The Fuzzy History of the Georgia Peach (2017)

Peach orchard at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Fruit and Tree Nut Research Laboratory, Byron, Georgia

(William Thomas Okie)

Peaches (Prunus persica) were introduced to North America by Spanish monks around St. Augustine, Florida in the mid-1500s. In the 1960s the commercial peach industry in Georgia and South Carolina nearly ground to a halt due to a syndrome known as peach tree short life, which caused trees to suddenly wither and die in their first year or two of bearing fruit. Peach pickers being driven to the orchards, Muscella, Georgia, 1936, photographed by Dorothea Lange

(Library of Congress)

Peach labor has always been—and for the foreseeable future will remain—hand labor.

Source: www.smithsonianmag.com