Where did all the peaches go?

Plenty of farmland, not a peach tree in sight

The Jersey peach has been a landscape fixture going back to the 1600s. Back in 1890, the state had more than 30,000 acres of peaches, and more than 4 million peach trees. But, this peach tree-free hilltop view of western Jersey in April 2025 is not atypical. New Jersey peach acreage fell 59% over the last 20 years. Just over 3,000 acres of peaches remain in the state.

This month, peaches bloomed in my yard and here and there around New Jersey, which has me dreaming of delicious days ahead. I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite fruit, but if I had to, peaches or perhaps another stone fruit like Santa Rosa plums, would likely win out. They are synonymous with my understanding of summer. There is absolutely nothing like the quintessential summer experience of enjoying a sun-warmed peach, preferably straight off the tree with your toes in the dirt. If you don’t have sticky, sweet juice running down your chin and threatening your clothes, you’re doing it wrong.

There were a lot of fruit trees in my childhood. I grew up in southern California in one of the housing blocks they built right into old citrus, avocado, and pomegranate groves after WWII. They didn’t even bother to cut the trees down - just built the rows of little stucco houses right in amongst the trees. Those trees were pretty old and gnarly by the time I was a kid and there wasn’t much commercial agriculture left in the Valley. But, I remember sitting on the rug in my first grade classroom for some sort of geography lesson where Mrs. Hall pointed at various regions of the country - ‘Now this is the Corn Belt (hello, I-states), this here is the breadbasket (hello, eastern WA), and we live here in CA, The Fruit Basket of the World!’ We all cheered with pride and proceeded to our seats where we got to eat various fruits delivered to the school from neighboring Ventura and Kern counties. I mean, when the choices are corn, bread, or fruit, it’s clear we were the lucky ones born in paradise.

In my memories there was fruit everywhere - loquats in the parkways, oranges in the parks, lemons and ollalaberries at my grandparents, plums, figs and mulberries at one aunt’s, blackberries in my dad’s backyard, and then there was my mom’s yard. Her yard is small. I would guess it consists of a 20’-wide u-shaped strip around her house to the block walls that separate all those ~1000-sq ft. low-slung stucco houses from their neighbors in LA. But, it had an apricot tree, a lemon tree, a lime tree, a tangerine tree, a tangelo tree, a navel orange tree, a fuerte avocado, a valencia orange, a fig, and a pomegranate. We had so much fruit all the time. The freezer was always overflowing with repurposed jars of frozen juice, and pre-measured baggies of chopped fruit to use in pies or other recipes. We rarely went anywhere without one of those full-sized brown paper grocery sacks of whatever we had excess of at the moment. Christmas presents were often lemon bars because the quantity of lemons carpeting the kitchen counter in December was always ridiculous.

The trades I was always most excited about were our apricots for my aunt’s plums. I hated those apricots. Something about the texture, I just couldn’t. But those Santa Rosa plums. Those were to die for. But, amongst all this cornucopia of fruit, no peaches. I think we mostly ate canned or dried peaches in weird windows when other stuff was less abundant. Though, I do recall my aunt making the occasional peach pie, with a lattice top - divine. When I’d inquire about fresh peaches in the grocery store, my mother would reliably wrinkle her nose at both the price and the quality, rejecting on the grounds of likely mealiness and bad value. She was right. A bad peach is really bad. You cannot even turn it into an edible pie.

Then, twenty years ago, I moved to the East coast and met real peaches.

If you have not met a fresh Jersey or Pennsylvania peach sometime between July and September, please mark your calendar and make plans. You have not lived yet.

In 2009, my husband and I bought our first house, a dilapidated 14’-wide brick row house with a view of rusting stacks of Bethlehem Steel from the front door. For those unaware with this region - this is southeast PA - prime peach growing land. So, my first move, probably before unpacking boxes, was to plant 2 peach trees in the backyard. He was still inside fixing the plumbing so our only bathtub would stop draining into the living room ceiling, and I was out digging holes for our future fruit. Perhaps most remarkably, despite the fact that we only got to live in that house for 3 years, we enjoyed many peaches because the trees grew so quickly and were so prolific. Also remarkably, he did not divorce me for my planting> plumbing priorities.

What is now our village’s NJ Transit stop once hosted the Annandale Peach Exchange, where farmers would bring their crop by the wagonload to send in to NYC by train. New Jersey farmers have been supplying New Yorkers with peaches for almost 4 centuries.

Several years later, I learned we would be moving to Hunterdon county, New Jersey. Me being me, I looked to see what would grow well in my future home garden. Imagine my delight upon discovering that the region has a long and rich history of produce cultivation, with reports dating back to 1683 of “peaches available in New York City by the wagonloads from New Jersey orchards.” Not only that, but the village where we settled sprung up as a railway town in the 1850s. The station stop hosted the Annandale Peach Exchange where wagonloads of peaches were bought, sold, and shipped through the early part of the 20th century. I might not be moving back to the produce paradise of California, but abundant peaches were possible.

This delightfully nerdy history of the NJ peach industry that appears to have been published in the mid-1990s recounts the deep roots and 20th century progress breeding better peaches at Hunterdon county’s very own Snyder Research Farm. The author notes early 20th century peach yields were only ~55 lbs per tree. As someone with 3 peach trees, this metric felt validating in another way - when the flood of summer peaches arrives, it is absolutely impossible to keep up with. If we’re getting the early 20th century yields, that’s 165 lbs of peaches. The recent yield record for NJ came in 2010, and would equate to ~274 lbs of peaches from our 3 trees. 

How does this compare to the average American’s peach consumption? Americans are notoriously short on their fruit (and vegetable) consumption. Could peaches help plug that gap?

So, I decided to dig in on what’s going on with peaches in the U.S. How has this crop and its markets changed? Might this Administration’s tariffs provide some sort of boost to this prolific and delicious fruit? If there were more than 4 million peach trees over approximately 30,000 acres of New Jersey in 1890, how many are there now?

It turns out, like nearly every other specialty crop with the possible exception of almonds and pistachios, peaches are having a hard time in the U.S.

NJ peach production fell steadily over the last 15 years, mostly due to declining acreage.

As of the 2022 USDA Ag Census, there were only 3,323 acres of peaches in New Jersey, down 90% from the crop’s heyday. For the first time in a century, New Jersey slipped out of the top 5 producing states, losing out to neighboring Pennsylvania. 

U.S. peach production was somewhat volatile year-to-year for several decades averaging ~1.2 million tons per year. But, starting in 2010, there has been a precipitous drop in peach production - down more than 50%.

But, as I peered at the data, it quickly became obvious that the plight of peaches in New Jersey was not unique. Nationally, peach production has fallen nearly 50% since 2010. Peach production is highly concentrated, with the top 7 peach producing states together accounting 99% of the 2023 U.S. Peach crop. Among them, California, which is in a class of its own in terms of acreage, production, and yields saw major drops in all 3 metrics. Why? Are people not eating fruit? Are they just eating imported fruit? Is extreme weather destroying peaches?

USDA Ag Census data on peach acreage documents large and widespread declines in peach acrage over the last 25 years.

Well, Americans are still pitiful fruit consumers. As of 2017, the most recent year for which the USDA has published data, Americans only ate a little over 40% of the recommended daily intake of fruits. Down from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s when we almost hit 50% of the recommended fruit intake, thanks mostly to our prodigious fruit juice intake. 

And, as I’ve pondered before, is it supply or is it demand that’s responsible for our inadequate fruit consumption? 

If it is supply, trade’s certainly not helping. Unlike the blueberries covered before, trade is neither meaningfully displacing domestic supply, nor boosting overall peach consumption. Unlike other fruits, the U.S. actually exports more peaches than in imports, mostly to Canada and Taiwan. But, both have been trending downward for 25 years. No trade deficit here, President Trump. It appears the beleaguered peach farmers need access to export markets to move their crop. 

Despite falling production and acreage, the US remains a net exporter of peaches.

So, what the heck is going on? Why do peaches appear to be going the way of the dodo bird in the U.S.?

It’s not cheap imports killing domestic supply. 

It’s not that Americans already eat too much fruit. 

I decided to look more closely at acreage and yield data. That cute history of the NJ peach industry noted that while the NJ peach crop averaged about 2 million bushels or 50,000 tons per year, it was volatile, noting that the peak crop 3 million bushels in 1971 only to be followed by the smallest at 500,000 bushels (12,500 tons) in 1972. Is this volatility the achilles heel of this crop?

Looking at recent peach yields across the top peach producing states, three things are immediately obvious. First, something is different about California. **queue the jokes - I’ve heard them all** It is true, California is in a league of its own. But, what is going on in California as it relates to peach yields is that California primarily grows/grew a different kind of peaches - processing peaches. These peaches are prolific, but lower quality and primarily make their way into entirely different products than the primarily fresh market-bound peaches grown in the rest of the country. 

Fresh market peach yields are lower and much more volatile than processed peaches, which is what most of California’s peach crop was.

Second, peach yields in California appear to be going down the toilet. Is it pests? Is it the drought? Is it climate change? Well, none of those issues are helping for sure, but this dramatic near term drop is caused primarily by some shifting market dynamics - the rise of almonds and the fall of the processing peach. For anyone not aware, almonds are basically peaches. They look very similar. Their needs are very similar. In fact, my third peach tree was supposed to be an almond tree and the nursery apparently mistakenly shipped me a peach tree. It’s delicious, so no one cares, but it is most definitely not an almond. But, a nursery mistake is not what happened in CA. In CA, there has been booming demand for almonds, ~70% of which we export, so many peach groves were converted to almond groves as they aged out. Second, the market for processed peaches - canned, frozen, etc. - has been on a steep decline. No one’s eating canned or frozen produce anymore, so when those acres of clingstone peaches reach the end of their productive lives, if they go back to peaches they go to the much lower yielding freestone peaches for marketing fresh. And, though we’re eating more fresh produce than we used to, we’re nowhere near replacing the quantity we used to eat in processed form. More matters, y’all. For all of our health, we should perhaps take another look at the possibilities of processed produce.

The third issue screaming forth from the bottom portion of that graph is yield volatility. Peach yields vary wildly year to year. For growers looking to make a predictable income off of their acres, peaches are clearly not it. Looking at those roller coaster yields I can hardly blame commercial farmers from walking back from this crop. If I were looking to make a living from farming, peaches are not what I would plant. 

It is easy to see why California growers have opted for almonds over peaches. The two crops have remarkably similar requirements, but almonds are mechanically harvested and have better prices.

This is too bad for those of us who love peaches. But, the good news is there are 85 million single family homes in the US, most of which are located in states where peaches can survive and thrive. Even if only half of those households planted a single peach tree in their yard - back, front, side - you do you, and those trees yielded as poorly as the early 20th century Jersey peaches, those trees would yield 1.2 million tons of peaches, or double the 2024 commercial peach crop in the U.S. 

So, if you have a yard, love peaches and live somewhere south and east or west of the Dakotas and Wyoming, plant a peach tree. You could have 20x the average U.S. per capita peach availability right there in your yard. Plenty to eat to your heart’s content and still share sacks with your friends and neighbors without yards. That’d be just peachy, if you ask me. 

Stages of backyard peach joy in New Jersey