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California farmers to destroy 420,000 peach trees after Del Monte collapses
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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You realize that the farmers produce the peaches, right? And that if it costs more to harvest them that the peaches are worth, you don't harvest them. Then you have a giant pile of rotten peaches anyway that has to be cleaned up, so maybe you harvest them anyway and take the loss yourself. Fine.
Now you - the farmer - have a surplus of peach trees that will grow new peaches, and those new peaches won't sell either. You'll take loss year after year this way. No, the best thing to do is to repurpose the land for something else, and that means uprooting the peach trees. It's a good thing there's federal grant money to absorb some of that cost.
Capitalism is where there's an ownership class that contributes essentially nothing and a labor class that produces the value, and the former exploits the latter. This situation is not that; the farmer is (ideally) the labor (unless factory farms, or unfair compensation otherwise). The peaches having more or less worth due to market conditions is because of a free market, which is distinct from capitalism.
Growing crops is work. Harvesting crops is work. Transporting, processing, inspecting, warehousing, inventorying, packaging, retailing - all work. People - workers - expend effort to create the value of cans of peaches in pantries, and each person should be compensated fairly for the value their effort produces.
Never anywhere in my commentary did I refer to profits. If the peaches are worth less than they cost to harvest, the value of the labor already invested is lost, and the farm as a whole is at risk. Especially for the remaining family farms, this means that corporate farm companies will buy the land and consolidate their power. It's a good thing there's federal grant money to absorb some of the cost of retooling.
I'm as anti-capitalist as they come, and there's parts of this situation to be justifiably pissed about. The fact that a single cannery closing results in this is one. The fact that the corporation that ran that cannery may well have closed it for profit reasons is another. But getting pissed about repurposing land for something more useful? Seems ill informed.
THIS IS LITERALLY CAPITALISM DUDE
You are so deep in this shit that you can't even see how it's coloring everything you're saying here.
If we lived in a society that didn't value profit over feeding humans, none of what you said would matter. What would matter would be making sure everyone is fed. Even if that means someone has to do work that isn't "profitable".
I can kind of see where both of you are coming from.
This doesn't necessarily mean we are going to be compromising feeding humans, it simply means they are backing away from peaches, specifically. If people don't even want to eat that many peaches, then we might be wasting farming capacity and we should be growing different crops. Maybe a more dense crop, maybe with other nutritional properties. If you insist on continuing to grow peaches that people don't even want to bother eating, then you aren't helping people get the food and nutrition they need, you are just generating rotting fruit. It says they are giving money to farmers to help them pivot to different crops.
But we might have too many peaches in the first place because of capitalist flaws. Some del monte leadership mismanages things and wastes valuable cropland on trees that aren't really what people want or need.
Or it could have darker outcomes, like 'poors' are hungry but we don't think it's worth it so we just convert acres and acres of arable land to datacenters for the tech bros.
But, by itself, cutting back on one crop does not necessarily mean it's some capitalist disaster.
No, that's a free market, as I explained before you stopped reading.
You're the only one talking about profit. I never have. Oh wait, I bet you don't understand what profit is, either. That's wealth gained above and beyond the value of the labor input, because the consumer price is higher than it needs to be and/or labor is being undercompensated for their work. Profit is what the ownership class takes from labor without adding any real value. Yes, that's capitalism. Profit isn't "I have this thing which is a manifestation of my labor, and I will exchange it with you fairly for something you have which is a manifestation of your labor. We might even use an agreed-upon third carrier of value (currency) to make our exchange simpler and fairer, and make it so that lots of things are readily exchanged between all sorts of people. That makes the fair distribution of wealth more efficient (ideally).
This will all make more sense when you're out of your mom's basement.
The US government had several programs to buy farming surpluses, ensuring the farmers were adequately paid and food was not wasted, before the corporate farms lobbied them out of existence. You're talking down to someone while not seeing the connection in your own statement between profit and cost.