As California’s April-October peach season climaxes, Chico State University’s student-benefiting “U-pick peaches” harvest has closed in communal style.  

All this is thanks to a favorable agricultural environment of northern California which nurtures wine grapes, honey and peaches.

Each August, the local community gets a chance to harvest peaches at the university, with the 2024 price at $3 a pound. 

The university’s harvest in particular welcomes families, children and adults, who show up with wagons to pick their fill. 

2024’s activity coincided with retreating summer temperatures, which hovered around 70ºF (21ºC), low enough for even kid pickers.

Chico State’s Fay Peaches

This year, Chico State was offering only the Fay Elberta cultivar, a golden yellow type with a red skin flush.

The heirloom peach variety, whose discovery was 1915, mainly serves as a choice baking or pie-making ingredient.

Its very make up is another factor that endears it to many, such as a freestone that comes out softly after splitting the fruit open. 

Picking Funds Learning

Revenue from picking revenue the Fay Elbertas goes to the orchard Program of the university’s College of Agriculture.

Chico State channels the funds onto internship investments where agricultural students learn firsthand from practical farm experience.

So committed are the “you-pickers” each summer harvest that the event lasts but a single day of exhaustive yields. 

You-pick services are popular in the Western states and pointedly in June 2024, a similar Oregon strawberry harvest ended successfully.

In short, the end of the “u-pick” peach season at the university farm in Chico has benefited agricultural students. And as the statistics below show, California, though not the official “Peach State,” leads U.S.’ production.

California Peach Statistics 

California produces the most peaches in the United States, at between 70% and 76% of the federal production total. In 2022, for instance, the Golden State’s output reached 475,000 tonnes out of a national estimate of 625,680 tonnes,. This according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

Does California only produce freestone peaches? 

The state leads in the yields of not only freestones but clingstone peaches (where flesh adheres to the stone). According to the University of California in Davis, the clingstone area in 2013 was 24,000 acres that yielded 368,000 tonnes.  The freestone area, on the other hand, was 22,000 acres, with a production total of 280,000 tonnes in 2013.