alt Hacker News> When a processing facility closes and 55,000 acres of fruit suddenly have nowhere to go — that’s not something a family farm can just absorb
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.
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It is common in agriculture that there is no existing market in which the price would cover the cost of moving the crop to that market. Destroying the crop minimizes the loss to the farmer.
I assume there is market saturation for fresh peaches, that is, all the fresh peaches the market wants to buy are already in the market.
How would they establish those relationships with grocery stores, and get the peaches to them? Sure you could do it with a handful of local stores but the numbers we're talking about are a rounding error.
How many kilos of peaches would you say you get through in an average day?
From what I understand it is a canning variety of peach that isn't all that great for eating fresh. So while im sure they could sell some, I doubt most people would come back for much more after the first time.