How the South tried to redefine itself with peaches

here in the US my state of Georgia is virtually synonymous with the peach we're known as the Peach State the peach is on our license plate a person from Georgia is often referred to as a peach the main street in Atlanta is Peachtree Street giant peaches adorn the side of every highway it's just peach peach peach everywhere the weird thing is is that we don't actually grow that many peaches in Georgia in the u.s. California is the number one peach producer by a mile followed by South Carolina then it's Georgia Trading Places on the list with the likes of New Jersey Pennsylvania and Washington depending on the year and how you measure its peanuts and pecans are far more important crops for Georgia farmers these days so why does everyone associate Georgia with peaches well the history that explains this is the story of how the American South tried to reimagine itself after the Civil War and the end of slavery and that is a process that is still very much ongoing it's a story told by dr. Tom okie historian at Kennesaw State University and son of a career peach breeder his book is called the Georgia Peach culture agriculture and environment in the American South peach trees of course are native to China but they were carried to North America by Spanish monks in the 16th century they planted the trees up and down the Florida coast in the Georgia Sea Islands seeds of it peach trees are really easily transported right they dry out easily and then you can keep them for a long time so it's a great fruit to bring with you and you're colonizing mission and unlike a lot of things peaches were rapidly adopted by Native Americans so like the sutlers he arrived in Jamestown in 1607 found what they what they called Indian peaches because it assumed they were native they were that well-established peach trees are super easy to grow they grow great in lots of climates but particularly here in the south these are from my friends Heidi and Chris's tree over there they just planted it in their backyard a few years ago it is very happy but Europeans did not come to the American South to grow peaches to eat sure there were small farmers and merchants and such but broadly speaking the project of colonization in this part of the continent was commodity agriculture cotton tobacco sugar and other cash crops often grown on huge plantations powered by human beings whom planters abducted and pressed into forced labor in Georgia it was almost entirely cotton plantation owners kept peach trees almost as a side hustle as forage for hogs they use them to make peach and II slave-owners would allow slaves to harvest the peaches and when they were in season for their own subsistence Charles ball a man who escaped slavery in Georgia in 1807 later told about plantation over Ceres letting him in to scavenge the peach orchard is a kind of an eager reward peach harvest usually happens in-between right before the cotton harvest so people would have been sort of at loose ends in terms of farm tasks during that that time period Charles ball though did have the last laugh when peaches formed the basis of his runaway diet anyway so the civil war happened the north ended slavery by force and then southern agriculturalists started to think about life after cotton cotton was everything associated with the Old South cotton was slavery cotton was the get-rich-quick scheme of lesser nobility and gentry from Europe who just wanted to come here and make a killing and then GTFO cotton was environmental degradation years of intensive mono cropping cotton here in the South had totally wrecked the soil the most dramatic example of this is Providence Canyon in southwest Georgia this is just some cellphone video that I took when I was there with my kids that's not rock it's sand this ain't natural these are massive gullies cut in the 19th century by poorly managed runoff from cotton plantations with all the land deforested there were no tree roots to hold this sandy soil together consider instead the peach peaches are not associated with slavery peach trees are beautiful peaches are a delicious food source for the kind of settled self-sufficient society that they have up north peaches do not wreck the soil in the landscape peach cultivation was a high-class hobby turned profession amateur horticulture had for centuries been the refined pursuit of established Country Gentlemen in Europe gentlemen who were rich enough to own science books educated enough to use them and established enough on their land to invest in a crop that wouldn't start to yield anything for years refined country gents is no doubt how the peach growing Berkman's family of Augusta Georgia saw themselves the descendants of minor Belgian nobility their beautifully landscaped fruit land plantation is now wait for it the snooty Augusta National Golf Club that didn't admit black members until 1990 were women until 2012 because the past is not even past but anyway peaches there were boosters in Georgia were eager to sort of claim the fruit there was a lot of rhetoric from from the southern perspective about how you know Queen peaches dethroning King Cotton [Music] this is a new crop for the new south that kind of thing the cultural and economic capital of this new South was Atlanta the agricultural capital you might say was Fort Valley where peach growers would eventually break away to form their own County peach County the climate was right for the trees and the city sat at a confluence of railroads that could bring the fruit to an ever geographically expanding market developing ice icing terminals and refrigeration but Jonathan Ruiz calls the cold chain you know the ability to transport stuff and keep it keep it cold you also see the development of a couple of new varieties the Alberta being the most important around in the 1870s Alberta is a really firm flesh peach you can send a long distance but it maintains a pretty consistent large yellow what people like eventually plump unbruised Alberta peaches and made it all the way up to America's hungriest market New York City and after a long cold northeastern winter Georgia peaches would be the first to make it to New York in the early summer why because peach trees need some cold in the winter in order to fruit what they call chill hours so Georgia is or was the southernmost climate that could grow peaches commercially therefore Georgia peaches would be the first to make it up north every season New Yorkers came to associate peaches with Georgia and then New Yorkers exported that Association to the rest of the country of via the main export of New York mass media but of course this new crop for the new South idea was a bit of a lie because the burgeoning new peach industry could not have functioned without the enduring and ugly legacy of the Old South which we shall discuss in a moment here's some Georgia peaches from my market and real quick I'm gonna scan my receipt with fetch rewards the sponsor of 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the description thanks to fetch rewards for sponsoring the video now back to peaches this new crop for the new South a new crop untainted by king Cotton's associations with slavery except not at all really this new southern peach industry depended on the labor of formerly enslaved people and their descendants peaches are super delicate so to this day they have to be harvested and packed by hand and following Emancipation the South was full of freed men and women systematically denied economic opportunity by the institutional and cultural mechanisms of white supremacy they needed work and peach plantation owners were happy to oblige you need a lot of people to harvest the fruit right but you don't want them the rest of the year you only want them for a certain a short couple of months in the summertime the fact that the South was still growing a lot of cotton meant that there was a large number of people who are in between jobs and a lot of the peach growers were paying cash which is pretty unusual in the rural South a lot of these peach Pickers would have been tenant farmers or sharecroppers most of the year they would have been paid not in money but in the right to farm on land owned by a white landlord and they would have done that in exchange for giving much or most of their crop to the landlord peach picking would have presented sharecroppers with a chance to earn a little cash when they needed it in the down time before the cotton harvest is this kind of tide of Labor like they would they might be kind of just dispersed on farms throughout the region during most the growing season but then during the harvest they would sort of converge and make these little peach cities to harvest the fruit this system of Labor was not long for the world industrial booms of the 20th century offered african-americans more desirable employment opportunities in the cities resulting in the great migration cotton cultivation was finally mechanized by the 1950s and the civil rights movement combated the racial hierarchy embedded in southern agrarian life southern peach growers struggled to find a new labor source until they found one in Mexico folks who were willing to come up for a couple of months for harvest to make some cash and then go away again to this day this is mostly who was packing and picking Georgia peaches Latin Americans on temporary guest worker visas so labor challenges were blown number one - Georgia's peach dominance blow number two was California peach trees grow great in the south a little less so the actual fruit it's super wet and humid here in Georgia which makes the fruit susceptible to all kinds of pests and funguses peaches do better than other fruits because of the fuzz that protects the fruit somewhat from pests but growers still have to spray them constantly it's virtually impossible to grow anything like an organic peach on a commercial scale here you got to drench them in chemicals California in contrast to here is arid nice clean dry air the problem is no water for the roots but the incredible boom of irrigated agriculture in early 20th century California allowed farmers there to deliver cosmetically perfect unblemished produce to American markets year-round and that included peaches plus those farmers had an ample supply of temporary labor from Mexico right up their doorstep and they developed a whole industry of other crops in need of temporary labor at staggered times of the year workers hit those farms in a circuit California now grows like ten times as many peaches as Georgia does California is the real Peach State we just don't call them that because they're also the grape state and the almond State and the lettuce State and the list goes on and on and on and some people worry that climate may be the ultimate undoing of the iconic Georgia Peach peaches need chill hours in the winter in order to fruit and Georgia is getting warmer along with the rest of the world it has not been uncommon in recent years for whole season's crops to be wiped out by increasingly erratic winter and spring weather dr. o key though is skeptical that climate change will kill the Georgia Peach breeders like his dad was had developed new varieties that can handle a warmer winter they're growing those in Florida and far south Georgia now no okie says that the once progressive dream of a georgia peach industry is more likely to be dashed by the increasingly toxic politics of immigration the growers themselves would say you know we get we get pests and diseases those things come and go but if I if I can't get these guest workers from Mexico something happens to that system then I'm not gonna go grow peaches anymore I mean it is kind of striking that all the growers are our family you know multi-generation family growers it's not an industry that people are kind of getting into right indeed as I drove around trying to get footage of peach orchards for this video I struggled because so many Pete Rose have switched acres to things like timber and pecans crops that can be harvested with machines and which steer clear of the messy realities of human labor and that is how something as seemingly innocuous as a Georgia Peach can tell us some mostly unflattering things about the people we are today

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 498,032

Keywords: peaches, georgia peach, georgia peaches, food history, peach history, southern food, southern agriculture, climate change, immigration, guest worker, h-2a visa

Id: kCHdp7RpiwA

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020