Interesting news today. I was talking to a guy who designs automation systems for the major fruit packers here. All of the major packing houses have canceled all contracts for the rest of the year. This is odd. Always the equipment needs replacing, repairing, etc. To suddenly stop all contracts - and to have all of the packers do that over a week or two...

A couple of months ago everyone was optimistic for the usual reasons - "prices are strong, quality is good, we have a good harvest" - but now suddenly it is a panic and no spending.

The growers are in this ridiculously vulnerable position. When they harvest the fruit it has to go into cold storage, and that means take it to the packers (who control the market.) It sits there and the growers pay cold storage fees until the packer decides to "buy" it - which does not necessarily mean pay for it, but declare that it belongs to them so they can sell it, collect on it, and only then pay the growers.

So right now the packing houses are full of fruit - which the growers have not been paid for, but on which the growers are paying cold storage fees.

The packers have become increasingly reliant on the Far East markets, and that business has collapsed. So the fruit is not moving out of cold storage.

Now what? The growers can't go retrieve it and hang it back on the trees. The money has stopped flowing. The storage expenses continue. The packers are out of money - or at least will not spend - and can't sell so aren't buying from the growers. The whole area is dependent upon this money flowing.

Now what?

This is strangely different than anything I have seen before. It happened so quickly as well - from optimism to an absolute dead end in a couple of weeks, and no one has a plan or an idea as to what to do next.

Usually there is some crisis going on - short crop, poor quality, low prices etc. - and everyone would be yapping this time of year about what is going to happen, what to do. But now everyone is shrugging their shoulders and no one has a clue.

This time of year there is usually a lot of optimistic chatter about the coming season -"the block of such and such will finally be coming into bearing, prices on such and such are going to be strong next year" - but I don't hear any of that. What I do hear is people thinking the unthinkable - what if it doesn't bounce back? Then what?

This is all causing people to not spend. A huge number of Mexican and Guatemalan workers have left and gone home, and now people are realizing that they weren't a burden, weren't an expense, but were producers and spenders and now their contributions are not there and that has left a hole.

I don't know. This feels like big forces at work, like a downward spiral that is self-feeding and accelerating. The finance industry people are always saying that if people have confidence that the economy is good, then it will be good, and they blame the people for thinking it is not good and therefore causing it to not be good - such idiocy.

People are not spending, companies are not hiring, goods are not moving. What the hell is going on? People can't be "optimistic" when they have lost confidence in their income, or lost their income altogether. How can you have an economy based on consumer spending and confidence, and then not think that laying off millions of people won't cause a few problems? Where do the apologists for the damned system think those people go? Who do they think is going to spend? And people are not going to use credit now. They are struggling to pay off the debt they already have, to hang onto their homes.

The propertied people are trying to downplay the crisis and talk optimistically and ridicule the doom and gloom people. There have been a few threads lately at DU about property management issues - bad tenants, insurance, blah blah - and a lot of people posting on those threads apparently own multiple properties, rental properties, commercial properties. I looked at the user names and it was a who's who of the people who defended the bail out, who are pooh-poohing those warning of a Depression, who are blaming Labor and consumers and tenants, and who are minimizing the crisis. Hmmmm.

They are just hoping, aren't they? Trying to artificially pump up confidence, trying to breathe life back into the damned thing. Not because they have any "opinion" about this, but because they have property.

It looks to me like we are irrevocably on a downward trajectory. I can't see anything that anyone is suggesting that can stop this (other than here of course.)

I read your post this morning, Mike, and then ended up having lunch with my little girl at her public school today. I had to check the label when I picked up the grapes - sure enough from Chile. While all your fruit is rotting in storage. Makes no sense whatsoever.

And I can't get over the Afghanistan posts over there drawing the warriors out of the woodwork. Crazy.

I read your post this morning, Mike, and then ended up having lunch with my little girl at her public school today. I had to check the label when I picked up the grapes - sure enough from Chile. While all your fruit is rotting in storage. Makes no sense whatsoever.

And I can't get over the Afghanistan posts over there drawing the warriors out of the woodwork. Crazy.


Here is what is happening. The food industry corporations make more money off of imported produce. The response of our fruit industry, especially here in Washington, has been to jump on the "free trade" merry-go-round and open up export markets. Now those markets have dried up for us, but the produce is still coming the other direction.

One of the packers here, Stemilt, went one step further a few years ago and got into the produce import business. So if you go down there right now and peek around, as I did, you will see produce from overseas moving through the packing house while locally grown produce sits and isn't moving and while local farmers have not been paid.

We need to put this into perspective and keep in mind that I am talking about the most stable industry in the country - finance is regulated, there are still some inspection and safety protocols in place, demand for food is more stable than any other consumer demand, distribution is stable and efficient, land and other assets are protected from speculation, loans are guaranteed by the government, the people in the industry are hands-on professionals.

If farming is in trouble, multiply that times a thousand for every other industry in the country.

This why I hate the "help the poor farmers" activism. It is not the farmers who are in trouble - it is the eaters.

The eaters indeed....this concept of 'food security' is quickly becoming a meaningless catch-phrase as so many things do. But as you can imagine in my line of work we are very concerned with it. And it is quite terrifying to look at the state of our food system in this country, from the actual growers to the methods of storage and distribution, to the end market and consumer. This is true both for the mainstream commercial market and the professional dumpster divers like myself.

And as the need for food assistance skyrockets here in SE MI, we are realizing that the only way we are going to keep up is to produce our own. This has always been a sort of pipe dream but has quickly become a necessity. And the fact that one of our major funders for these endeavors was invested with Madoff (and yes, that is totally indicative of why our current model will never get at the real problem) isn't stopping us - we have no choice. Cash donations are surprisingly easy to come by even in these tough times thanks to the overwhelming 'liberal guilt' in my community but purchasing food is a fucking waste. Money is not the answer. So we are gonna grow our own (thanks to local farmers who are working to help us do it). And given the rate at which the rich are becoming the poor here, it looks like we may end up having to feed the whole goddamn county ourselves.


Anyway, sorry if this seems totally off-topic, but imo it is all tied so deeply together. If there is food, and there are people with bellies, then the people should eat! I don't care if they are rich or poor. Everyone needs fucking food! Real food. So even despite the conversion of so much land to corn and soy and other things that get so processed they are barely food anymore, there is still food there and it can't get to people it is so messed up. It shows us the heart of the problem, profits, money, power, market manipulation, and the people be damned. The growers and the people have so little control over any of it.

It is no fucking good Mike. It worries me to read what you have written here.

Hey Megan, Michigan is one of the most productive and diverse ag states in the country, and is still dominated by small family farmers. That is where the answer lies.

Washington is on another model - massive tracts, a few big growers (relatively speaking), mono-cropped to the hilt, all irrigated, the growers very much under the control of the big processors and packers who will switch to imports in a heartbeat. Ag is much stronger back East (despite being ridiculed by the West coast producers as old fashioned blah blah). We have been watching this perfect storm develop in Washington for a while and warning about it. They were riding high with their tonnage, their massive investment in storage, their glamorous export markets, their focus on a handful of the most profitable varieties. Now they have millions and millions of tons of those crappy Red Delicious sitting in storage and the Asian buyers are not calling.

OK I am going to get personal. Geez I gotta get back somehow, both from the standpoint of the work that needs to be done and for the sake of personal survival now as well. Drives me nuts to be trapped out here in la la land out of touch and out of the game - Washington in the worst place for people having completely embraced the whole yuppie fantasy of real estate, tech jobs, and investment mentality. So many folks I know back in Detroit hurting, so much to do. Critical time for the small farmers, too. So long as the big packers were throwing money around here, and the Seattle yuppies were coming over and spending money, there was hope of turning things around. But it has just died and I can't see it coming back anytime soon and we are hand to mouth as it is.

I am in a deep hole here, worst of my life - I am the damned frog in the gradually boiling water and it is one f-ing rolling boil at this point lol. Hope springs eternal, so I kept trying to limp along, but now that I have given up on it and take a hard look at things, damn I am upside down.

Just thinking out loud... open to any and all ideas at this point. Not looking for charity...

One good thing about this..

The people are so arrogant and obnoxious, they remind me of Texans with their bragging. "The biggest apple orchards in the world, the biggest packing house in the world, the pear capital of the world, the highest quality fruit" and on an on. And of course the bestest beautiful get away home sites, the most wonderful progressive tech companies, and Seattle is the best city in the country, and the Cascades, well haven't we all fucking died and gone to heaven and aren't we the most clever people in the world? They just mock and scoff when they hear that I am from Detroit and worked with Michigan growers.

Well they are not so smug and arrogant now.

Checked the market index tonight on Washington produce - onions, potatoes, pears and apples are the big crops. Demand - light, light, light, light to moderate on everything.

The four winter staples, in mid-winter (by the harvest cycle) and no demand. Hmmm. Stone fruits - peaches, plums, cherries - can't be stored, by the way.

Apples are $8-16 a bushel, Gala the highest and Braeburn (much better apple in my opinion) the lowest.

By the way, it is the 70 bushels (70 apples to a bushel) that are $16 and the 125 bushels that are $8. Think about that. The 125 count weigh about twice as much (smaller apples) and cost half as much. There is the premium that people pay for appearance right there. Know how they get apples bigger? More irrigation, so there is more water in them. "Water bags" we call them.

So my recommendation - Braeburns (a true winter apple that improves in storage) the smallest ones you can find.

I am going to look and see if I can find them here. I am also going to look for the pears now that I know they're in season, you'd think I could find locally grown ones considering that the city (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearland,_Texas) was named after them.

That is interesting about Pearland, TBF, because there is no way they could grow pears there - nowhere near enough "chill hours." Deciduous fruit needs 400-800 hours below 40 degrees, which puts the trees into dormancy, and without that they won't bear fruit the following spring. Interesting that they tried, though. Pears all got wiped out in North America back in 1817 by a virus, and the industry never recovered. In France they grow hundreds of interesting pear varieties, but here we just have a few - Bosc, Bartlett mainly - and Americans still don't eat many pears. Bosc is an old French pear, and a great fruit I think.

Pomme fruit - pears and apples - continue to ripen and improve after harvest. Stone fruit - peaches, plums, cherries, apricots, nectarines - start deteriorating as soon as they are picked. Pears ripen faster at room temperature for a couple of days, everything else should always be refrigerated, with 37 degrees being best. The big packing houses use "CA" storage - controlled atmosphere. They extract the oxygen and arrest ripening. In theory they keep forever, then, but I am not a fan of that. They look good, but don't taste like much after a while.

Apples fall into three broad categories - summer, fall and winter. Summer apples come in during August and early September. They are only good for a week give or take. Fall apples are harvested in September and will keep a month or so. Winter apples come on October, and almost all of those improve in storage and depending on the variety can keep 6-12 months. Almost all of them are much better 1-3 months after harvest.

LOL. I should start a column here - "Mike's Produce Tips" or "Cooking with the Socialists."

Well developers started the pear growing, so it's no wonder... ::) I usually buy them diced for the kids (they love them), but I'll have to look at the package to see where they're grown. The pears that people sent at the holidays from Harry & David's weren't the best this year.

Well developers started the pear growing, so it's no wonder... ::) I usually buy them diced for the kids (they love them), but I'll have to look at the package to see where they're grown. The pears that people sent at the holidays from Harry & David's weren't the best this year.


Harry and David's is a hustle. They contract with produce warehouses around the country, and when you order pears the order goes to the local warehouse in your area. They take the same fruit they send to the supermarkets, put it in a Harry and David's box, and you pay three to ten times as much for it as you would if you bought the same fruit at the supermarket.

Must be all that fancy tissue paper they wrap around the pears, huh. The secretaries at my husband's office were not amused. Crappy fruit for Christmas, and now I learn all the good fruit is still sitting in cold storage.

Some confusion here but a reasonable amount of alarm:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Goodbye-farmers-markets-C-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090303-287.html

They're doing it in other areas of commerce as well. The childrens' clothing designers publicized new regs this spring that would have increased testing required on all clothes sold in the US. There are a fair number of creative moms who can sew, and sell their home-made designs on eBay. I've bought many for my kids over the years because it's nice to have unique things that don't look like every other Gap-clad kid on the street. I've never had a problem with quality and often re-sell them to other moms when my kids outgrow them. There was enough of a outcry that the bill has been put on hold for a year to collect more info. This (http://islandgirlbags.blogspot.com/2009/01/cpsia-boutique-felony-launch.html) is just the first blog I pulled up with a mom discussing the proposed changes.

They shouldn't piss off a bunch of stay-at-home moms. We have plenty of time on our hands to be really pesky!

More news from the food front.

Organic is in trouble. There is not enough domestic production to feed any more than a fraction of one percent of the public, and the imports of phony organic are not happening. People are not, or cannot pay a premium for it, and that was what the whole scam was fueled by - people willing to pay a higher price for inferior produce if it had an "organic" label on it.