> Every year farmers cut down a bunch of trees and plant new ones in response to costs and market demand

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.

No, not typically. And I know this because I grew up around farmers and farmers that had orchards. Trees would be cut down and replaced, usually if the tree was sickly. But not because this year plums are doing better on the market.

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?

> Canned fruit, like what these farmers were producing, has been losing popularity for years. You can't force consumers to like it.

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.

> Are you thinking another processor/distributor won’t come along in the future with long-term contracts?

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.

Stone fruit (like peaches) are all typically grafted. And that 2 to 3 years is when the trees first fruit, not when you get a full harvest from the tree. The 10 to 20 years is when the tree is fully mature and producing it's max amount of fruit.

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.