Farmers are specialists at growing things, not at moving them across great distances, marketing them to dozens small buyers and or starting up packing plants from scratch. They don't have enough trucks, people or packaging machines to move them around.
Maybe, they can take some portion for local use. But the rest will spoil, and rest of the land will be effectively unused, and a burden. The best option is to cut that as much as possible, and plant something else that actually sells.
Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.
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.
Worse, the price would have to be lowered to bring up sales, which could put the other peach farmers into bankruptcy as well.
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.
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).
Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.
I'll admit my experience is more with vineyard than orchards, but at least for grape, this isn't true. You only cut down old, unproductive vines, and market demand is not a factor. You never know how much you will produce YoY, so basically you try to only produce what your domain can handle. (The english translation for the following will be rough i realize).
On the "planting" side, you're wrong: a limited stock of "rootstock" (if this is the correct translation of "porte-greffe") is produced each year. As those are specific to a certain type of soil and take time to grow, you don't produce a ton each year. And vines "rootstock" are _a lot_ easier to grow than other trees (you have a mother-vine that you don't prune, you bury its branch in the soil, and over a year it will develop roots). My guess is that for orchards, your rootstock should take 3-4 years, so it isn't that easy.
As I said, trees take a long time to bear fruit. It's not typical that a farmer will cut down a tree in their orchard in response to market pressure as that tree represents a huge investment.
If that were the case, then why are there so many peach trees currently? Why hasn't the entire orchard been replaced with olive trees?
Do you actually have farming experience?
> If that were the case, then why are there so many peach trees currently? Why hasn't the entire orchard been replaced with olive trees?
I agree, that farmers forecast and switch up crops. But I disagree with you that you have a bunch of farmers that have mixed orchards setup because of that forecasting. It's not like wheat or barely where you could switch between the two even mid year if you were crazy enough.
I'd also point out that the first fruiting isn't exactly a bumper crop. It takes several more years after that first fruiting before you get to the point where a tree is fully productive.
You claimed
> Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand.
What do you mean responding to "costs and market demand"?
You also claimed
> They forecast future trends as best they can and will replace trees (or other crops) when it seems profitable.
Both those statements would imply that you have orchard farmers who are growing and harvesting multiple types of crops. Unless you are trying to say that it's common for a fruit farmer to completely destroy an orchards and replace with with a new crop.
Both, frankly, are ridiculous claims which are quickly dispatched with "Why aren't there more olive trees".
If the reaction to market forces was that fast, the expectation is that last 10 years of raised olive prices would have caused a lot of these farmers to uproot and plant olive trees. It's currently a very lucrative crop and California is certainly amenable to growing olives.
> That's just how farming works: you have to place your bets and then work for years to see if they pay off.
I agree with this statement. Farming is a game of placing bets on the future of the market. But I disagree that orchard farmers are commonly just diving head first into switching crops in any sort of fashion. It takes a severe event, like their primary distributor going bankrupt, to move an orchard farmer towards new crops. That is not common or business as usual.
I contend this is not "routine and seldom makes the news." and I back that up by claiming that it's uncommon for orchard farmers to change crops.
What part of that doesn't make sense?
New orchards of various crops are planted every day, I don't know why you think this doesn't happen in the modern age.
Has canned fruit actually lost popularity? Or did the grocery stores decide that the shelf space had a higher profit margin pushing something else?
The last couple of times I tried to get canned fruit for a recipe I had to actively hunt for the particular cans of fruit I needed (I needed to hit 3 different grocery stores).
I haven't tracked peaches recently, but I can tell you that canned apricots have been a bit thin on the ground for at least a couple of years.
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.
Aren't there 3, at least? Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte?
I've also bought Fyffes bananas [in the US] in recent times; those probably came from Aldi.
The more diverse ethnic marketplaces surely have other sources. They've got their own ways of doing stuff. :)
Peach trees take 2-3 years to bear fruit specially with grafting.
That first fruiting you are looking at something like 2 or 3 lbs of fruit. Full grown you are looking at about 20 lbs of fruit yearly.
You can push up maturity by using a dwarf root stock and get to full fruiting in 6 to 8 years.
Ironically, there’s a century year old perry tree at the top of the valley.
Maybe if grocery store peaches weren't a fibrous, tasteless representation of a real fresh peach, they'd still be in business.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://en.excaliburshop.com/catalog/item/8951/fleret-merunk...
This went on for about an hour, but finally, I made my way up to the truck that was carrying the tomatoes. They were pouring out of the open top. Other vehicles kept their distance in the right lane so as not to be pelted with tomatoes. But the thing was is that the truck was still full. And the road was isolated, so it must have been driving along like this for several hours. All those tomatoes we passed on the road - decades worth for a single family - just an irrelevant minor leak. It wasn't even a leak, someone just filled the truck a tiny, probably imperceptibly small bit too much.
If one truck carries that much food, and then there's however many other tomato trucks each day, then that's a lot.
A local university professor did a study on homesteading in my state and determined that even then the land offered to immigrants was actually to small to regularly turn a profit, to some extent that seems to continue to this day at times.
Uneducated rice farmers in Bangladesh would understand the problem better than the people complaining about this.
I think the emotional misalignment most people will feel at this announcement is a signal that there's a large missed externality that allowed margins on this produce to get too thin.
Although in this particular situation clearly the consumer surplus wasn't enough to keep consumers buying Del Monte products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus
If we measure consumer surplus as a percentage, how would it compare to business profits as a percentage?
Edit:
Nobel laureate William Nordhaus studied the historical data of the U.S. economy and concluded that innovators and corporations capture only a tiny fraction of the total social value they create. Consumers capture ~98% of the value in the form of surplus. Producers capture ~2%.It's a bit awkwardly worded but unjust isn't the word I'd specifically choose, it was inherited from the OP so maybe their view of what "injustice" meant was different and I just hijacked it. Dunno. I interpreted is as an unjust allocation of resources that could have been put to more productive uses.
How did you determine this? Do you expect every single venture with forethought and planning to "succeed" (however you define that)?
Is it not prudent to assume that when the farmers made the decision to plant those trees, they did so with the best available information and "forethought" they had?
This isn't pristine old growth forest, it has no great ecology.
I've noted this elsewhere but "injustice" was semantically baked into the OP so I retained that wording but my brain really stretched the term here to align better with "wasteful". I can certainly argue to their equivalence but I think if multiple people have gotten hung up on the term I've committed a semantic misstep.
A negative of the subsidy is that the farmland is not going to hit the market at a much lower rate. That raises the bar for entry into farming or at least keeps the bar at some level higher than the market would have had it.
I fully understand that there is processing and logistics problems. This is not a misunderstanding of economics - its a wild misallocation of resources, and massive destruction of crop.
Have a banner year of peach sales in California for super cheap... market corrects for its past mistakes.
Bankrupt everyone who grows peaches then?
There are actual costs in growing, harvesting, and delivering produce to market you know.
this is why I think the solution is to have people grow their own fruits in their own backyards and front yards. customers will save a huge amount of money and it's better for the environment too.
It was still worth it, though. It required very little maintenance (pruning once a year, replace the batteries on the auto-irrigation system a couple times a year), so it was basically free.
The best time to plant was a few years ago, the next-best time to plant is today.
This feels like a weird argument; you can decide you want to grow your own fruit today, plant that tree, and continue to buy fruit for the next few years until it's ready. This isn't rocket science. For most people it's not particularly likely that they're going to decide in the next few years that they don't like apples or lemons or whatever anymore.
Your lack of desire to either plan ahead or be patient doesn't invalidate the approach.
The great injustice is very much me paying however much per pound of peaches when the supply is so great that they should be much cheaper.
However, if these are the trees that grow rock hard peaches that never soften as they ripen with no flavor, then bulldoze them all and say good riddance. Hell, might as well take of and nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
But its not, because the supply and competing demands for motor fuel and all the other things that are required between the orchard are involved, not just the supply of peaches at the orchard.
A business cannot stay in operation if the only way to sell the product is to sell it below cost[0]. Having all this excess production is exactly why Del Monte failed as a company. There's no point in building a business to provide people with below-cost food; it's not sustainable and is ultimately wasteful.
Find a way to get the peaches from the trees to people's homes cheaper? Great, do that, and maybe you can sell more at a lower price.
Or produce fewer until you can sell at a price above cost without much waste. We don't wring our hands at factory owners when they don't manufacture a huge surplus of toys that no one wants to buy. We shouldn't be upset when farmers decide to stop growing as much of a certain crop because they can't sell it all. I get the visceral reaction against killing trees. But that's an emotional response that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. I would much rather that land be used for a more productive crop that people actually want to buy, at prices that reflect what it costs to produce.
[0] Cue VC-funded startup jokes.
That's not even how trees work. If they wanted, those same trees could grow plums within 2 years, or almonds, or pretty much any stonefruit except cherries (which tend to be incompatible).
The existence of Subway doesn't mean you can't get phenomenal deli sandwiches. It does mean you probably need to look around a little more and don't settle for the first sandwich place you see.
Edit: This is my wife holding one of those strawberries. We took that picture from the sheer absurdity of it. The pack of berries hardly survived the rest of the drive. We'd eaten almost all of them by the time we arrived at the B&B. https://share.icloud.com/photos/0ebgyxOMT9LpyjhfKuLQWD0kw
That’s not to say that we can’t get amazing fruit in Massachusetts, but the selection is quite different. Apples, blueberries, raspberries, and cranberries are all fantastic. Oranges, peaches, sweet cherries, avocados, and many other things are mediocre at best. Getting great in-season fruit and produce is the primary reason why I now have a very large garden, but I need to temper my expectations even for some of the things I grow. Outside of a farmer’s market, this is the ONLY way to get a decent tomato in Massachusetts.
No thanks. The most wonderful strawberries I ever tasted were wild ones picked on a disused Welsh railway line, probably a centimetre or so in size.
But here in California, we have tremendous strawberries in our markets: Camarosa, Albion, Gaviota. Each is different in size, texture, flavor-profile.
I usually buy a "flat" of strawberries from the local farmer's market during peak season every weekend. They go in my oatmeal, my smoothies and in my lunches.
E.g: https://www.ocregister.com/2024/07/13/farmers-market-pops-up...
Some of the wild species taste better than the commercial species but those also tend to be too delicate to be commercially viable. It is a common problem for berries generally.
I tell you all this in hopes you'll understand what I mean when I say that the strawberries you can buy along the northern California coast are freaking amazing. I don't say that because I don't know any better. I say that because I've had S-tier wild fruit, and know from personal experience that these were every bit as delicious.
Ripe, Watsonville farm-stand strawberries are something else entirely. They can indeed be fist sized. I encourage you to try them yourself.
Alternatively, you can go to pick your own places along the way - also fantastic.
Bay area produce is unparalleled - Tomatoes, peaches, figs, strawberries, etc.
More organic growers if thats what you care about - high quality growers. There is also massive commercial growers doing high volume low cost but you do need to know where to look.
The Sunnyvale farmers market was a different story though. Two of the vendors gave out samples. One of them tasted like Safeway strawberries. The other gave out these small strawberries that were really sweet, and this vendor had a lot more business even though their berries were $1 more expensive. However, the ones that the vendor actually sold were much bigger than the sample strawberries. I was suspicious, but bought them anyways. Sure enough, when I tried them, they tasted like Safeway strawberries. My takeaway from this experience is that America sells bad produce less so due to supply reasons and more so that Americans just have poor taste in produce.
Or maybe you don't generalize about an entire country based on your experience in one small city.
The suppliers don't notice when the numbers that stop are rounding errors. The vast majority of people don't have any experience with anything other than supermarket produce and don't know there's a choice. Growing up as a kid, I didn't know there were so many varieties of apples. Our store only carried red delicious, golden, and granny smith. It wasn't until I moved out of the sticks and saw more varieties. Some people never move, so they only know what they know and never experience new
This is what happens when you optimize your food supply for profit instead of being edible; varieties are selected for yield, longevity and shipping rather than flavor or nutrients. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
Been to Maui once, and this was pretty much my exact experience as well. Thought I was the only weird one to do that. I only slowed down though until it got really bad before stopping. Wish I was smarter to stop earlier ::face-palm::
There’s a large swath of America that has a deeply ingrained mentality of “food is for fuel, not enjoyment.” It’s a Protestant idea that entered the culture and became ingrained to the point where nobody remembers the origins but are still influenced by it.
I was in Iowa a few years ago, and the food is awful. I don’t think the food in Iowa used to be great “100 years ago before modern factory farming,” etc. I suspect it’s always been awful, and people just don’t care about it very much as long as they get the calories they need.
And I don’t think it’s just “U.S. consumerism blah blah” either. The Anglo food in Canada and the UK sucks too. They just don’t care.
The US is big and fruit needs to be refrigerated to be transported. Refrigeration kills aromatics.
I assume you would have a similar experience buying plums in Germany. Similarly, if you bought stone fruit in California where it is grown, it would taste good.
> stop buying shit produce and suppliers will notice
Unless you are willing to pay $30/peach for them to be flown next day on a jet, peaches in New York are not going to taste as good as they do off the tree.
It's disgusting.
Real apple juice is dark brown and tastes nothing like the golden liquid mentioned above.
"Apple cider is raw, unfiltered, and often unpasteurized apple juice, resulting in a cloudy, dark appearance and rich, tart flavor. Apple juice is filtered to remove pulp, pasteurized for a longer shelf life, and often sweeter. Cider is usually seasonal and refrigerated, whereas juice is shelf-stable"
Europeans consistently visit a gas station and conclude this must be all there is to eat in America.
How would most Americans know there's a difference? A large plurality will never leave the country in their lifetime, and many won't even leave the area where they grew up in.
Even for those who travel to some extent, eating as a tourist will rarely give you the experience of going to a grocery store, buying fresh produce, and eating it.
And even if a tourist ends up with some really amazing produce in another country, they'll likely chalk it up to a lucky, isolated incident, and not think much of it. Or it's just the "everything is better when you're on vacation" phenomenon. They'll go back home and be back to eating what they're used to.
To be fair, though, there is plenty of wonderful, flavorful produce in the US. There are a few problems, though:
1. Some areas in the US truly are underserved and have bad produce. And by "areas" that can even mean small pockets here and there, where you may only have to drive an extra 20 minutes to get good produce, but it doesn't even occur to you to try, because you assume it will be the same.
2. In the US we seem to believe that we should be able to get every single kind of produce year-round, regardless of what's in season. So you might see something on the shelves all year, but it's only actually really good for a month or three. The experience during the rest of the year will tend to dominate your opinion.
3. You're more likely to get better quality at a more expensive, boutique-like grocer, or at a farmer's market. Most Americans just don't shop at places like those when there's a cheaper, large chain grocery store available. Farmer's markets can be especially difficult when they're only open a day or two per week, and busy people/families need more flexibility.
For reference, I live in northern California, and there's plenty of fantastic produce here. Yes, when I go to something like Safeway (part of a huge grocery chain), I don't expect anything terribly amazing. It's fine, but nothing special. But I have a small local grocery a couple blocks away from me that usually has great produce (though sometimes it can be hit-or-miss with some items), and they also make an effort to stock many items based on growing season. I've been to various places in Europe many times, and have even been to grocery stores and bought produce so we could cook dinners in an Airbnb. I've generally had a good experience with the produce there, but I wouldn't say it's notably better than where I live in the US.
This is a failing where a lack of coordinated collectivized action was one contributing factor but there is actually a large collectivized will here - but I think the bigger issue is that it's having difficulty aligning itself in the current political environment.
He switched to almonds and walnuts, which are less labor intensive and have better management on the processing side. But they are an export-heavy market and have also been hammered by the strong dollar. Inflation-adjusted crop prices are near all time lows while costs are at all-time highs. Farming is a hard business!
Farming is hard. I heard Urea prices are up 2x since the start of the year. How many farmers will go out of business because of that…
I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about. And it’s a shame; unions actually deserve better representation than you just provided.
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/farm-bankruptcies-continued-...
https://www.adamsandreese.com/the-ledger/rising-farm-distres...
And those farms get bought up and folded into for-profit operations. You simply can't fix this in the current system.
They overproduce for votes. Countries without farmer blocks swinging elections stockpile non-perishables for food security.
Overproduction is the method. Food security the aim. If they weren’t a swing voting block, the overproduction loses purpose.
The issue is that the company that owns the canning plants (Del Monte) went bankrupt. There is no canning capacity available to do this.
How did you possibly miss the point by this far? It’s like trying to drive to Los Angeles and ending up on Pluto.
Also which government? Because there are at least 3-5 relevant ones here, maybe more.
That'd actually be quite easy for this particular federal government actually (current administration aside). And probably California too.
The DoD (for one) runs lots of logistics, warehousing, HR (2.8M), and finance stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_City_Army_Ammunition_Plan...
edit: Actually, they don't even need to take over the business. Another company is already operating it. The government could simply sign a contract to buy the 50,000 tons of canned peaches and the company would can them. Again, not to endorse the idea, but it is very straightforward logistically.
Have a conversation with someone who grew up in communist USSR/Russia sometime... It definitely isn't cool.
If we had govt controlled food supply, we'd never have the likes of hot sauce (sriracha, pace, etc) and would likely never have seen a lot of options form. For better and far, far worse.
I don't know how it'd get to that if we had even more supply. I'm saying we'd be better off dealing with the problems of overproduction rather than the problems of unprofitable businesses and killing production capacity because it isn't profitable in the short-term.
I also never said you couldn't have non/not-for-profit food production, just that they shouldn't be for-profit.
If the government was responsible for running the farms, we would not have near the variety we have today... and for that matter, it would be much closer to soviet communism. I'm absolutely opposed to that.
And how do you know we would be better off? What would you do with oversupply? We had mountains full of cheese for decades from oversupply.. and that's a single product. Canned fruit doesn't even last that long before breaking down. The alternative is waste year after year, vs. cutting back and planting something else, which is what is happening... part of the market was allowed to fail (Del Monte) and part is being bailed out (farms) in defense of being able to have ongoing production, even if the product is different.
That seems far better than having mountains full of rotten peaches in cans.
The first was related to COVID. Sales of canned goods spiked during COVID. They misinterpreted this as a permanent change and invested accordingly.
Second, they did not find a way to compete with store brands, which are no longer at a quality deficit vs. more expensive name brands like Del Monte.
Finally, they didn't address changes in diet that (as I see it) makes sugary syrupy tree candy not something people want to eat. Carbs are recognized now as seriously unhealthy. Ozempic and related drugs may have also affected this.
It was an easy, steady cash-positive business until it wasn't. If those farmers thought what is final product and who benefits from it most, they'd grow diversified crops to sell locally, which many California family farms do.
This is out of touch, many of these farmers are 100+ miles from a large population center. They can’t move enough produce at a local store to stay in business.
That's not to say it's an easy problem to solve.
Incorrect. You simply decide that having less than 5 suppliers at any level is unacceptable and you bust companies up, repeatedly until you have those suppliers. That way when one goes bankrupt, you don't wind up with complete supply chain disintegration.
The solution is quite straightforward. However, it requires an electorate that has a couple of brain cells to rub together in order to understand the solution. And 30% of the US is willfully hostile to any real solutions while another 30% is happy to fiddle while everything burns.
This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider:
- insurance companies
- banking
- utilities
It’s also hard to implement. What counts as a supplier? Is Google the sole supplier for search functionality? If 4 suppliers provide 1% of demand, and one supplies 96%, does that comply? If there’s only one company offering some new service (e.g. driverless cars), do they immediately get broken up?
Yes. Always. At all levels. I might provide a limit below which that doesn't happen (like $50 million in revenue), but as soon as you cross that limit, scrutiny should be automatic.
> This is a very extreme solution, and eliminates many of the benefits from horizontal integration even when the benefits are passed onto customers. Consider: - insurance companies - banking
There is no advantage to horizontal integration for consumers in those industries. If anything, the value is negative. The fact that people are quite a bit happier about credit unions than Chase says everything you need to know.
Sure, there are "efficiencies" to be gained by horizontal integration. What we have seen is that the horizontal integration is so strong that the industries are sclerotic in the face of crisis or change (see: toilet paper manufacturers in Covid who couldn't switch gears). It has become repeatedly clear that we need resilience and competition more than we need efficiency.
> utilities
Should be limited to natural monopolies and strongly controlled by the government. We have seen what happens when you create hybrid-type utilities that try to have some existence in the market (rather than being solidly government regulated) and the result is poor (see: PG&E).
IMO this claim is just too strong. I think you'd end up breaking up (or trying to) Lloyds of London, Spacex, Fedex, DHL, Boeing, Panasonic, ASML, Google, Apple, and many other very specialized companies. These businesses would be very expensive if they could only supply 1/5 of the market, to the point that many people would be totally priced out. The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them. We'd be sent back to the 2000s, and that's _just_ computing.
https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...
I actually read his whole book. Most of his "patterns" are kind of quaint and twee, the sort of things that seem superficially attractive to people with no real domain knowledge. Highly overrated.
I realize we can't really go backward in time, but I would prefer if the farmers that lived close to where I am sold to people who live local to me. That can happen to some degree (open yard stands), and I like to do that for some of the smaller farms, but it's really a kind of "nice to have" rather than a "The market stocks stuff that was grown a town or two over" type thing. I feel like something probably got lost when that kind of arrangement went away.
There's still one or two local businesses that manage to make it into the local market for me which is neat to see, but that's more so because they are for frozen pastries and stuff, and can prepare a metric ton in advance, and the market can mark it up for being a "local specialty" type thing. I like to buy them when I can afford it. It just sucks that essentially every other thing on a shelf probably wasn't even made in the same time zone or hemisphere.
More widely, they matter in that farmers markets and roadside stands and such do exist. Why do they exist? Because there are enough people that want to buy from such places.
I mean, it's never going to be the way that food is sold. But those preferences matter enough for niche markets to exist.
Rome got its wheat from Egypt and its olive oil from around the Mediterranean.
Ancient egypt sent food up and down the nile to population centers in Cairo and Thebes.
And so on.
What if they can't make much money doing so?
This is out of touch. Growing fruit is one of the most difficult tasks in farming.
Agriculture is a highly competitive business - even large scale agriculture still has very stiff price competition. There isn't a lot of fat to burn on charitable gestures and what is there isn't on the scale of maintaining such a large unproductive orchard.
It sucks - don't misread my statement. It is deeply unfortunate and we should consider mitigations for the future - but the party to throw blame at here isn't the farmers and neither should they be expected to bear the cost.
Weird Al's straight cover. Al should just do an album like that, would be kinda neat.
A lot of the removed almond tree wood is sold to people like me up in the Sierras where we heat with it in the winter. Almond has significantly more energy per unit of volume that most other species of trees in our area. I don't like the smell of burning almond wood. I bet peach wood smells a lot better, but it would take a lot more space to store the same energy.
(Source: my relatives in the Sac. Valley don’t heat with almond wood anymore.)
Another casualty of what happens during the shift from independent, family-run farms that often sold to grower's cooperatives to much larger, scaled-up operations that focus on wringing every last dollar out of efficiency and standardisation.
Selling it as fuel is maybe some added revenue in the short term but really just doesn't make sense. Now if you were getting a premium (lumber, specialty hardwood, etc), then processing and selling could make sense
Easy way to understand, they can announce it’s free come and get it and it wouldn’t have moved. Which clearly shows financially moving these don’t make sense.
Tree maintenance labor, harvest labor, storage before shipping, labor to load the truck, labor to unload the truck, supermarket storage, supermarket shelf-stocking labor, supermarket disposal labor and cost for any stock that spoils.
That's for peaches intended to eat whole. The peaches we're talking about here are intended for canning, so you also have to add the cost of running the processing and canning machinery, the cost of the cans themselves, and the cost of labor to run and coordinate all that.
Also consider that no single supermarket is going to buy out the entire truck, so you're going to be stopping at many supermarkets, and unloading multiple times.
For larger chain supermarkets they may be buying a full truck (or multiple), but then you'll probably be delivering to a distribution center, where the supermarket then has to pay for that storage, plus labor to re-load onto other trucks, ship to the supermarkets themselves, and unload again.
Your analysis is missing nearly everything. Driving the full truck from point A to point B is a tiny part of the process, cost-wise. And I'm sure I've left things out too.
The fruit needs to be picked. Paying people to pick it costs money.
As far as I know, you can’t just load 44 tons of peaches into a grain hopper trailer. It has to be loaded into crates, which are stacked and palletized and loaded into a refrigerated trailer. Possibly this is automated, but I’d bet it’s done by humans.
Food is generally not delivered from a farm directly to a grocery store, (ignore local co-ops buying from local farms for the purpose of this discussion, we have 44 tons of peaches inside our 53 foot trailer) fruit is stored in a refrigerated warehouse and it costs money to store it there whether you own the warehouse or pay someone else to store it in their warehouse.
A grocery chain will have (or rent/rent space in) warehouses where they receive large orders and then distribute them to individual stores, or they buy it from a local distributor that sells to multiple chains. Include unloading from the truck to the warehouse, which is faster than loading the fruit onto pallets, and picking the order in the warehouse to then be loaded onto another truck to be delivered.
Then, someone at the store has to receive the order, and then someone is assigned to stock the fruit on the sales floor, which occupies space inside the store which costs money.
All of your freight costs go up if you ship less than a full trailer (LTL).
You gave the LLM the wrong prompt. You probably asked something like “How much does it cost to ship 1000 kg on a semi-truck in the United States?” when you should’ve asked something like “Name all of the input costs for selling peaches, include all costs starting at harvest and ending at the customer purchasing the produce at the grocery store.”
The specific peaches referred to in this story are "Cling peaches", which can only be canned, they aren't sold fresh. But modern supply chains mean fresh peaches of other varieties are easily available, which has reduced the demand for canned.
They'll probably replace the trees with almonds, pistachios, and walnuts.
> Del Monte was killed by COVID. Canned food sales spiked and they thought that would last, but it didn't.
Why can’t they reduce to their former size? It seems the California plants had been around long before Covid
If anything would have been profitable spun off, it would have been spun off in the bankruptcy.
"Consumer preferences have shifted away from preservative-laden canned food in favor of healthier alternatives," said Sarah Foss, global head of legal and restructuring at Debtwire, a financial consultancy.
Grocery inflation also caused consumers to seek out cheaper store brands. And President Donald Trump's 50% tariff on imported steel, which went into effect in June, will also push up the prices Del Monte and others must pay for cans.
Del Monte Foods, which is owned by Singapore's Del Monte Pacific, was also hit with a lawsuit last year by a group of lenders that objected to the company's debt restructuring plan. The case was settled in May with a loan that increased Del Monte's interest expenses by $4 million annually, according to a company statement.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/del-monte-files-for-bank...
During the coronavirus pandemic, when more people were eating at home, demand rose to record highs, Del Monte said in the filing, and the company committed to higher production levels. Once demand began to ease, Del Monte was left with too much inventory that it was forced to store, write off and “sell at substantial losses.”
The company also said it had carried a large amount of debt since it was acquired in 2014 by Del Monte Pacific Limited, which borrowed to finance the acquisition. Interest rates continued to increase, and the company’s annual cash interest expense has nearly doubled since 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/business/del-monte-bankru...
If you're up for a 12 minute video, besides re-iterating the points above (particularly underscoring the debt issue), it also points out that the company has changed hands many times in its history.
Won't they at least sell the fruit to customers through grocery stores, where possible? I can see replacing the crops based on reduced future demand from the canneries, but surely the current fruit is usable.
“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.”
Nor are we destroying food while people go hungry; we produce more food than we eat by a considerable margin. What hunger remains in the world is a distribution problem, not a supply problem.
I can't speak to the fruit business, but let me assure you: people are starving, the cost of living crisis is a political weapon, SNAP is unfunded, and this nutrition is, as in Grapes of Wrath times, succumbing to the market, not to the lack of need.
People are hungry, there's just no $$$ in feeding them.
Shame.
75% of the population is overweight, and the rate is even higher among poor people. We've had to invent new words like "food insecure" because actual starvation is a solved problem.
It's hygroscopic as all hell and I can only buy food grade stuff in 10 kilogram quantities. But I need like half a gram per dozen rolls, so I'd have to make around 50 batches of rolls a day to use it up before it goes off.
My electric bill is going to be hellish.
Efficient usage of sodium hydroxide feels like a compelling use case for consumer grade at-home thorium MSRs - we've got to get the DoE in on this now.
Similar with the Spirit bankruptcy, nobody wanted to save the company... they wanted to sell the assets to reduce losses.
“ 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; Grapes of Wrath
This reaction is similar to constituents who bristle at the fact that their local library destroys old books, seeing a parallel to book burnings in 1930s Germany.
This is also good for the remaining peach farmers because it keeps peach prices high, and also because massive forests of unattended peach trees leads to pest problems.
California is not in any drought right now and our reservoirs last 10 years in the absolute worst case. Most of our water goes into the ocean.
I have no dog in the race in terms of what trees there are but if you take them down it'll be invasive South American pepper trees or mustard grass. As long as it's used and sequestering carbon it's all gravy.
https://oroville.lakesonline.com/Level/
You can see the water level there for Lake Orville which is the source for the California aqueduct system that feeds part of the Central Valley and the 20 million living in Southern California. Given that non-residential accounts for 92% of all the water use California is never in any danger of not being able to provide water to residential. That would require 20 years without rain and that also assumes we don't build new reservoirs.
California is the size of a country. The North is in an area more like the Pacific Northwest than any desert.
We just lived through a worst case scenario that lasted 3 years and only on the 3rd year of that did we even bother to start water restrictions. For the past two years we've been full to 100% and having to let it go in the spring.
I did a ton of research on this cause I own a property supplied by this system.
https://interestingengineering.com/lists/7-mighty-machines-f...
It’s actually cheaper just to buy new fruit tree stock and you can get better quality (ie flavorful varieties vs mass farmable ones). Source: worked at an ornamental tree farm, done the math in spreadsheets and have planted peach trees in my yard as well - once loaded a trailer wrong and did a 180 in a loaded flatbed with trees, which went all over the interstate.