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.

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.

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.

Were these trees ever profitable? If the true cost of water resources were added?

If the true cost of picking them with US workers were paid?

Any other subsidy?

In my country there is a farm lobby too, but they rather look after the massive agribusiness at the expense of small farms. Is that the case in the US?

I have never seen a californian peach orchard (I have read Grapes of Wrath, if that counts!), are they a similar environmental disaster to the almond monoculture?

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.

Napkin math suggest 500 tankers of peach juice, which makes me sad.

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.

https://emojipedia.org/peach

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

https://interestingengineering.com/lists/7-mighty-machines-f...