Will this reduce the farmers waste of water, and if so, how much?
Millions of peaches? Peaches for free?
Millions of peaches, peaches for me
Meanwhile rent is going up? Oil is more expensive? What an absolute shit show. Imagine getting paid to destroy production to keep profit margins up, god forbid anyone got a cheap peach.
What, and let corporations hold the bag? Are you high? /s
no no, we have to milk them dry, no food for anyone unless the corpos profit GOD FORBID someone benefits from the productivity of past individuals
Someone benefits from the productivity of past individuals
COMMIE!
Meanwhile another billionaire was created by just inheriting money. 🤡
deleted by creator
We can’t predict the future but I’m in the camp that if we collectively get our shit together food will stop being a “everything I want now and always” to “eat what is local and in season first”
Very good plan, fully support it. However, you must then deal with he fact that this company (whoever destroyed the trees) is destroying the viability of the entire region by destroying food production. It should be regarded as terrorism.
I heard in the original post that these peaches suck and that’s why del monte is having problems. I’m all for saving trees, but if we’re going to replace them with trees people want I’m all for that.
No they taste great, but they cannot be sold fresh because they are clingstone, the stone is embedded in the fruit.
i mean i’m from the area. ish. remember the whole boycott USA thing? we have the best damn peach ranch (don’t ask me why peaches get ranches and strawberries get farms) about five miles down the road. i just damn near had a heart attack because their social media’s last post was a memoriam for a family member and i thought they sold the farm. the boycott is why they’re struggling, not the peaches.
Fruits grown on trees come from orchards?
i know. it’s just what they named their farm.
Yeah, I read something about that, too. These were bred to grow fast, look good in the store, and last long on the shelf. Flavor was one of the least considered traits.
They don’t go on a shelf they are canned
Capitalism would prefer people to starve if it is the surest way to protect profits.
Please describe how random people could keep 420000 peach trees going.
I think there are a few choices in between “giant conglomerate shuts down and destroys 420000 fruit bearing trees” and “random man tries to farm 420000 peach trees unsuccessfully”.
Sure, then the question becomes why haven’t people been doing it since decades? We are being warehoused in WEF-style densified housing, where are you having a garden with a tree?
Oh, **you **have one, but what about the 419999 other dudes?
you realise that if you tell people 420000 peach trees are available for harvesting, everything would be gone in less than week?
The capitalist mind does not understand the concept because there is no profit in it, so i will not blame you if you fail to understand
Idk. Destroying peach trees in the desert makes sense in some ways.
Well, there a lot of places that are populated only because humanity had access to monstrous amounts of energy and power. AKA fossil fuels.
It’s like that map that showed where people moved after electricity and AC was widespread.
Those areas may represent a kind of deficit that gets harder to overcome.
Pretty much. There will be significant changes in our species’ living arrangements in the coming decades.
Agreed also, peach trees only produce viable fruit for like 8 years or something. Are one of the most pia crops to grow. And once new ones are planted, they will be producing crop in 2-4 years. This isn’t as tragic as these people are making it out to be. If the price to grow the peach and harvest the peach is 100$ per ton to break even. but because there is to many peaches on market and you can only sell for $80 a ton, how the fuck is the farmer going to sustain the farm? Pay for the ungodly amount of pesticide that peaches need, and stupid amounts of water for next year. You gota make the cut sometimes to protect next year’s crop.
were we lucky? ours were viable more like 15 and then the tree split in half. we had so many on that one damn tree we just gave them away.
Yeah typically backyard trees can infact produce for much longer, I don’t know why. At one point I was interested in having a peach orchard… then I looked into it. Quickly changed my mind.
i just want to get me a tree’s worth of peach wood for smoking but the local orchard is not selling
Huh, is peach good for smoking? Little did I know. New to the smoking thing. Also it could be to prevent the spread of diseases. Peaches have all of them and are stupidly susceptible to them.
I have no idea, I just want to try it
@HugeNerd@lemmy.ca this ⬆ is how random people can keep 420000 peach trees going.
yeah. ours probably would’ve kept producing had she not split in half. we brought our arborist neighbor (best kind of neighbor to have) over and he wept with us because our tree was his tree’s pollenation buddy. spouse if you will.
Officials say cutting 50,000 tons of peaches from production could prevent $30m in losses for farmers
I hate this capitalist shit-hole.
Oversupply would make them more expensive to harvest than they’re worth, I’d bet. And the federal grant money to clear the orchards means the land can be put to other use.
That’s economics, not capitalism. Dont you dare stop hating capitalism though.
Yeah, no, that’s literally capitalism.
As soon as you start worrying about profits with respect to feeding people, you’re talking about capitalism.
“More expensive than their worth” here means “I can’t sell them for enough of a profit.”
That’s purely capitalism. If we only cared about making sure everyone’s need for food is met, the sentence above would be complete nonsense.
You realize that the farmers produce the peaches, right? And that if it costs more to harvest them that the peaches are worth, you don’t harvest them. Then you have a giant pile of rotten peaches anyway that has to be cleaned up, so maybe you harvest them anyway and take the loss yourself. Fine.
Now you - the farmer - have a surplus of peach trees that will grow new peaches, and those new peaches won’t sell either. You’ll take loss year after year this way. No, the best thing to do is to repurpose the land for something else, and that means uprooting the peach trees. It’s a good thing there’s federal grant money to absorb some of that cost.
Capitalism is where there’s an ownership class that contributes essentially nothing and a labor class that produces the value, and the former exploits the latter. This situation is not that; the farmer is (ideally) the labor (unless factory farms, or unfair compensation otherwise). The peaches having more or less worth due to market conditions is because of a free market, which is distinct from capitalism.
Growing crops is work. Harvesting crops is work. Transporting, processing, inspecting, warehousing, inventorying, packaging, retailing - all work. People - workers - expend effort to create the value of cans of peaches in pantries, and each person should be compensated fairly for the value their effort produces.
Never anywhere in my commentary did I refer to profits. If the peaches are worth less than they cost to harvest, the value of the labor already invested is lost, and the farm as a whole is at risk. Especially for the remaining family farms, this means that corporate farm companies will buy the land and consolidate their power. It’s a good thing there’s federal grant money to absorb some of the cost of retooling.
I’m as anti-capitalist as they come, and there’s parts of this situation to be justifiably pissed about. The fact that a single cannery closing results in this is one. The fact that the corporation that ran that cannery may well have closed it for profit reasons is another. But getting pissed about repurposing land for something more useful? Seems ill informed.
If the peaches are worth less than they cost to harvest, the value of the labor already invested is lost, and the farm as a whole is at risk. Especially for the remaining family farms, this means that corporate farm companies will buy the land and consolidate their power.
THIS IS LITERALLY CAPITALISM DUDE
You are so deep in this shit that you can’t even see how it’s coloring everything you’re saying here.
If we lived in a society that didn’t value profit over feeding humans, none of what you said would matter. What would matter would be making sure everyone is fed. Even if that means someone has to do work that isn’t “profitable”.
I can kind of see where both of you are coming from.
This doesn’t necessarily mean we are going to be compromising feeding humans, it simply means they are backing away from peaches, specifically. If people don’t even want to eat that many peaches, then we might be wasting farming capacity and we should be growing different crops. Maybe a more dense crop, maybe with other nutritional properties. If you insist on continuing to grow peaches that people don’t even want to bother eating, then you aren’t helping people get the food and nutrition they need, you are just generating rotting fruit. It says they are giving money to farmers to help them pivot to different crops.
But we might have too many peaches in the first place because of capitalist flaws. Some del monte leadership mismanages things and wastes valuable cropland on trees that aren’t really what people want or need.
Or it could have darker outcomes, like ‘poors’ are hungry but we don’t think it’s worth it so we just convert acres and acres of arable land to datacenters for the tech bros.
But, by itself, cutting back on one crop does not necessarily mean it’s some capitalist disaster.
No, that’s a free market, as I explained before you stopped reading.
You’re the only one talking about profit. I never have. Oh wait, I bet you don’t understand what profit is, either. That’s wealth gained above and beyond the value of the labor input, because the consumer price is higher than it needs to be and/or labor is being undercompensated for their work. Profit is what the ownership class takes from labor without adding any real value. Yes, that’s capitalism. Profit isn’t "I have this thing which is a manifestation of my labor, and I will exchange it with you fairly for something you have which is a manifestation of your labor. We might even use an agreed-upon third carrier of value (currency) to make our exchange simpler and fairer, and make it so that lots of things are readily exchanged between all sorts of people. That makes the fair distribution of wealth more efficient (ideally).
This will all make more sense when you’re out of your mom’s basement.
This will all make more sense when you’re out of your mom’s basement.
Gotta be one of my favorite attempts at an insult because you better be right or else it just doesn’t hit at all.
Sorry bud. Better luck next time.
I’m not sure about your living situation, but after reading that back and forth, I gotta say, you haven’t metaphorically left your mom’s basement. Capitalism has a specific meaning, and capitalism is when markets exists is not it.
The US government had several programs to buy farming surpluses, ensuring the farmers were adequately paid and food was not wasted, before the corporate farms lobbied them out of existence. You’re talking down to someone while not seeing the connection in your own statement between profit and cost.
Oversupply needs diversion of that supply to other uses - not destruction of established production.
It takes years to establish a productive fruit tree. If the land is really more valuable producing plums or apricots instead of peaches, then, sure, migrate it over slowly. Wholesale destruction with the assumption “the land will be put to better use” is the kind of bullshit that (all too rarely) gets laws and regulations passed to stop it.
If there are too many peaches for local markets, export. If the whole world is drowning in whole peaches, juice 'em.
Yes! I was looking for this comment. I live smack in California central valley. Farms here flex continuously with a multitude of crops. Strawberry, walnuts, cherry, and almond are top long-runners. There are also so many unexpected other high value crops here; like blueberry, spinach, sugar beet, olives, garlic, pistachios, etc.
Del Monte was only one processor. But every one of their factories continues on doing something else that’s currently in abundance here.
If local market isn’t demanding, one final attempt is the export market. We are currently doing this with alfalfa (hay), rice, and wine.
And on a final fruit note, pears are slowly following the fate of peaches. Dont know why. Currently Brazil and Mexico just make 'em better.
It must be the Presidents of the United States…
you take that back i got a peach ranch up offa 505 that’ll knock your socks off (/false offense)
🍑Envy!🍑
no juice, can. can.
It sounded like another aspect of all that was that Del Monte may have partially or wholly roped them in to exclusive supply deals, cutting way down on their ability to deal with other potential canners or whatnot.
When farmer Craig Watts did his exposé on Purdue, it sounded a lot like a share-cropping / coal-mining situation, in which the chicken farmers had little real autonomy, and became super-reliant on Purdue for everything. Doesn’t sound quite as bad in this Del Monte situation, but some similarities hit me.
You are absolutely correct, and I should have considered that aspect.
The human and logical thing to do would be offer these fruits to people to pick for free.
This measure is capitalist because they’d rather throw away food than giving away something without profit or even damaging to other producer’s margin.
This is all kinds of fucked up and is totally related to capitalism incentives.
oh dude, i’m having generational ptsd flashbacks to the 70s. i didn’t even work the strawberry fields myself and i can see them. my hands stained red. fuck.
I can absolutely guarantee you the peaches would mostly just rot in that approach.
Their problem is that people just flat out aren’t interested/need as many peaches we are growing. So it totally makes sense to change much of that land to do another crop. Peaches are not necessarily the most efficient, or healthy nutritious option that the land could possible support.
The people who might be in need of that fruit are likely no where near the orchards. So the direct approach is right out.
Now this is where organizations like food banks can and do step in as able. They have people who are intrinsically dedicated to make it work out for people to have food even if the capitalist concerns don’t make sense. Sure, they can take over logistics when no one else wants them (my family has volunteered and dealt with all sorts of farmer surplus, including separating rot from viable food). Ultimately even they wouldn’t want an oversupply of any particular crop, as the hungry need diverse nutrition, not just a ton of peaches. As it stands a fair amount of the food is ruined before it can be distributed even with food bank efforts already.
Harvest it. Turn it into canned peaches. Finish the harvest. Export it to places where peaches aren’t that common. ???. Profit.
The cannery closed. That’s why this is happening.
Uh huh, and that had nothing to do with capitalism or profits, right?
Well, in this case those profits might be modeling a real world situation. If Del Monte was pushing canned Peaches more than people needed/wanted, then changing the farms from one crop to another isn’t necessarily a horrible thing.
🎵 Peaches come from a can
🎵 They were put there by a man
Peaches came from a can
They were put there by a man
But the factoryyyyy is no mooooore
God, i hate canned peaches.
Sadly I realised after moving to the UK that peaches aren’t really “in season” here, at any time of the year. Most grocery stores in my area don’t seem to carry them at all (even though we have things like strawberries or even watermelon all year round…), so I have to make do with the canned option.
I like canned goods, because they last longer, and don’t go bad as quick. They are usually cheap, and affordable.
Do you know what’s worse? Destroying tons of peaches while millions go hungry simply because they couldn’t make the right amount of profit from it.
Ah yes. What a wonderfully efficient system capitalism is. So very good at utilizing resources.
Free markets are a lot more efficient than trying to run the whole economy from the top down. We just need to tax accumulated wealth.
There are other systems than unhinged capitalism and top down communism.
Like?
Capitalism and free markets are not the same thing, nor is either particularly necessary to the other.
Free markets are absolutely necessary for capitalism.
Yes. Buuut what type of capitalism are we talkin’ bout?
Or exclusive.
The comment I was replying to seemed to assume capitalism had something to do with resource allocation.
I mean, capitalism does have to do with resource allocation, or rather allocative power. It’s defining feature is that allocative power is used in service to grow the allocative power of those whose allocative power was used to allocate resources in the enterprise under consideration. This doesn’t require a free market whatsoever, and that’s why things like state capitalism exist. The other corollary to this is that it inevitably tends towards constricted markets as allocative power naturally consolidates among fewer and fewer holders as time goes on.
All these tankies down voting you as if the entire world wasn’t running on this principle and as if something better existed. Free markets with oversight are simply unbeatable - fact.
What’s the largest manufacturing country
You think China is not capitalist? China that told it’s citizens to: please stop competing so much?
It actually is VERY good at utilizing resources.
Preserving them for the future, not so much.
Not quite. Factories will stay closed, houses empty.
In the words of a favorite skit of mine: Let’s Pickle em!
We can pickle that!
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.
Is that Grapes of Wrath?
Edit: I should have read to the end :) I must give that another read.
Apparently it’s the Oranges of Kerosene. ;-)
What a fucking book.
Damn. I love peaches*. Peaches and cream ice cream is mad delicious. Had a dessert once, ages ago, where the peaches were set on fire for a short bit. Also crazy good.
Peaches lovers unite. Let’s go score some delicious peaches before they are burned away!
- even canned peaches
“peaches (and cherries/berries) jubilee” is probably what you had
White peach is best peach. All other peaches are inferior. I can’t wait for my annual peach pilgrimage where I but 100s of dollars of peaches just to give them away because everyone must try a white peach.
Yellow peach is best peach and I’m even East Asian. I know, I’m a traitor. I need my peaches like watermelons: leaves their juices on my cheeks
my friend, i need you to come to the peach ranch. last year they were growing what they called “white lady” peaches. you had to eat them over the sink or outside.
Yeah I planted a white lady jn my back yard, I’m pumped for this year. They are so damn good. Ugh I’m craving one so hard right now. I lie I’m craving at minimum a 4L
phrasing dude phrasing
how do i get to the wet ass peach ranch
Look up Brazeltons peach ranch. They are only open summers, I think maybe June to September? Unfortunately their only website is a Facebook
Peaches of wrath
Why not give them away to homeless people? Homeless people are often hungry, and would certainly not regret eating 30 to 40 peaches.
apparently they spoil very quickly if not frozen immediately, if there is no market they cant do anything witht ehpeaches. also the trees will attract alot of pests if its left unattended.
That (in their view) would be even worse, then peaches would become associated with the homeless and lose even more value!
The issue is that the idea of destroying product to protect its value is counter to anything good or reasonable.
Cost to harvest peaches to freely give to homeless dudes: very non-zero
Cost to burn peach trees: zero
And who is going to pay to water, tend, pick. And ship these to the homeless?
Who ever is paying to destroy them, rip the trees out and rehab the land to something else, what they’re already doing isn’t free. Avoidable food waste should be illegal.
Look up the types of peaches. They aren’t sustainable long term and they need to be replaced regardless. Removing them is less cost then tending and distributing.
This might surprise you, but you can give food to homeless people right now. You don’t need to wait for some peach-related mishap in California to do so.
Why would that surprise them? What a weirdly confrontational response to someone you ostensibly agree with…
You can’t truly be a good person, unless you’re smug and condescending about it.
Wait, i don’t understand, in what way would giving food to homeless people help the shareholders? Are the shareholders homeless?
This guy gets it.
Aw, gosh, thanks for pointing that out. I hadn’t even considered your point among my disdain for huge amounts of food going to waste that could otherwise have helped people. You can pat yourself on the virtue signal now.
Might want to wait until after the global supply chain breaks down again before making this decision.
Never put all your peaches in one basket.
Apparently, never put your peaches in a can if the company goes bankrupt. :(
