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Let’s Talk It Out To Fight for Fair Crop Prices

Carol Miller By Carol Miller|October 26, 2022

A grower called me yesterday to discuss some issues he’s concerned about. He says one topic could get him blacklisted by retail buyers, so he asked me to keep his name anonymous. That topic? Crop prices.

Consumers are paying a lot more for their produce this year, creating a boom economy for just about everyone in the food industry. Except for farmers.

We’ve all heard the news stories about soaring food prices. Even though vegetable and fruit prices are up, if you hunt up charts for how much each category is up, you’ll quickly find that vegetables are at or near the bottom of the list.

Compared to 2021, August 2022 vegetable prices rose 7.6%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A nice amount, and higher than most of 2022. Eggs rose 39.8%, however. Dairy was up 16.2%. Meat prices have been falling for the past couple of months but were still 10.6% higher.

Meanwhile, produce growers pay the same increased costs for fertilizer, shipping, and fuel that all sectors pay.

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The only way to address the topic, this grower argues, is for farmers to band together on crop pricing. No one wants to fix prices, he says. But there should be base prices per crop, per season. A line where prices do not go below.

One of his farming neighbors recently retired in his 80s. The poor man has almost no money, despite working hard his whole life. He was a grower who always had a better price than everyone else. And in the twilight years of his life, he has nothing to show for it.

Personally, I’m not sure it’s possible to get independent-minded growers to work together on something like prices. But there’s a lot of merit in discussing the issue with fellow growers.

It’s a lot like breaking the rule many corporations have about not discussing salaries. If employees compare notes, they’ll have to deal with demands for better pay from those not earning as much as a peer.

If growers are talking about the retail purchase prices, it will help your negotiations with your buyers. You know you aren’t being unreasonable in asking for a better deal, because you’ve heard about what your fellow growers are also dealing with.

It’s time to stop worrying about being undercut by competitors. You land your contracts and your sales on much more than competitive prices. Your quality, your reliability, and your production practices. America needs its vegetables grown here by those who pump money back into the local economy. Ask for more. You might be surprised by what you gain.

Oh, One More Thing

Here are some of the economic reports on food prices and farm costs making news this year.

  • 0.8% Month-to-month food price increase in August 2022 — the lowest increase of the year.*
  • 13.5% Year-to-year food price increase in August 2022.*
  • 9.4% The amount fruit and vegetable prices rose from August 2021 to August 2022. *
USDA chart tracking fertilizer prices for the last decade

Graphic courtesy of USDA

* Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Carol Miller is the Lead Editor of American Vegetable Grower®, a Meister Media Worldwide publication. See all author stories here.

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Avatar for Matt Matt says:
October 29, 2022 at 12:08 pm

As someone who can attest to this article, prices vowing to wholesale are in some cases LOWER than they were last year.

The problem? One or two LARGE growers have tried to push most of the smaller growers put by doing the following things:

1. Buying “excess” produce from other local growers at well below wholesale prices. Then selling said produce as their own “locally” grown.
2. Using tactic one above the large grower, now also acting as a distributor, offers below wholesale prices to local and regional grocers. Said grocers like the additional profit margin and keep their prices the same or slightly raise them.
3. Tactic one and two makes it difficult to impossible for local growers to market their crop while still making ANY money. Remember the large grower bought the “excess” at below the cost of production.

Consumers don’t know or don’t care where there food comes from at the larger chain grocers. The organic, co-op, etc. type stores all have contracts with specific growers and DO NOT buy from anyone else. Any backfill with conventional produce they will purchase from a warehouse thinking it is not worth the time to deal with yet another local grower for non-organic produce.

I don’t know what the solution is. Farmers will never work together. There will always be “The One” who undercuts everyone else. The market will continue to consolidate until only a handful of large corporate growers control the lions share of the market. THEN, using their market dominance and lack of competition, prices will be ratcheted up.

NEVER believe that we can’t grow enough food to feed the planet. I have thrown hundreds of thousands of lbs of fresh produce (tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, eggplant) on the compost pile over the last couple years. I could not even sell it due to numbers 1, 2 and 3 above.

My wife and I are contemplating either exiting the produce business and switching to conventional corn, bean rotation or exiting farming all together. We can’t pay double on all inputs and get the same return or less for our crop.

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