California Tree-Fruit
I receive a lot of questions concerning why California tree-fruit, such as plums, nectarines, and peaches, continues to be in depression, when row crops and things like almonds and fresh grapes are not. Speaking as someone who grew up with the tree-fruit industry (my grandfather began farming our place in trees in 1910), I think there are three reasons.
All fresh fruit that is not storable is not so easily exported, and so misses out somewhat on the new appetites of an increasingly affluent middle class in China, India, and Korea, who are beginning to put California almonds in their rice, or use more of our walnuts or processed fruits as condiments. Second, 10-15% of all fresh fruit in the United States in the summer months is now consumed in farmers’ markets, and bypasses the old packer, shipper, broker nexus (Thank God), which leads us to the third relevant point: the new varieties that came on the scene in the 1960s were disastrous: big, shiny, watery, hard, bouncy—and tasteless, they shipped as well as they tasted awful.
Oh, to Eat an Elberta Peach!
In the old days, farming tree-fruit was an art: one had 24 hours to pick a delicious and ripe Santa Rosa plum or an Elberta peach before it went bad. Pickers used gloves; we used small padded boxes; and the fruit was on the truck within the day—or else. I can remember 20-hour days of madness as we rushed with my grandfather into the orchards to spread boxes and get them out, and hear his lectures to the picker to be sure to wear gloves and not drop the fruit from the bucket.
The result was that a consumer ate a delicious, ripe (and sometime messy overripe) tree-fresh plum or peach. It was hard to farm a 30 acre block of one single variety, since the skills involved took years to master. A single bad decision about irrigation timing, or soil fertilizaton, or thinning, or picking time, or a suddenly hot or cool day could spoil tons of fruit. The corporations, family or not, hated the hassles, and much preferred to have large tracts of ‘pick and forget’ varieties that were off the tree half green in one or two (rather than four or five) pickings. Almost anyone could manage such an orchard, and many with almost no skills did.
So with the advent in the late 1960s of varieties like Red Beaut plums (that destroyed its rival (both were picked in late May) delicious, soft old Burmosa early plum), May Grand nectarine, or Red Top peaches, the shipper had a fruit that could be picked half green and still colored much better, had a window of a week to be picked, did not bruise, had a good shelf life, and thus attracted the shoppers’ eye—until they got home and tried to eat it.
After forty years, the consumer said “no mas” and simply assumed that California plums, nectarines, and peaches were de facto unripe, hard and taste badly, if not saturated with chemicals to make them ship and look like plastic fruit. True, some have gone back to the old varieties for local consumption, but the notion that a family farmer of 100-200 acres could grow blocks of five-acre varieties, and from May to September pick and pack each day at a profit is apparently over.
They are going broke or long gone. Instead we have micro-farmers, mostly organic who do their own labor on 10-acre suburban farms for farmers’ markets, with tasty old varieties, OR mega-corporations, who own 5,000-10,000 acres of tasteless hard fruit and through sheer economy of scale still survive, though are in deep trouble since they have a product few anymore like.
(Tree-fruit farming is far more risky than Vegas gambling, as I can attest. It is not unusual to net $50,000 one year on a five-acre plum orchard, and lose $20,000 annually on it for the next seven years—due to hail, rain during bloom, shortage of bees, poor set, market collapse, changing taste for varieties, tree or soil diseases, strikes, etc.)
In the end, one would be safer playing the stock market or going to the Casino.
I note in passing that to a degree the fresh grape industry was similar, but the new shiny hard varieties like Flame Seedless tasted almost as good at Thompson Seedless (itself making an unfortunate devolution from a small, golden color sweet grape to a pumped up, girdled, gibbed-up, and water soaked monstrous, thumb-sized tasteless berry.)
The end of the Santa Rosa Plum and the Elberta Peach is emblematic of our age.
VDH
AI
