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.

One time, I was driving on a highway, and every now and then I'd see a tomato on the side of the road. At first it was one every couple minutes, but as I passed more vehicles the rate increased. 10 per minute. 30 per minute. Then, hundreds. Every mile, I passed more tomatoes than my household would eat in a year (and it's probably a household that eats an above average amount of tomatoes).

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.

As someone close to agriculture this is the only true response in this thread and anyone understand fruit business knows this.

You are implying a centralized semi monopoly is the only way. If we had farmers to buyers direct distribution it would be much more resilient to this kind of problems.

I agree that the tree destruction is a perfectly rationale reaction - but it is still an injustice. This quantity of waste is not free and not fully priced into the cost to produce the fruit.

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.

Farming history seems to be boom and bust and the golden ages of farming seem to be not quite what they were and surprisingly short.

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.

> Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.

Uneducated rice farmers in Bangladesh would understand the problem better than the people complaining about this.

> 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.

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.

Reminds me of stories about McDonalds introducing new menu items. The logistics of introducing things at all their locations is a major concern. Maybe they could have introduced a new peach desert or something, but like you said supply isn't the only thing - you need to move them around and process them too.

Peaches are from the great country of China. Very popular and important in culture. Export may be the best solution. However, cultivar matters, and it may be too late in this case.

Seems like an opportunity to form a coop. I guess I’m being naive though. I just don’t know how

Then why do they use so much land in the first place?

That's the problem with depending on monopoly for coordination.

Maybe if we didn't let one corporation control so much of the distribution chain, we would avoid both the decision to overproduce and the stagnation of overproduced goods.

Of course, the real problem is that we have accepted the notion that food must profit someone, even when we have too much of it.

Although you have a point regarding this specific situation; the real, bigger issue is this industrial scale, low quality, high quantity food production system.

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I mean you are destroying an entire forest that grows food, of course people are incensed, they are funding the destruction with money paid from taxes. Food is already bananas expensive. And it feels so terribly inefficient to just rip and replace.

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.

the difficulty of bringing produce to market is reflected in the cost structure. 90% of a food dollar goes towards all the efforts required to get food to the customer (transportation, packaging, warehousing, marketing, retail, etc).

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.

> and call it great injustice.

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.

It's difficult for them because farmers are raised anti-union individualists that are at the mercy of middle-men. If they would cooperate, unionize even, they would be far more powerful than they are now.

In a less profit driven world, we might stockpile these in cans and then later throw them away once they spoil, taking over the canning facilities and paying for the wages via taxes on things not needed for survival. We don't maximize food security though, we prefer profit, up to and including choosing not to feed people.