Analyzing Big Data on What's Happening in the Vegetable Industry

By Carol Miller|July 31, 2024

Among my colleagues, I’m known as a data geek. I love the window statistics allow us to gaze through to have a better understanding of the industry. That said, it’s only a glimpse. With the wide-ranging scope the vegetable industry possesses, truly knowing everything is an unreachable goal. But if our team understands that and we’re open to updating our viewpoints, I think we can get a decent understanding, one not available to most.

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Are you an American Vegetable Grower?

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We strive to do that because it helps us figure out our purpose. American Vegetable Grower serves growers and the wider vegetable industry. If we see pain points, we seek out those who have answers or good ideas. Or we brainstorm a fresh way to make connections between growers and industry allies.

Analyzing stats is just one tool in our pursuit. To that we add visiting farms in person, dozens of phone chats, hundreds of emails, and meeting industry players at trade shows.

Then once a year, the entire team gathers for a series of meetings to pool our collective knowledge. These meetings are the backbone of what we do in the year to follow, content wise and in our business plans.

Here are a few things we highlighted in our most recent State of the Vegetable Industry meeting:

Sustainable Growing Still Gaining Steam

The new buzz word, regenerative, isn’t going away and looks like it may one day hold similar stature to organic certification. This is not only a grassroots movement, it’s being adopted by those who have the ear of mega retailers like Walmart and Costco. New certification is available or in progress. We’ll have to see if one ends up being dominant, or if we’ll see a few competitors.

Financial Pressure Continues

One of the things that has helped growers survive increased input costs following the pandemic has been strong increases in crop prices and production. Unfortunately, our State of the Vegetable Industry survey shows fewer growers had an increase in production this past season, the lowest in six years. The past year’s extreme weather is a likely culprit, at least partly. The increased adverse wage rate for H-2A guestworkers isn’t helping. We need political intervention in H-2A and imports policy to help, but it’s an election year. And gerrymandering has created a Congress of uncompromising viewpoints.

We discussed many other topics as well, from ag tech to shifts in protected ag to national food security. I invite you to read over our collective analysis of this year’s State of the Vegetable Industry survey and drop me a note on how these stats look like in your neck of the woods.

When it comes to big data, the State of the Vegetable Industry survey is enormous. Scroll through the slideshow above for survey result highlights.