Changing rural America with really, really cheap food

Ten day sale at Winco

Cantaloupes: 18 cents a pound. 

Rural America is in distress. Food this cheap has political consequences.

I grow melons. For years I grew them for sale. I put myself through college growing melons at a farm at the base of the Table Rocks, north of Central Point, Oregon. I earned a college tuition every summer in my youth. In 1980 I made a living as a melon farmer.

That was then.

Melons are in season now in southern Oregon. There is a five week season when local melons ripen and can be sold vine-ripe at local stores.  

Cantaloupes on sale at Winco supermarket.

Vine ripe melons are delicious. They taste much better than melons picked green and shipped. Today the local Winco store is selling cantaloupes for 18 cents a pound, cantaloupes shipped in from a 17,000 acre farm in California. 

What a deal for the consumer! 

Food this cheap has consequences, and it is a sign of ongoing pressures on the livelihoods of rural Americans, that swath on the political maps marked bright red, Trump country.

1. Local farmers cannot compete with this price, so will lose the income from this cash crop. No small farmer can survive in an 18 cents a pound market. Farmer sales at 35 to 50 cents a pound give a farmer margin to grow a profitable crop. Sales at 15 cents a pound are a dead loss. The smart thing to do with local melons is to leave them in the field or feed them to livestock.

When I was in high school and college from 1965 to 1971 I sold melons to local fruit stands and supermarkets for 15 to 20 cents a pound. Today the local Food 4 Less store is buying melons for resale at 15 cents a pound, the low end of the price I got 53 years ago. They sell to consumers for about half what they sold in 1965.

Pretty melon, but picked green for shipping.

2. Factory farm melons are displacing local vine-ripe melons. There will still be a few local melons available in niche situations of farmers markets, but in general local melons will be much less available. Supermarket prices will put pressure on prices everywhere, including those niche markets.

Factory farm melons look good and have a consistent bland but melon-like taste. They are sorted by size, so they are presented to look uniform, like any product manufactured in bulk. They are picked green, but current varieties are bred to have a taste consumers find satisfactory. Melon consumers no longer expect a rich, aromatic taste and smell.

The melons aren't very good but they are good-enough. 

The above photo of the melon with a stem remnant is proof-positive evidence of having been picked very green. (Ripe melons slip off the vine with a smooth, concave navel.)  A restaurant serving a fruit salad is interested in the color--orange--and whether the melon cuts into smooth edged chunks. Melons like the one above are suitable, and meet expectations. 

This is another iteration in the big picture of mechanization and automation of food production. Food--including raw produce--is becoming a standardized, manufactured product, available 52 weeks a year. It is very inexpensive, and it is good enough. 

Very strong competition.

3. This process accelerates the changing face of rural America, putting pressure on family farms to sell out to larger corporate style enterprises. Local farmers are small business people, owner-operators. They own the land and equipment. Factory farm operations are different. There are owners and they hire employees, a great many of whom are paid low wages, a proletariat class.

It is the efficient system for low cost uniform food.

Corporatization of food production happens one crop and one location at a time. Melons have been added to the big story, but it the process is irregular. Local growing conditions create niche opportunities, and there are resistance movements of consumers and stores that value local produce. But notwithstanding the alternative channels of sale, very cheap factory food overwhelms a market and advertised supermarket prices create a mental set point for consumers. Fresh produce does not store, so when crops are in season then there is a short window when high volumes need to be sold. Farmers need to sell where consumers go to buy.

Note: I am not complaining. I am describing. I already gave up trying to compete with factory melon farms. Last year I grew Golden Honeydew melons, and was offered 25 cents a pound for them. It was easier and cheaper to leave them unpicked in the field than to sell them at that price. I attempt differentiation by branding my melons as local and vine ripe. My melons are better than the factory ones they would displace, but consumers don't know the difference between mine and theirs. Mine sell, but at the factory price.

This is competition. This is the marketplace.They won. They are the efficient, low cost producer, selling melons at a price consumers jump at. 
. 

San Joaquin Valley, west of Fresno

Local farmers will deal with the new reality because they have no choice. Voters in rural communities have reason to feel frustrated and worried that the economic ground is changing underneath their feet.

Urban voters who wonder why rural Americans were open to a politician like Donald Trump can find some answers at the supermarket. Consumers want cheap food, so the market is supplying it. 

Farm families are being squeezed out of a job, so they were looking for answers. Trump offered up a villain, immigrants, here legally and illegally.