I suppose it’s supply and demand. Here sweet corn is sold from the backs of trucks but peaches are too hard to grow.
I suspect Amado is one of very few local peach growers where he’s at.
Another member messaged me and told me there is an outfit in his locale which sells peaches by the bag. $20 for eight peaches. Doesn’t sound like you’d be beating their door down to buy those, but apparently they do a brisk business.
You just made me appreciate what I’ve got all the more. At that price, I’d never know what a peach tasted like unless I grew my own.
We are one of three peach growers in the entire metro Phoenix area. The other two are selling at $6-7 dollar a pound. We average closer to $4 for what we offer. For us its $7 for a jumbo 4 pack or $3 for a medium 4 pack.
Yes I know its a premium but understand how little real fresh good tasting farm produce is available out here. No one grows here anymore, most are under the impression that its not even possible! We are quite blessed for the prices that we are able to get because it allows us to be profitable at this little family venture. We mainly do it to be a service to the community more than anything. It allows us to meet so many neat people and share what homesteading in the Phoenix valley used to be like 50-100 years ago.
The Phoenix valley was settled for agriculture. We damned the rivers and used canals to irrigate crops all over the valley. It traditionally was a very productive area for alfalfa, corn, citrus, and cotton. At one point years ago we were the alfalfa kings of the entire country and exported it all over the world. But otherwise we grew all sorts of produce that we in need locally. All the types of typical produce can be grown here successfully with the right timing and techniques. One of the big reasons that its such a disappearing art is that we have been rapidly paving over all the good fields that could be irrigated with cheap river water for subdivisions. Almost all the good farmland now lies underneath housing. Trying to grow with city tap water is a real chore and very expensive. Thats the sum of why no one is growing here much.
I just can’t resist telling you about the folks I told Olpea about. They started a business called the Peach Truck. THey have a web site you can check and also do tons of newspaper and other advertising, wherein they post the location where “the Peach Truck” will be. They have an old 1950’s farm truck with wooden rails, and they will go to a different town every day, or sometimes different locations in the same town. They started out in Nashville, TN and would drive out to the smaller surrounding towns on different days. Now they have even spread into other STATES! (I imagine there is more than 1 peach truck by now). As Olpea mentioned, they sell their peaches in little brown paper bags with a picture of the farm truck on it. Overall, they have done an incredible job with their marketing. Its very clever and has been wildly successful. Seriously, people literally line up at the locations they are going to be at. The owners also frequently go onto the daytime local news shows and do little cooking segments with peaches, and always work in some advertising and mentioning where they will be that day and the rest of the week. Clever.
But what stuns me is how absolutely incredibly outrageous their prices are. First, they promote all their peaches as “REAL GEORGIA PEACHES” and make a big deal out of that, as if a peach from Georgia is much much better than from anywhere else. Then they sell their peaches by the bag, not by the pound. That little bag usually has 8 peaches and never more than 10 and it sells for $18 to $20 (not sure why the price changes or what makes it one price or the other). Think about that…that is about $2 PER PEACH!!! And people line up waiting to pay that. But here is the real astounding part. They also have started taking advance orders for peaches on their web site. These peaches come in a box that has 13 round holes in it, and each peach is individually wrapped in a sheet of foam and put in one of the holes. The price of that box with 13 peaches? $34.50!!! That is almost $3 per peach. That doesn’t include shipping, either, so I’m sure if you have them shipped it would be over $40- so MORE THAN $3 per peach. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
I suppose they have the right to charge whatever people will pay, and since peaches aren’t a necessity for life (except to all of us of course) I don’t suppose I can accuse them of price gouging, but it sure feels like it when I see all those people buying those $2 and $3 peaches. CRAZY.
If $3 per peach just seems too high to believe, here is a link to their web site:
UPDATE- Turns out shipping is either $8 or $22 depending on what state you live in. So, their box of 13 peaches cost $56.50 for a lot of people. Are you kidding me? That is close to $5 PER PEACH ($4.30). And these people are selling them and growing their company like crazy. If I seem overly amazed by this its because I am!
Olpea, Did you graft your Lady Nacy or did you buy it bare root?
Do they even grow the peaches they sell? Lots of promotion on the website, but no information on how they are grown or the variety.
I find it amusing that for a place selling “real Georgia peaches” they don’t do their truck sales in either GA or SC. Of course, promoting them as “real GA peaches” would go over like a lead balloon in SC where we know we’re the ‘real’ peach state. 
NO!!! They don’t. They say they have “special connections” to Georgia peach growers because the husband (its a husband-wife team that owns it) used to live in Georgia. I know for 100% certain that one weekend they were set up at the main Nashville Farmers Market and ran completely out of peaches and went to another vendor right there at the market and bought more peaches and took them back and put them in their little bags and sold them at the high prices. I watched that happen. Also, they were selling Georgia peaches in early May (first Sat of the month), and I’m 99.99% certain that there were no Georgia peaches ripe at that time. So I’m a little suspicious of their operation.
If I was selling at a farmers market, I would simply state boxes mixed and matched by customers are on sale for double the price of the boxes as they are. Just have a sign explaining that this is to cover the cost of extra bruising of fruit left behind. I don’t think you’d be selling a whole bunch of the self packed boxes and it wouldn’t be offensive- at least by NY standards. .
That is flat amazing! We have actually been kicking around doing something similar for sometime. Its all about the marketing folks. During the season we hold alot of markets at a local boutique dairy that has gotten big selling their milk in old fashioned glass bottles at a real premium. Great small family operation trying to do something different. But yeah its marketing.
I wonder if they’re at least discerning enough to sell good quality peaches. It’d be sad if they were from a grocery store or something.
Tuff,
I bought two bare root (from Adams County) but I’ve since made a few copies. Looks like I have 5 trees total.
THey give away samples and I’ve tried them. The two times I tasted them they were average- better than grocery store peaches but not anything spectacular at all. SInce they are having them shipped hundreds of miles from Georgia, there is no doubt that they are picking them before the absolute peak of ripeness. For $3 per peach they should be pulling them off the tree and handing them to you, IMHO!
Hey, my customers probably pay more than $3 a peach for what I put on their trees when it’s all said and done. This is show biz!
Of course it is a more exciting show when you are picking the peaches off your own trees.
Thanks Olpea, I thought ACN had a minimum order.
I just read their Website and for retail customers, Adams has no minimum order, although they charge a surcharge for orders of 5 trees or less.