Vegetable Crop Prices Are Frozen in Time

With inflation alone, crop prices should have increased by 17.5% since 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s important to understand that price increases due to inflation don’t equal growth. It’s merely a price floating up with the rest of the economy. Healthy businesses increase their prices at a faster pace than inflation in order to re-invest in the company and build cash reserves. But that’s not what you reported happened in the vegetable industry. A small percentage — 27.2% — say your crop prices are more than 10% higher than they were 10 years ago. But an alarming 44.6% of you have seen either no price increase or, worse, lowered prices. These statistics should worry us all. Almost half of the industry — that 44.6% — faces going out of business, because that’s the logical outcome of no price increase over 10 years.