| ▲ | ryandrake 7 hours ago |
| > 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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| ▲ | AngryData 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | dehrmann an hour ago | parent [-] | | This. They'll be edible, but we don't have a fresh peach shortage, so you don't really want these peaches. |
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| ▲ | jandrewrogers 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ryandrake 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Reminds me of Steinbeck: “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.” | | |
| ▲ | Legend2440 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not what's happening here. They are not destroying the trees to limit supply and jack up prices, but rather because no one wants them. 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. | | |
| ▲ | creationcomplex 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You have no idea what's happening in the USA do you lol. 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. | | |
| ▲ | Legend2440 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | No one in the US is starving outside of illness or drug abuse. 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. |
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| ▲ | somat 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | afavour 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How many kilos of peaches would you say you get through in an average day? |
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| ▲ | munk-a 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ah so the real problem here is the loneliness epidemic. If yall were less shy and came over more often to share my home baked peach cobbler then this wouldn't be an issue! | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think you'd face the same problem with peaches as I do with laugenbrötchen, or more specifically sodium hydroxide. 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. | | |
| ▲ | munk-a 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well if you make laugenbrötchen and I make peach cobbler then we can swap and our friends can have both! Experimental baking and cooking is a passion hobby of mine and it's such a nice topic that allows quick iteration and wild variations. 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. |
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