Where have all the peaches gone...?
Signs of a summer freeze (thanks, ICE)
Peach season has always been the high point of a South Carolina summer for me. With so many low points (heat, humidity, mold, bugs), I am yearning for a reason to venture outside by late July/early August, and the peach orchards have always provided it.
Summer u-picks with my mom trained me in the traditions of going direct to the farmer for the highest quality. And usually by mid-August, farmstand tables are buckling under the weight of all that ripe soft fruit coming to market, with the last of the blueberries and the late blackberries battling for space with scuppernongs, muscadines, plums in a dizzying variety of forms and colors, and, of course, the Queen of them all: Prunus persica, the scrumptious, the ambrosial peach.
So many of my earliest childhood memories involve the small orchard of fruit trees—apples, pears, plums, and peaches both yellow and white—at my grandparents’ farm. So many that it’s long been a tradition of mine to drive out into the countryside to find the freshest and the most delicious fruit for canning and cobblers, preserves—and of course, eating.
But this year I found myself stymied…
A 40-minute drive west to a favorite outdoor market in Mauldin yielded zero peaches. That’s right. Zero.1 Driving 30 minutes in the opposite direction, to Newberry, was better but not by much. There were maybe four or five bushel baskets on display, when normally the bushels would have been stacked double and stretched the whole length of both sides of the tables. Perhaps 10 pints waited on the counter next to the cash register, but they were greenish and hard and had little fragrance.
I bought some blackberries and some shelled pink-eyed peas and made my way home, but I was definitely unsettled. What’s going on? By the time I made a final foray, this time 40 minutes south to a peach stand—normally flush with fruit— between Greenwood and Abbeville only to find another anemic display, I was actively alarmed.
Is it possible there’s … a peach shortage? I wondered.
Turns out I was on to something. According to the farm trade website Farmonaut:
As of June 28, 2025, the United States is experiencing a significant peach shortage, sending ripples across the entire agriculture, farming, and forestry sectors. This situation has emerged from a potent combination of adverse weather conditions, labor shortages, increased production costs, and economic disruptions, each intensifying the pressure on peach production in key regions such as Georgia, South Carolina, and California’s Central Valley. (Emphasis original to source.)
So … adverse weather conditions? Yeah, we had some late frosts—not particularly severe or long-lived.
But those labor shortages, tucked in there in the midst of all that other stuff? That’s what my editors back in the day used to call “burying the lede.”
Of course, we’re experiencing labor shortages in the current ICE Age. Labor availability for the season hovers at 65%-80% of need, the Farmonaut report said. Meanwhile, here’s a lede from the June 30 Newsweek:
Farm owners and industry representatives report that up to 70 percent of workers stopped reporting to work following Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions, resulting in significant crop losses and financial strain. (Emphasis mine.)
"We do not have enough workforce in the United States to do manual work, to do those jobs that other people are not qualified to do and do not want to do it," [said] Alexandra Sossa, CEO of Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project.
"We do not have enough farm workers to grow the food we eat every day… We do not have enough workers to go to the meatpacking processing industries and factories to produce, to pack the food that we are eating."
Red state MAGAts might have thought we could simultaneously target all the people most intimately involved with our care and feeding—the farmworkers, the meatpackers, the hospitality and food and beverage folks—without consequences. I was never so deluded.
Still, shortages. They really snuck up on me. All summer, we’ve been eating mostly out of the back yard and the community garden, with the occasional trip to a produce stand. But once I started to think about it a bit harder, it occurred to me that the bins at those summer produce markets have been a lot less crammed with goodies. Certain crops seem plentiful; while others—peaches, cherries especially—seem hard to find.
The produce at the grocer’s has always been a problem—it’s one of the great ironies of living in an agricultural county surrounded by fields and small farms that the food is terrible. And I’m not joking or exaggerating. Our town, small and rural, is an official USDA food desert; and when the produce semi finally rolls into our city limits, we know from what rolls off of it that that truck has hit every larger town in a three-country radius first. Now in the midst of the farm policy nuclear winter that is the second Trump administration, what was already a bad situation appears to be rapidly worsening, right before my eyes…
And none of these melancholy reflections were helping me in my quest. I still needed those peaches. Needed them!
Finally, I did what I should have done when I hit my first roadblock. I called my pal Justine.
Here’s the thing about the South—that stuff about Southern hospitality? Largely a myth. If you’re like me, and you move to a small town without family or church connections, you’ll be considered “come yuh” no matter how long you live there. Your best bet is to make friends with a “been yuh.” Then you can kind of sneak in under the radar.
Justine’s people are quintessential “been yuh” folks, literally since the first settlers clawed the land away from the Indians and started planting Presbyterian churches. Cementing her status, she’s also married to the publisher of the local newspaper, to which she contributes half the stories and the vast majority of the photos. So yeah, Jussie knows every little thing and everybody, and she had an immediate answer for me.
“Cam Goggins.”
“Huh?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“Cam Goggins—he’s been bringing a big old truck of peaches to the farmer’s market every Saturday. And they’re AMAZING. So juicy and sweet. You have to get there early, though, because he always sells out.”
How about that, I thought. All that running around and she’s knows someone personally with great peaches.
We went off on a bit of a tangent about Mr. Goggins. I wondered aloud if he was the man I’d been negotiating with for the better part of a year to get a load of manure delivered. No, Jussie assured me, that was his brother, Dan. Dan and Cam had split the farm when they inherited, she explained. Mr. Cam took the peach orchards while Mr. Dan took the chickens and cattle (hence the manure, natch).
I hedged about Saturdays—that’s my community garden day—but Jussie had a trump card to play. “They’ve got a self-serve stand right at the entrance of the farm,” she said triumphantly, texting me the map location. “One of those honor system things.”
“It’s right here in the county?” I nearly screeched, mildly scandalized at the thought of all the miles I’d put on my truck looking for a decent peach.
And that is how I came to be driving down the Greenwood Highway just a few miles from the Saluda River, once again searching for peaches. And as I drove there was…
… a turbulence of memory eddying at the corners of my consciousness. I’m a woman in my forties, blanching and peeling fruit, laughing and swapping lies at a peach canning “bee” among friends—I’m a young woman in my 20s, trying desperately to play it cool as I absorb the kick from my Great Aunt Ludie’s peach wine—finally, I’m a very young girl, only six or thereabouts, standing on the back porch at my grandparents' farm—
This porch is a screened porch and I recall how spacious it seemed, ringed with large windows and deep shelves beneath. This porch was my secret pathway past nosy adults who were always dipping into a little girl's business. Just out the door and down the stairs was an apple tree with tart green fruit in fall. Beside the tree was the smokehouse, which no longer held the precious sides of ham or ropes of sausage but which still smelled —deliciously—like it. Beyond that was the hay pasture where the grasses were taller than my head and I could hide and play for hours ...
Mawmaw kept her treasured Maytag washer with the wringer attachment on this porch. I was to tangle with that wringer and lose another time, but at this moment I am focused on the shelves behind it, shelves that are groaning with the weight of many quart jars filled with peaches. Row upon row of them, rose and gold, blushing as if newly picked and magicked behind the glass.
Mawmaw had told me, Go pick a jar and I’ll make you a pie, baby. This was her promise to me, and Mawmaw never broke her promises ... certainly not when it came to pie and never when it came to little girls.
Mr. Goggins farm was less than 20 minutes from my front door, just north of Waterloo on a stretch of road that felt more like town— exurban I guess you’d call it—than rural. A succession of neat homes fashioned of Greenwood County brick widely spaced on half-acre and one-acre lots. Before I knew it, a sign alerted me that I was there.
I turned in and drove past a lane of fuschia crepe myrtles to … a very fancy self-serve stand.
The screen door creaked loudly as I opened it, in a sound reminiscent of those long ago summers “down home,” and my nostrils filled with the honeyed, tangy, unmistakable odor of perfectly ripe peaches.
OK, to be fair, they had a few bushel baskets of white peaches. But they were clingstone… and not yellow. I should add in general that I’m not saying peaches are completely unavailable. I’m saying we’re not seeing the normal abundance of the season in 2025. There are upwards of 40 different varieties of peaches grown in SC and GA— they’re different sizes, levels of sweetness and tartness, yellow and white, clingstone and free, early season and late. This year I’m not seeing numbers or variety or quality. The fruit are nearly green some places; others have nothing but “seconds”; still others only have peaches from California. It’s tough out there.
Perhaps I should take off for a peach search on the Georgia backroads, considering I have lived here for 1 year and 10 months, and have yet to find a Georgia peach. SC peaches are plentiful, though, and quite delicious.