When the minimum wage goes up, I don’t get to raise my prices to offset the cost. I can’t just charge more for a box of fruit. Cherries don’t hold. Pears don’t wait. If I don’t move the crop, I lose it. And if the packer says the price is down this year, that’s the end of the conversation.
This isn’t just a labor issue. It’s a structural crisis.
We’ve created a food system that rewards scale, speed, and consolidation—while punishing the very people who nurture the land and harvest the crop. It’s a system where the farmer carries all the risk, and the profit flows uphill.
I’m not against fair wages. In fact, no one understands hard work better than the people who pick fruit from sunup to sundown. But raising the minimum wage without reforming the broken pricing structure in agriculture is like piling bricks on a house with a cracked foundation. Eventually, it collapses.
We need public policy that treats farmers not as disposable middlemen, but as essential stewards of our national food security. That means:
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