Spring - How to Pick a Peach - page 73

With the fruit carefully tucked away for its nap, the action in the packinghouse shifts to
the glassed-in offices that encircle the upper level. This is where the salespeople work the
phones, frantically scrambling to sell all of the fruit that has just been harvested. Peaches
wait for no one, even when picked so underripe, and they certainly won't wait for a better
price. For that reason, in produce country it is almost always a buyer's market, and every-
one knows that. Conversations are rarely about "How sweet are those peaches?" They're
almost always along the lines of "Is that the cheapest you can sell them?" On the other end
of the phone are a wide variety of buyers. Some represent large grocery store chains; what
they take will be trucked to their warehouses and then distributed to individual markets.
Some are wholesalers, who will bring the fruit to large collective warehouses called "ter-
minal markets," where individual stores can buy them in bulk. Some are specialty com-
panies that buy the fruit and then ripen it further before selling it to high-end users (either
markets or restaurants).
At each step of the way, someone is making a profit. And by the time you track back-
ward to the source of the fruit - the farmer - the prices can be shockingly low. Only about
20 cents of every dollar you spend on peaches at the grocery store winds up in the pock-
ets of the people who grew them. (To put this in perspective, according to one university
study, it costs about $11,000 an acre to grow, pick and pack peaches in the San Joaquin
Valley, including amortizing the cost of the land and equipment. At an average yield of ten
tons per acre, a grower whose peaches are selling for $2 a pound at retail will get about 40
cents of that, meaning that he will lose $3,000 per acre.)
Growing better-tasting fruit involves both money and risk. For a farmer every harvest
is a race against time, weather and misfortune. Every day the fruit hangs on the tree is an-
other day it might rain or blow, another day for bugs or birds or some other calamity to
find it. Entire orchards of fruit have been lost because a grower gambled on waiting one
more day and got hit by a hailstorm, wiping out a whole year's work. The goal of a com-
mercial farmer is to harvest the fruit as soon as it reaches a minimum quality standard.
This is the way commercial agriculture has worked since at least the end of World War II.
These farmers don't see themselves as talented artists creating sensual masterpieces. They
are technicians, and they are proud of how well they are able to feed so many people so
cheaply. Given the realities they face, it really is a minor miracle that our fruit is as good
as it is.
In the world of commercial farming, this kind of packinghouse stands at the pinnacle.
It is a grower/packer/shipper, an all-in-one operation. It grows the fruit, packs it and has a
dedicated sales crew to sell it. There are also individual growers, who farm the fruit and
then contract to have it packed and sold. And there are packinghouses that do no farming;