User deleted post
This is what happens to all of the unsold apples from my family's orchard
Meanwhile getting charged six to seven dollars for a small bag of apples means I buy less apples. A lot of food goes to waste because there aren't buyers, and a lot of buyers aren't buying because of cost.
Ive replaced apples with bananas. At least where I live it's a lot more affordable.
It’s crazy that a banana grown in the tropics can be sold in North America for cheaper than an apple grown in the same state or province.
But that’s what slave labor in third world countries can do.
So if I understand correctly, by buying the food I can afford im supporting slavery.
There really is no way to live ethically in Western society. At least, not legally.
There really is no way to live ethically in Western society. At least, not legally.
You know whats really going to get you mad? Depending on where you live the city can destroy your garden. Their reason was that the grass was too high and not properly maintained, so they destroyed $1000 worth of fruit/flowers.
That also wasn't the only one. The city's reason for destroying a 3 year old community garden that was feeding people was because of "unsafe conditions".
That's also not the only other one. destroyed a medicinal and edible plant garden. She did so because she was unemployed and was going to be self-reliant.
Then there are states where collecting rain water is illegal. And other countries also destroying gardens. Or states making it illegal to go off-the-grid.
land of the free lolz
The land of the free is region blocking the first article so that they don't have to comply with EU regulations.
We have Hutterites in our area. They couldn't sell their potatoes recently. They dumped them near a road and told the local news to tell folks to come get them.
It’s always nice when a group passes on a bounty that’s more than they can consume.
It's human. This is a human trait. And it is good.
Pumpkin farmers did this in 2020 in my area. "We can't sell these, please come take as many as you'd like."
If I remember correctly, we had a shortage of pumpkins here. Wow, so different!
I literally ate potatoes from potato mountain for dinner tonight. I have a feeling we live in the same town!
Pics of Mt. Potates?
I don't know, that's more like a potato hill. JK jk
Honestly would love to be able to just grab as many potatoes as I can. I'd be handing bags of potatoes out like business cards.
"Hey, John! I haven't seen you in forever how's the kids?"
"Awesome, awesome. So, I have these potatoes..."
This and the apples together and you can make "earth and heaven". An easy and lovely side dish from germany
Honey, if your side dish requires A MOUNTAIN each of apples and potatoes… What the fuck Lovecraftian cosmic horror is your entree???
i hate the large fries are like $5-8 at local burger joints.
They don't get processed into apple juice, pie filling, or applesauce?
They could've been, but there were no buyers. People aren't consuming as many apples as they used to due to high prices set by grocery stores.
EDIT: I'm not involved with the orchard in any way, as I live in a different state. My family has just informed me that this is a picture of apples dumped from a whole bunch of different orchards, not just from my family's--that is why there are so many. In their words: "this is what happens when there are more apples grown than consumers can eat." Regardless, it sucks to see it all go to waste
Keeping doctors gainfully employed.
User deleted comment
11d
11/10 doctors approved
the AMA would never let there be 11/10 doctors, it's in their founding mission statement to maintain a cartel prevent an oversupply to absolutely gouge americans maintain fair pricing
Clearly not an apple pie though
A doctor a day keeps the apple away.
Can't afford to! Not really true for me, but apples used to be a cheap fruit to have, but at my local grocery stores, the prices are crazy, and it's $6-$9 for a bag of apples. If I want to buy the nicer "Honey Crisp" ones, they are $2.99/lb on sale, and upwards of $4.99 when not on sale.
I just can't understand how it can be better to let food go to waste like this rather than selling them at a lower price. It feels sinful. (And that is a strange sentence coming from an atheist.)
The dairy industry in Canada is literally run by a cartel. They dump millions of gallons of milk so supply never exceeds demand and keeps prices high. We pay 40% more for dairy than the states.
Wisconsin (amongst others) pays farmers to till crops under through a fund to keep values worth it. I toured a lettuce farm in AZ a couple years back for a work related thing and the farmer was only sending half the field to harvest and tilling the rest under because the price was so low. It would have cost him more to harvest than he would have made selling. Crazy!
His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.
I also liked the part above it
“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa...
“Disapproved of loose women who turned him down” says so much about that character in such a brief line
The entire paragraph is just such a well written burn.
Random catch-22 quotes make me very happy
I always question how the world would look like if people would actually do some effort to work together without wasting ressources out of financial/strategical reasons.
In some countries, people started to create buying collectives and tell them that this is the price you are willing to pay. In some places, organic milk and bread is way cheaper because of this. But it would require quite the effort to get everybody involved. But its not impossible.
Ah, that makes sense, and I'd say, another reason for all the incited division, drama destruction and distraction constantly in our faces, keeping us from coming together productively..ye olde divided and conquered ingredient
I mean the world produces more than enough to solve world hunger. The problem is greed and to a lesser extent logistics.
The US alone could feed the world.
It's insane how much food the USA is able to produce. Like we take it for granted but you guys down there have some efficient farmers, farmland, farming technology and logistics setup to move it all.
There's the stat I read that always stays with me
The USA has more navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined.
Climate also helps a ton, the US covers every hardiness zone so barring any soil issues pretty much everything can be grown.
The only people who have the power to put in that effort and find a solution are those who are actively doing it. The rest of us proles? We’d be shot on sight if we went 100 meters within these farms to protest or save the dumped product. Putting the blame on the average person who’s struggling to find enough energy to survive day by day only serves to benefit those on top.
I felt bad because I had to toss three carrots on sunday. Meanwhile this
I know.
Consumers are made to feel bad for tossing the slimy bag of baby spinach yet there's literally fields full of produce not even making it to us.
What's really stupid about that is if they lowered the prices people would not only buy more items, they would get them more frequently. For instance if eggs were still between 1-2$ for 12 I would buy them all the time and throw away whatever I didn't get to. With eggs at 4-6$ for 12 I am way more cautious about it. Instead of buying something if I'm not sure if I'm out qnd having too many I'm not buying the items. I'm also picking meals that don't use eggs instead of using them and buying more. I'm sure the same thing is to be said about dairy in Canada. If it was half the price youd buy 3x as much because you wouldn't think about the price as often.
If you sell 100 carton of eggs to 100 people for $1ea you obviously get $100. If you sell 60 cartons of eggs for $3ea you get $180. You can lose 40% of your customers and make more profit. This is how everything from milk to rent to vehicles is being priced now.
Wow.
The farmer’s market here sells peaches for $5/lb and then gets a huge tax write-off for the stuff they don’t sell because they donate it to City Harvest. The homeless are eating the $5/lb peaches.
I know it seems messed up but I’m fine with them actually getting some fresh fruit in their diet even if it’s only for 2-3 months of the year. The homeless largely survive on fast food and gas station cupcakes and shit.
This is what I was wondering, why can’t farmers donate the excess to homeless shelters/food banks? If they want to avoid undercutting the market or reducing demand, figure out a way to check that the people receiving the food are actually needy
In general, there's too much cost involved in processing fresh fruit.
There was a local non-profit in our area that matched people picking fruit with tree owners to help reduce the amount of wastage and reduce the amount of wild bears in town.
Their goal was that 1/3 of the harvest went to the owner, 1/3 to the picker, and 1/3 to charity.
They couldn't get charities to take the fruit. It had to be cleaned, stored/refrigerated, rotten/bad fruit disposed of, and sometimes this had to be done multiple times if they couldn't get the fruit to a family in time. Too much fruit was spoiling and the charity workers couldn't do other tasks when doing this extra work.
Go read The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. He breaks it down really well.
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.
Because there is still costs to transport, package, process the apples. Once it falls below a certain level it's just not worth doing. That's even assuming there would be demand for them.
This is part of why there are various subsidies and agricultural regulations from the government. Too little food supply is very bad, too much that tanks prices directly leads to too little and is very bad. It's all about keeping a balance
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.
It undercuts the market so much that the market would collapse. Farming is at the point where everything has advanced so fast in such a short period or time that the economics of it are totally broken. That's why there are so many government programs when it comes to agriculture. If everything was sold at pure market rates all but the largest farmers would be out of business.
I spent a lot of my life in apple country so maybe my take is skewed but I remember apples being one of the cheap fruits. Now they’re more expensive than even some berries and it blows my mind. I miss the days of fujis the size of a softball for 89 cents a pound.
Paying taxes to subsidize orchards that throw away their product due to lack of buyers, because we can't afford the price anymore is peak capitalism.
Honeycrisp is 1.50 a pound at my local Costco, but like any fruit the prices fluctuate based on the season.
It’s like $2 for a single apple, maybe that’s why.
How is it possible that the price is too high for consumers yet there's excess supply?
I’m an apple farmer and the answer is the retailers. Take honeycrisp apple for example they used to wholesale for $40-$60 a bushel this year they are selling for ~$23 a bushel. Yet the retail price has barely come down at all. Guess who’s keeping all that extra money? It’s the grocery store!
Then I'll show up and buy a bushel for 30 bucks directly, fuck those retailers.
this is what needs to happen. somebody needs to create direct grower to consumer service, where you just buy online direct and pay shipping and they just back a flatbed up to your door.
The problem with that is vegetables are super perishable and if delivering on time to grocery stores is difficult than coordinating home deliveries will be impossible.
What really needs to happen is that non-profit food co-ops need to be set up where they coordinate large purchases of consumer goods without the brick and mortar markup. That'll never happen of course but I don't see an individual based solution really working at scale.
I’m a commercial salmon fisherman, last year they (the processors)paid us .50 a lbs ($1 less than the year before) The prices in the supermarkets are higher than the previous year.
So what I'm hearing is that, we're producing more food and that should lower the price, but grocery stores refuse to lower prices saying that inflation is killing us. So, farmers are getting fucked, consumers are getting fucked, and grocery stores are to blame?
From the UK here- it's a shame the US never really went for alcoholic cider in the same way we do over here where it's a genuine rival for beer. There's micro cider breweries everywhere doing good business. I go to one of the local beer festivals each year and there's always a big local cider section that's super popular in the summer
The apple orchards near me do alcoholic cider
Aren't the varieties different? Like - the apples used for cider and not the same types used for eating or baking?
They are, best apple cider are made from very bitter apples. Remember tasting my GMother apples : brrrr ouch…
We've kind of started to, but I swear I can find more THC drinks than hard ciders nowadays, especially at bars.
Cider isn’t unpopular here really, it’s just that we have so many options for drinks. My wife loves the flavor of cider but her go to is usually moscato since it takes less calories to get a decent buzz.
Is moscato different in the US? In Australia it’s a sweet wine that’s really high in calories (higher than cider) and similar alcohol content (5.5%)?
In fact to drink the same amount of alcohol, it’s slightly more calories drinking moscato than cider (depending on the cider of course).
That gets right to the core of the issue
Hungry for Apples?
Shut up, Jerry
My man!
The price paid won't even cover the transport expenses
This reminds me of when I was younger and spending the summer with my father. I went to the apple orchard right outside of town with a girl who was either related to the owner or family friends. We ran into him in the parking lot for the orchard's shop and he gave us permission to take as many apples as we wanted, free of charge.
I ate sooooooooo many apples that day of several different varieties.
Kinda similar story. When I was in high school my baseball team travelled out of town for a game to a really small town that had massive orange orchards (groves?). It smelled so amazing during the game, it was distracting. After the game, a group of the locals passed out some paper grocery bags and told us we could pick as many oranges as we wanted to take home. That was about 20 years ago and I've still never had better oranges than those we picked that day.
Any chance this was in central FL? I have a near-identical core memory of doing that when playing away games in Frostproof, FL.
Nope this was is California.
Love it! Two opposite sides of the country, same exp 🤙
The camaraderie that comes with delicious oranges is unrivaled.
Apple trees produce so many fucking apples. My dad had 10 dwarf trees growing up. They're about half the size of normal sized trees. He would literally walk around the neighborhood begging the neighbors to take a giant basket of apples so they wouldn't go to waste. And believe me, we ate A LOT of apples in every form imaginable every day for months. Still had way too many.
Yeah, we had 4 full size trees, most apples went into bin. There are waaaaaaaaaay too many apples every other year. You make jams, you make juice, you make cider, you eat them raw and bake them into pies. You give shit loads to friends and family. AND STILL MOST END UP IN THE FUCKING BIN!
Time to get an orchard pig!
We have ONE apple tree. And this is our experience too. I'd drown in apples with FOUR TREES.
Though some local farms will take them for feed.
Moderator removed comment
11d
This is fake news!
Eating a lot of blueberries turns your poop green.
Drinking beet juice and forgetting about it, then later wondering if I need to go to the doctor.
Am I bleeding internally? 🩸
I love beets. I eat em all the time.
I forget every single time and still get spooked by the colour. It's just such a shock seeing that colour come out of you
One year I contracted campylobacter and was hospitalized. It basically shreds your intestines bc of how upset it makes the environment. So I pooped blood and it was a rather large ordeal but. I got better and all is well.
A few weeks later, I had never eaten beets before and tried them. A day later, I got the biggest fright bc no one told me what happens, and I thought my insides were dying again. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.
I do this too, like beet induced amnesia.
You can't expect the apples to turn themselves into apple cider on their own. You've got to motivate them.
That’s not true the natural state of fruit is to become alcoholic it’s like nature wants to get drunk.
Did Terry Pratchett write this post from beyond the grave?
terry pratchet is fucking dead?
No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.
Which is why I fart before I leave every room
remember me
would not recommend as watery fart happens. dont ask why i know.
You aren't dead until the last time someone says your name
Yeah, this is beautiful. Pratchett has another quote on the same topic (well, he has several) that made such an impression on me when I read it. I wish I'd written it down, but I stupidly didn't.
It was a description of how Granny Weatherwax had acted when her mother died - she'd organised everything, been practical and calm and done everything step by step... until the next day, when the clock in her mother's sitting room stopped, and she realised it was because her mother had always been the one to wind it. And then she sat down and cried.
GNU Sir Pterry
Yes, he died about 9 years ago. GNU
Not many people know that, it’s in cider information.
you rang?
My favourite limerick:
There once was a woman from Ryde
Who ate all the apples and died,
The apples fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside.
Hello? Can you hear me?
There are pig farms here in NC who’d jump at that as feed!
Cows love apples too. Maybe a dairy farm would buy them?
Cows love apples but can't really be a regular part of their diet, too acidic causes stomach issues for them
You'd think something with 4 stomachs would have apples handled.
There’s only so much they can do.
1 stomach 4 chambers actually
Also when milkers get into fermented apples it's not good for the dairy supply. Drunk cows make bad milk.
Let some moonshiners know they're free, maybe check in with some distilleries.
Not sure OP is offering to just GIVE them away. Might hurt the apple market even more. . .
Yeah, I'd aim more towards distilleries, but just to get it off your hands there's a ton of homebrewers, cider makers, etc., that this would be heaven for. The other option is to just leave them there and they go to waste.
At the very least, I'd put up a sign for $1/gal bring a 5 gal bucket and top it off for $5.
Probably but the labor costs to load, rent transportation to carry these to destination, unload all make it not work out apparently.
Yes it’d depend how far out they are, might be hard to find a pig farm that could even make a dent. That much product I’m surprised they can’t find someone that’s pay a few bucks for it though. Wonder if it was a particularly bad year, that’s a lot to just let rot I feel.
fuel, equipment, and labor costs, available storage space that is suitable for this material - become the real expense. Even if these are free, there's a cost associated to the job of getting large amounts of anything from point A to point B. Loading requires equipment and mapower, transport requires equipment and manpower, unloading. Then there's the issue of storage. Can you effectively store the amount you just transported?
How do you then regulate the rot and spoilage? I'm not saying that's not doable but the question is whether the pig farmer has the room, the funds, the time, the staffing to take this on amid whatever he already has scheduled to do at his farm now.
Or animal rescues and sanctuaries.
Pig owner, here. My Bacon Bits would die for some of that.
So you are the guy from my maths question huh???
The joe with 1000 acres of apples
There’s a sad beauty to this. Those are some truly beautiful looking apples and its a shame so many have to go to waste…
Came to say this. Gorgeous but sad. It’s almost like looking at the Danxia colored mountains.
They don't have to go to waste, they're going to waste because someone decided it would be better to let them rot on the ground than to make slightly less money by selling them for less than they did last season.
The entire agriculture sector is like this. Hunger pretty much doesn't need to exist. We don't have a supply problem, we don't even have a distribution problem. We have an "infinite profit growth" problem.
They don't have to go to waste, they're going to waste because someone decided it would be better to let them rot on the ground than to make slightly less money by selling them for less than they did last season.
If you live in an apple-producing region, you might literally not be able to give them away, if transporting the apples to where they're needed costs more than what they're worth to buyers.
Maybe a pig farmer 400 miles away would pay $0.05/lb for them, but if it costs $0.06/lb to ship them there the transaction doesn't make any sense
overproduction happens for every crop in existence. to create a whole region of monocrops with no local business to absorb waste, is pure stupidity, not "economical".
but even if we ignore this false situation (there is plenty of capacity to absorb an apple glut by local animal feed operations and cideries in every apple-growing region in the states), the cost to haul these truckloads of apples is not too high.
this is purely price fixing in the most wasteful way possible. keeping the price up by destroying crop surplus has been a core policy of american ag for decades, and is about the most blunt and moronic way to do this that is available to a farmer. a dumbass farmer who monocrops the earth into oblivion. it was a good move in the 30s and 40s when it was the best we could do as a nation. we've had almost 100 years of agroeconomic innovation since the great depression and we're still doing this stupid shit every single season.
they don't pay enough for water or harvesting labor or for the pollution from their biocides and fertilizers and all the diesel they burn. until they pay the true cost of production and pollution, they'll find it affordable and advantageous to destroy surplus.
Apples are costing 2-4$ a lb in stores, that’s why no one is buying
Canadian here. $4.99/bag at the low end. If you want nicer apples, they are $7.99-9.99 a bag. If you buy solo "nice" apples, it's $2.99 / lb on sale, and $4.99 when not on sale. I love my Honey Crisp apples, but it's easily $12-$16 for a week of apples (4-5 apples a week). Crazy.
Next year you will pay twice as much because this year they couldn't sell them. So they have to bring the cost in again
This is the stupid reality we live in.
I saw bags at 10.99 and 11.99 at Provigo (Loblaws). There were cheaper bags with all bruised apples (I know, I bought a couple).
Yep. I love my apples. Honey crisp, pink lady, you name it. Apples are now too expensive for me to purchase.
Bought 2 really nice Honey Crisps the other day... $5.02 at the big grocery store.
Yes, and throwing out the excess apples instead of placing them in to the market keeps the prices artificially high. what a tremendous waste!
How is there so many apples but they’re so fucking expensive?
Maybe. I've also seen situations where the distributors don't buy what they can so they can charge more per pound. This is a type of price fixing.
they do it with louis vetton and other pricey brands. any product they dont sell they destroy and write off on their taxes instead of just selling at discount.
Op is probably paid $0.1 a lb
For highest quality apples (huge, desirable cultivar, and very red) farmers are paid ~ $0.76 per lb. For lowest quality apples (only suitable for juicing/processing) farmers are paid ~ $0.08 per lb.
If someone where to look at the insane input costs, labor, post-harvest handling, etc., farmers are out here struggling. speaking from experience
So they don't buy it intentionally?
Buy less, claim stock problem, charge more. So less stocking and transportation costs, and charge more so earn 3x lmao. Genius.
As someone who produced a consumer packaged product that is sold in grocery stores, this is almost 100% the fault of your grocer. We saw price hikes on all our products at retail, when we hadn’t raised our wholesale price a single cent in over 18 months.
Corporate greed, made manifest.
EDIT: I can’t speak for every retailer, and we aren’t big enough to work with Kroger or Albertson’s yet, but what I can say is that we never raised our price to our distributor, and they never raised their price to the retailer. And yet, the retail price went up, and not just a little. Almost 20%.
So guess what we’re doing this year…yep, raising our price to the distributor. Why should the retailer make such an insane margin on a product they do very little to actually sell?
And before anyone says “b-b-but they give you a channel to access your customers”, there are other ways to do that and we are working on those as well.
And for those saying these retail chains had razor thin margins last quarter, have you accounted for the possibility that they are wasteful, inefficient, and that the only reason they are still in business at all is because they bought out all their major competitors?
#AmericanCapitalism
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I see a lot of comments about processing.
OP I have worked with fresh apples for 15+ years, selling both US1 into retail, US 2 into foodservice, and all other business segments: K-12, DoD, pet food, ingredient, etc.
If you ever want to look at diversifying the segments more, I’m happy to help
I also work in industry and I have never seen dumping on this scale. Also weird that there are no trees in the image. The deserts of Washington, maybe? But I can’t imagine anyone would be dumping out there.
definitely looks like eastern washington or eastern oregon. I'd imagine the orchard is not too far away. this is what most of the area out there looks like. maybe a neighboring ranch with a bunch of cows soon to have diarrhea.
This guy apples
Microsoft Desktop Background Team: "Get that! Get that RIGHT FUCKING NOW"
This sucks. My family runs a charity organization and we receive donations like this to give out to people. This is really sad.
EDIT: We pick donations up ourselves.
I work for apple growers and food banks are turning down apples. They already have too many in storage. Folks want processed goodness!
As for why people at food banks don't take the apples, they simply are not filling enough. Food banks usually have a limit on how many items you can take and when you are choosing between an apple that is not even breakfast and a box of pasta that can feed you for a week... well you choose the pasta. A couple food banks I have been to have had fresh fruit sat out for free that doesn't count towards your limit, but they usually only have a few fruits there to take.
User deleted comment
11d
Every week some woman shows up here in the neighborhood and gives out all their extra for free to whoever wants them. She parks at corner store and hollers free. People come a running.
Worst ball pit ever. Wouldn't recommend. 7/10
This makes me really sad for your family. It also makes me really fucking angry because we were a family that used to eat 5+ apples per day, but since that's like $6+ worth of apples now, per day, we've found other fruit to replace our favorite and cut way back on apples. Meanwhile, your family has to dump all of those, which is a waste of their time, money, and labor. Distributors keep supply low, prices high, forcing demand down.
None of it is mildly anything.
What fruit do you buy instead? I feel like every fruit is stupid expensive now. The other day, I had a craving for a grapefruit and didn't check the price when I put one in my cart. I got to checkout and it was $4.50 for a single grapefruit. Apples and citrus used to be the cheap fruits when I was a kid.
Bananas, oranges and grapes mostly. I tend to focus on what's in season, where as I used to buy what we liked no matter what.
I thought unsold apples went into cold storage and lasted up to a year.
I'm sure some did, but take a look at that landscape.... There's only so much you can store.
They do. They go into cold atmosphere rooms and can last up to a year. But states like Washington were still selling the previous years’ crop when this season started. There’s simply too much volume now and too little consumption.
Doctors - keep your eyes shut
"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"
-Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath.
"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."
"There simply isn't enough food for everyone"
There's got to be a better way. This is appalling.
tell me where to go and i’ll get to work eatin all them apples
Apple Fields Forever
I know it's a cost issue but damn that sad to see when a ton of families would gladly take a bag
Great compost
The problem is the price at the grocery store, your family sells them for pennies an apple, I have to pay like 50x what your family sells them for.
Look at all those lazy apples just sitting around and not contributing
So what I’m seeing is that apples are too expensive and no one wants to buy them so we have an extreme surplus of food going to waste for absolutely no reason other than inflation pushed by greed
A local bean farmer had a bumper crop, they just put it out on the local paper and social media that from a certain date to another, all the beans you could carry, come one come all. It was actually really cool, people came, they talked, mingled, it was so awesome I really thought it would be cool for the city to have some special fields just for community picking days. But of course as soon as you do something cool like that someone will exploit it for stupid reasons and screw it all up, but I'd say it's still worth a try.
Yakima Valley?
Let’s not mince words here.
It wasn’t economically viable to process.
Of course they could have applesauced that shit, or sell it/donate it as feed, or turned into cider/anything longer lasting.
But each one of them options had a cost. Whatever that cost was, it was more than the potential profit/revenue it would have returned.
Or worse, it would have altered the supply chain, as you know.. they wouldn’t have been sellable at $9/pound if the real supply > real demand (even storage). A bit like it happens with diamonds.
Hey, I don’t blame the orchard/s involved. At the end of the day it’s a business.
I would be wary to blame it on “well, people ain’t eating apples!” though - which likely it’s true, but let’s not fool ourselves that there were countless other viable options instead of dumping the lot. Dumping the lot is what made financial sense.
“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.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath