Many California growers can’t find buyers as the industry produces more wine grapes than the market wants. Wine consumption is declining globally as people drink less.
It’s harvest time in California wine country, but many growers are struggling to sell their grapes as changing drinking habits have caused demand to plunge. The decline is forcing some growers to tear out vineyards that their families have grown for generations.
Wine sales have decreased by more than 20% over a five-year period, causing prices paid for grapes to drop and prompting California growers to take roughly a quarter of the state’s vineyards out of production. Many growers are having to decide whether to harvest at a loss, leave grapes on the vine or replace vineyards with crops more in demand such as almonds, walnuts, pistachios and olives.
Third-generation grower Bill Berryhill said it means another year of losing money and wasting hundreds of tons of healthy grapes.
Seems pretty obvious to me to convert it to food. World needs calories.
The world does not have a shortage of calories. The world has a shortage of getting food to the people who need it, but so so so much food is thrown away. Wine grapes would be incredibly low on the list to try and save. What would help far more is stepping in to help cut down on food waste and increase processes to get food from where it is to the people that do need it.
And fix wealth inequality.
Might have been more true in the past but with wars and droughts and crazy weather, well you can see the effect on food prices.
Every single famine or other food shortage that happens these days is a policy choice. We don’t have to sacrifice to Ceres anymore to ensure a good harvest.
We’ve had mechanized agriculture and on-demand global trade for over a century now.
Even with climate change, food is expensive right now because of things like the War in Ukraine (produces about 20% of the world’s grain and 30% of the world’s sunflower oil) making it difficult to distribute the food that people are still growing in Ukraine.
See my links in other comments.
Except we still have a huge surplus of calories. It would take a LOT more destruction of farms and bad weather for us to actually have a calorie deficit. Wars destroy logistics more than anything else, and logistics are what is needed to get food to hungry people.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/commodities/articles/jpmorgan-warns-global-food-crisis-183000431.html
https://globalcommunityweekly.substack.com/p/wont-be-short-lived-jpmorgan-warns
https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/sustainability/climate/food-security-under-pressure
These articles are everywhere. Don’t use the past when when thinking about future conditions.
Food prices are not rising out of scarcity of food.
Or rewilded solar farms. That requires not trying to make enough money to drown the sun from the sky though
Agriculture land in california is pretty damn productive. Solar can go in deserts.
It can’t. The us doesn’t have barren deserts, and running power out to them isn’t cost efficient. The disruption to wildlife is pretty severe too.
Just put solar on existing structures in the cities. There’s plenty of sun to go around and existing power infrastructure.
Mixed solar-crop fields have been reported to do pretty well. Though I haven’t seen for grape+solar.
It depends heavily on the crop, and on the climate. I believe it works well for lettuce, for example, because lettuce needs shade, but other crops (I think ones with more sugar in them, hence need more sunlight) are adversely affected
Nutrition and flavor is complex. One study I’ve seen stated that sheep grazing on solar grass fields ate almost 1/3 less grass but gained equivalent weight to sheep eating non-solar grass because the overall nutrition was higher.
If high sugar was purely sunlight and CO2 crops would be getting sweeter with human-made greenhouse gasses and thinning ozone.
Crops are getting sweeter but I think it’s more due to selective breeding
aka raisin land :)
(simple stupid pun/joke)
Only because I did the math a while back - dedicating around 10% of the land we grow corn on for ethanol - converting that to solar - would give us enough energy to supply 100% of US can transporation energy needs (i.e. if everyone converted to electric cars). We’d have 90% of that corn-grown-for-ethanol land freed up to do whatever, and not impact any land used to grow food we (or animals) eat.
That said, using desert for solar also makes tons of sense.
Very little corn grown in the US is actually edible. It’s mostly used for oils and sugars.
Not that I know much about it, but you don’t grow corn in the most productive areas. You grow that in hardier areas. California is the best for fruit and vegetables.
Another reason not to use our best ag land for solar. :)
Solar and crops can do exist, some crops thrive in indirect light and use less water.
The irony is, a lot of agricultural land in California is quasi desert (central valley). They irrigate.
Part of the problem being ridiculous contracts that prevent the grapes from being sold or given away even if the person who contracted them decides they don’t want the grapes
Not that knowledgable but I think wine grapes don’t make good food. What I meant is that you convert the land to grow something else.