Spirit of Birmingham Distillery

Following the success of their previous market, the fab Colmore Artisan Market (a team up between Birmingham Artisan Markets and Colmore Life) is back on Thursday 21 May (12pm-6pm) with a jam-packed market filled with some of Brum's very best indie makers. Go support!

🦔California farmers are destroying 420,000 peach trees following Del Monte's bankruptcy earlier this year. The successor company that bought Del Monte is purchasing 50,000 fewer tons of peaches from the region, and canned peach demand has been declining for over a decade as consumers shifted to fresh and frozen alternatives. The fruit is still edible, but the trees were planted specifically for canning and the cultivars do not store or transport well enough to compete on grocery shelves against varieties bred for that market. Total revenue loss to the region is estimated at $550 million, and growers are expected to replant with pistachios and almonds. My Take There is a real Grapes of Wrath instinct that kicks in when you read a headline about hundreds of thousands of fruit trees being torn out, and I understand it. A canning peach picked for the Del Monte line is not going to survive the journey to a Kroger produce section looking like something a shopper would pay for, which is why farmers grow different cultivars for fresh sale. The real loss is a regional economy built around a category of shelf-stable food Americans stopped buying, along with the workers, processors, and trucking routes that depended on it. The replanting decision is where this gets harder to feel good about for me. California is shifting toward pistachios and almonds, both of which use considerably more water than peach trees, in a state that has spent the last decade in cycles of severe drought and groundwater depletion. SGMA regulations are tightening, Central Valley aquifers are dropping fast enough to cause land subsidence and well failures in farming communities, and growers are still being pushed toward higher-margin tree nuts because that is where the money is right now. My concern is that the bankruptcy made the news but the replanting choice will produce a much bigger problem in five to ten years, and almost nobody is covering that part. Hedgie🤗