 1 year contracts are going to be much more likely because that's where a lot of the investment is going. And Del Monte is the poster child for why a business would shy away from doing a 20 year contract.

gorgoiler 6mo ago

I don’t know about peaches but ‘round my way the cider apple farmers spank the living daylights out of their high density dwarf trees. They get grubbed up and replanted in under a decade. Fruit trees have a naturally short lifetime but mega yield modern species are something else — the arboreal equivalent of a 40 day broiler. Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.

suzzer99 6mo ago

> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. Maybe if grocery store peaches weren't a fibrous, tasteless representation of a real fresh peach, they'd still be in business.

lotsofpulp 6mo ago
I find good stone fruit to be very fragile, and hence the economics probably don't support their sale outside of the stone fruit's season and an acceptable radius to where they grow. Peaches/nectarines/plums are easily one of the worst returns on investment when I buy fruit, and this is within a days' drive to California and PNW.
rini17 6mo ago
The peaches have similar problem with fungal diseases like bananas. The best tastiest varieties can't be mass grown anymore.
throwup238 6mo ago
Del Monte sells mostly canned peaches and those plastic snack packs so they’re picked a lot riper than fresh peaches at the grocery store.

BlueRock-Jake 6mo ago

Great point, hoping whatever replaces them uses less water. Ag pulls ~40% of California's water and it feels like 3 out of every 4 years is a drought

kelnos 6mo ago

> The comments talking about farmers not being organized enough or powerful enough must be unaware of how powerful the farm lobby is and how much money they're able to secure from the government every year. Most people don't realize how powerful farmers are in the US. We (rightly!) complain about Wall Street and bank bailouts when they happen, but I'd wager that we've given significantly more money to farmers over time, through bailouts (like this one) and regular subsidies. Maybe that's a good use of tax dollars, maybe not. It feels bad, but I'm not an economist. (And before anyone says that farmers are much more sympathetic characters than bankers, remember that "farmers" in the US overwhelmingly means gigantic corporate farming conglomerates; the individual family with a few hundreds or thousands of acres of land and hearts of gold is sadly increasingly uncommon.)

ssl-3 6mo ago
Farmers switching from peaches to elsewise due to a lack of buyers represents a bailout?
- Vvector 6mo ago
  Paying farmers to make the transition from peaches is a bailout
DarmokJalad1701 6mo ago
I would much rather there be a surplus of food production (driven by subsidies or whatever) even if it causes inefficiencies given that the alternative is significantly worse.
- wahern 6mo ago
  Regular surpluses can cause famines. This is what happened in East Africa in the 1980s. Cheap grains from elsewhere (Europe, US) caused farming to become unprofitable. Domestic/regional traditional farming of grains largely ceased as farmers moved to the cities. This happened very quickly, so consolidation and mechanization of farming to become competitive never happened. When cheap imported grains became unavailable in the 80s, for various reasons, it was too late. (The war in Ethiopia is often cited as the immediate cause, but people have always managed to farm through wars, usually at least enough to avoid the Ethiopian situation.) It's an extreme case, but that same sort of pattern has happened repeatedly throughout history. Keeping some amount of farming economically sustainable is important. You don't necessarily need direct public subsidies, but you definitely want to avoid long periods where prices are too cheap to make farming of important crops not economically viable.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

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

quickthrowman 6mo ago
The lack of a crop next year is why they are receiving a subsidy. It’s to bridge the gap until they plant a new crop on that land.

jojobas 6mo ago

There might be not enough demand to match the capacity they contracted and invested to can, but surely there is some demand. You'd think someone would buy out some of the contracts and the canning capacity at a discount and continue some sort of operation.

NetMageSCW 6mo ago
They are, but it is only 40% of what was previously contracted to be purchased.

musicale 6mo ago

> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches They appear to have gone out of business because of massive debt from a leveraged buyout, combined with other issues. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-private-equity-overcooked-del-monte-breakdown-bharat-bezawada-pah9f https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-private-equity-overcooke...

graeme 6mo ago
That doesn't change the fact that there isn't enough demand for canned peaches. If there were enough demand for peaches the farmers would sell the peaches, rather than destroy the peach trees.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- musicale 6mo ago
  The wholesale buyer is in bankruptcy, unable to pay the interest on debt inherited from the leveraged buyout.
  - graeme 6mo ago
    I am confident that if a gold mine existed, and their wholesale purchaser went bankrupt, someone else would buy the gold.
ToucanLoucan 6mo ago
Somebody really good at the economy needs to explain to me how a PE firm buys a company using the company it’s buying as collateral for that financing, and then somehow, that acquired company is the entity that debt is attached to. Imagine if us poors could buy a Hummer EV financed against itself and then the truck had to self-drive for uber to pay its own payment, under penalty of being put in a crusher. Oh and you get paid by the thing for the privilege of being bought.
- 6mo ago

UncleOxidant 6mo ago

> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches How did this happen? It takes a long time before a peach tree seedling gets to the point where it can bear a significant amount of fruit. I'm going to guess about 10 years. Given that kind of delay, how did they get into a situation where there was this much over-production?

lacunary 6mo ago
delays between increasing capacity to produce and bringing production to market naturally lead to cycles of over and under production. https://thesystemsthinker.com/balancing-loops-with-delays/ https://thesystemsthinker.com/balancing-loops-with-delays/

AnthonyMouse 6mo ago

> Del Monte went out of business because there wasn't enough demand for the peaches. Things are often more complicated than that. Del Monte was founded a long time ago and fruit trees take a long time to grow. As a result, as the originator of those trees, you're at a disadvantage because you have to pay for many years of maintenance and interest on capital before the trees bear fruit, and are then sitting on a load of debt from the unproductive years that you can't service if the market price is low after the trees are producing. But bankruptcy (or new ownership) clears the old debt, and then you're left with a productive asset that might not have been worth the cost to create at current prices, but could easily be worth the cost to continue using now that growing the trees is a sunk cost, which requires a much lower market price to be sustainable. > In the article you can even see that the farm lobby was so powerful that they got the USDA to pay for the tree removal. That sounds a lot like a cartel acting through regulatory capture to limit supply. Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy?

happymellon 6mo ago
> Like if destroying the trees to grow something else was more profitable than continuing to sell the produce then why does it require a government subsidy? Because why pay for something when you can get someone else to pay for it?
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
  "The industry has captured the government and is doing a corruption" is the thing consistent with the theory. The non-corruption/capture reason for the government to pay for it is supposed to be what?
  - IAmBroom 6mo ago
    An ideal solution, but not what is happening.
    - 6mo ago