Christina Herrick spends her days talking to the people who feed this country. As produce editor at The Packer and host of The Packer podcast, she hears what growers, shippers, and researchers say when the cameras are off. We asked her about the state of the landscape.
If you’ve eaten an apple, an almond, or a handful of blueberries this week, you’ve bought something from the world this story is about. USDA calls them specialty crops: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, berries, and nursery crops. They fill half your plate, yet they sit outside the commodity programs that support corn, soybeans, and wheat, and the people who grow them operate with some of the thinnest safety nets in agriculture.
Right now, that world is under real strain. Production costs have climbed for years while the prices growers receive have not kept pace, and many family operations are farming through the tightest margins in a generation. Those pressures rarely make the evening news. They surface instead in trade publications, at industry meetings, and in conversations on the back of a pickup at the end of a field row.
Few people sit closer to those conversations than Christina Herrick. She kindly agreed to share some of her insights and understandings of what she is seeing in the field today.
The math problem nobody outside the industry sees
Ask Herrick what comes up in every conversation, and she doesn’t hesitate.
“The number one concern is how it’s going to pencil out,” she says. “There are some commodities that are more profitable than others, but all growers are hurting.”
The numbers explain why. The grower’s share of every food dollar is small, and it’s shrinking. USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that farms received just 11.8 cents of every dollar Americans spent on domestically produced food in 2024, down from 12.1 cents the year before and part of what the agency calls a long-term downward trend. The other 88.2 cents covers everything that happens after the farm gate. Restaurants and foodservice take the largest bite at 38.6 cents, with processing, transportation, wholesaling, and retail accounting for the rest.
Meanwhile, the costs of growing keep climbing. U.S. farm production expenses reached an estimated $473 billion in 2025 and are forecast to climb again to nearly $478 billion in 2026, with labor costs alone projected at $53.9 billion. Growers are paying more to produce every box.
“Growers’ costs have gone up, but they tell me they’re unable to pass those costs on to the consumer,” Herrick says. “They just eat those expenses and hope things will get better.”
From resilience to survival
Five years ago, the industry buzzword was resilience. Growers were adapting: to the pandemic, to labor shortages, to inflation, to weather that no longer follows the old rules. Ask Herrick whether growers still think in those terms and she offers a harder word.
“I’m not necessarily sure it’s ‘resilience’ anymore. I see it as survival,” she says. “Growers are just holding on and hoping that things improve in the near term. For these multigenerational farms, there’s a hope that the farm will weather the storm.”
The threat that she ranks above all others isn’t a single freeze or one bad market year. It’s the slow squeeze.
“It’s low grower returns and the increasing cost of farming. What we’re seeing this year isn’t new; this is the result of many years of rising costs for labor and inputs, compounded by rising fuel costs this year,” she says. “It feels like we’re at a breaking point.”
The disconnect in Washington
Specialty crops account for billions in farm gate value, yet the farm bill’s core safety net programs cover a defined list of commodities: corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts. Fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts are not on it. Growers of those crops rely instead on crop insurance, disaster programs, and block grants, a patchwork that was never designed to catch a systemic margin squeeze. Herrick sees the gap up close.
“I don’t know how many policymakers realize just how much the industry is hurting,” she says. “I think the specialty crop industry is doing a better job of communicating these challenges, but there are certain topics, such as ag labor, where progress hasn’t been able to get off the ground in years past.”
There are signs of movement. The Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act of 2026, introduced this summer by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, is a bipartisan attempt at the first major overhaul of the H-2A farm labor program in four decades. The bill would open H-2A to year-round operations, restructure how the program’s wage rates are calculated, and streamline the tangle of federal agencies that administer it. Herrick names it as one of the two stories she’d tell the industry to watch closely. Read the bill and track its progress at Congress.gov (H.R. 9535).
The acronym that should be on every grower’s radar: EPR
Herrick’s other watch item is one most growers haven’t heard of yet: extended producer responsibility, or EPR. These state laws make the “producer” of packaging financially responsible for its recycling and disposal. Seven states have enacted packaging EPR laws so far: California, Oregon, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington. According to The Packer’s reporting, more than a dozen additional states are considering similar legislation.
The complication is in the word “producer.”
“While there’s some debate as to which part of the business is considered the ‘producer,’ what I’ve heard is that it ends up being the grower, even when it shouldn’t be,” Herrick says. “So that’s one more thing growers will have to navigate in the future.”
The definitions typically capture brands, grower-packer-shippers, and importers who introduce packaged goods into a regulated state, wherever the company itself is located. The costs are no longer hypothetical: Washington state tree fruit shipper CMI Orchards told The Packer it expects $10,000 to $20,000 in annual fees in Oregon alone, and noncompliance penalties across the seven states range from $1,000 to $50,000 per day.
Growers selling packaged produce into these states can check registration requirements through the Circular Action Alliance, the producer responsibility organization administering most state programs, and track new state laws at EPR Atlas. You can also listen to Herrick’s podcast episode on the topic here.
Where the technology hype ends and value begins
Plenty of ag tech promises more than it delivers. So which innovations have earned their place? Herrick points to one area.
“I’m watching closely how AI integrates into software and field scouting,” she says. “I see a lot of potential for crop prediction and data analysis.”
We’d agree, and not just because it’s our business model. When coverage decisions, yield estimates, and risk assessments are built on real field data instead of guesswork, growers make better decisions and keep more of what they earn. The technology is finally catching up to the complexity of specialty crop farming.
Journalism in service to the industry
The Packer has covered produce for over a century, and Herrick is clear about what she believes the job demands right now.
“I truly view my job as being in service to the industry,” she says. “My priority is shining a light on the hard, systemic challenges. Agricultural journalism needs to reflect the reality on the ground, give voice to grower struggles, and spark the honest conversations necessary to keep this industry viable.”
Her economics series at ThePacker.com does exactly that, and she isn’t shy about recommending it. “A little shameless plug,” she admits. It’s earned.
The people who keep showing up
After years of reporting from packing sheds and orchard rows, what stands out to Herrick isn’t a trend or a technology. It’s the people.
The growers Herrick describes are holding on through the tightest margins in a generation, absorbing costs they can’t pass along, and navigating risks that multiply faster than the rules that govern them.
That pressure is real. But so is the pride.
“Growers are the most down-to-earth people,” she says. “They’re passionate about what they do and so proud to share the literal fruits of their labor with the entire country and world.”
Our thanks to Christina Herrick for her time and candor. Find her reporting and The Packer podcast at ThePacker.com.