Supply, mechanization and low production cost! It would even be cheaper if not for adding bioethanol to gasoline!
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Someone is making ethanol from sweet corn?
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You’re lucky you can buy from fruit orchards. The orchards with the best fruit are about 3-6 hours drive away. Stan mentioned Andy’s Orchard. They are 6 hours from here. Even with his prices, I’d probably still shop there sometimes. Costco’s provides best value for things like bananas and mangoes, but they are too hit or miss (mostly miss) when it comes down to stone fruit.
Also, i don’t buy as much of the good stuff that costs more. I certainly can’t buy even a tenth of a bushel of top shelf fruit every week.
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I agree. Organic become a label of justifying very high price. l always tell my friends that organic pesticides are as poisonous as none organic pesticides. If not used properly, organic pesticides can cause problems in human as well . Unfortunately, many only know organic as rotten leaves, chicken manure , composte, baking soda , neem oil spray etc. They thought there is no chemicals involved, all supposed to be nature.
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Absolutely correct. Fees for certification give the large corporate farmer a
method of getting more money out of customers…(customers that have been “conditioned” by marketing and media that ‘organic’ is best)…and the little guy selling at the farmer’s market can’t claim “Organic” because he’s not jumped through the right ‘certification’ hoops. I agree on the scam comment by Ahmad, too.
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Perhaps sweet corn is cheap because field corn is cheap. Field corn is about $5.50 a bushel or around 10 cents per pound. The price has been up and down over the last 20 years. As low as $2.bushel or as high as $7 a bushel. Produced mostly by industrial scale agriculture driven by huge machines, no till, a lot of nitrogen fertilizer and GMO seed. These growers are mostly “price takers” and are forced to sell at the market price. This corn is mostly used for animal feed, ethanol or industrial feedstocks.
Local sweet corn is normally grown on a smaller scale and often picked by hand and sold to the local market where the grower has the chance to set the price rather than accept the market price. Lots of people are willing to pay $9 a pound or more for local sausage so I’m not sure why more local growers have not raised the price sweet corn.
Growers selling non organic as organic can be a problem. I read about one large grower who was fined 10 million for selling non organic corn as organic.
Most small local growers I know are no longer certified organic but the USDA does provide a lot of grants to help small growers pay the organic certification fee. I understand the paperwork burden is huge and is better suited to large industrial scale farms with the resources required to keep up with the paperwork. The organic community is very happy to promote the idea that organic means no chemicals or pesticides. Some customers fall for this but we all know better!
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Acreage planted with field corn for the purpose of bioethanol reduces the acreage available for other crops, hence indirectly raises the price for other crops that would/could have been planted on the same land.
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That’s a very indirect unless people start feeding sweet corn to cattle. Not saying it’s right or wrong, but the field corn is being planted anyway and has been forever, without even the slightest concern for sweet corn, whether there is an ethanol plant nearby or not. If there were enough of a market for sweet corn beyond planting a few rows to sell on the street corner, and assuming there were any humans that wanted to harvest it, people might make a switch to grow it on a greater scale, but that has never happened either. The land can grow anything but there has to be market demand for it.
@blueberrythrill you already know a lot more than me on this topic 
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If we think about the $1/ear price that you thought is warranted, that puts corn more or less at the same price as peaches (pound wise) or perhaps more, then one should ask the following questions: 1-Which is more labor intensive, growing peaches or growing sweet corn? 2-which produces more pounds per acre per year? 3-Which requires more specialized skill/knowledge? 4-Which grower faces more competition, sweet corn grower or peach/nectarine grower? Answering these questions will make clear why peaches or nectarines are more expensive.
I think this will hold true if the farmer is selling in his/her own farm outlet, with loyal customer base. However, if he sells to farmers markets or supermarkets that buy from multiple farmers, he/she will be forced to consider market price.
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I am not an Agricultural Economist, but there have been many studies on the impact of increased biofuels production on crop and food prices; see for example:
Now, maybe sweet corn is a niche crop that is somewhat isolated from such effects, in that case you may be right and my original statement would be wrong. I am not so adamant on proving myself right, so I will leave the discussion around that statement here .
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I’m not sure if anyone mentioned this yet, but those figs look suspiciously like commercially grown ones from California. I see the same looking ones at Wholefoods.
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I don’t grow figs or sweet corn but I’m always interested in the price of local food since I sell tree fruit and small fruit. 1000 dozen ears of sweet corn was considered a good yield when we grew it a long time ago. Although $8/dozen for corn is considered a high price by most folks, the potential revenue per acre is low compared to many alternative crops. Sweet corn was a good place for a rookie to start but it didn’t take long to determine that a small grower like myself could never make money growing corn
The same type of calculation would produce gross revenue of over $20K/acre for peaches or small fruit even even with a lot of waste. With 125 peach trees per acre each only yielding two bushels of sellable fruit per tree should gross over 30K/acre when sold locally.
Even at $30K/acre it’s no way to get rich but it’s a rewarding lifestyle.
Housing prices, car and truck prices, energy and many other prices are rising rapidly. I’m going to be surprised if the price of local food does not do the same. California grows somewhere close to 50% of our vegetables but without huge amounts of water it’s not going to continue. Add higher costs for all types of energy and I believe we can expect the price of food across the board to rise dramatically. Chicken and beef prices have already increased a lot.
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I don’t care too much about it really. Just my observations on what I see. There are papers that have taken the opposite opinion to, so it’s definitely a hot topic among some. The first study mentions Brazil where they a torching the rainforest to plant corn…so maybe food prices aren’t the primary thing the economists should be concerned with in that case! Of course we’ve torched massive amounts of land to produce food too, so maybe I’m being hypocritical.
Farmers here have been growing the same things for just about as long as anyone can remember. The field corn has grown forever, predating any ideas about ethanol. Maybe that’s different elsewhere. In some cases, the field corn feeds the cows and makes ethanol both, and isn’t really an either/or proposition. Could the field corn be replaced by sweet corn? Maybe if we have some economists to harvest it 
I would love to see that! Otherwise, I don’t see sweet corn making here where there aren’t the people to harvest it. Heck, people don’t even want to man the counter at the qwik stop, so why do actual physical labor? The population in this area is gone…replaced by the few farmers running planters that are a football field wide. Also, the weather in this area flat out sucks…so that limits the crops that can work. Get a bit further west, and it’s wheat.
In terms of alternate crops, occasionally someone will try it with the neighbors scratching their heads…but unless there is a ready market for it, it never works and they all go back to corn and beans, corn and beans…
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I don’t buy anything from farmers market after I found out some don’t even grow the produce themselve. Beautiful peaches,no flaws, perfect.
Garlic imported from China? No, imported from Sams, 3 for $2.00.
Some of the stories are plain hilarious, the best part, shooting the bull with them.
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Real Farmer’s Markets have rules that are strictly enforced to insure that growers only sell what they grow. Plenty of places that call themselves farmer’s markets are really just produce stands where people are allowed to sell produce they do not grow. Some of the produce at these fake farmer’s markets may be local but it’s hard to tell.
I encourage consumers to investigate the rules that govern their local farmer’s markets and shop at the real Farmer’s Markets. Real Farmer’s Markets promote the fact that their produce is all locally grown and many communities have them.
Please don’t allow the fake markets to discourage you from seeking out the Real Farmer’s Markets
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My main gripe on the “real farmers markets” is they are exclusive and farmers that don’t produce enough to open up and tend a ‘stall’ all year are pretty much shoved out of participation.
Also, may large structures have been/are being built to house farm markets in Kentucky – using taxpayer money. Taxation paying for fancy ‘farmers markets’ doesn’t seem good…but it’s far from the only thing government is into that it shouldn’t be.
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In my experience the best markets stay full of growers with a long waiting list to join. Most require the grower to sell at the market for a certain number Saturdays (perhaps 20) in order to keep your space. I would agree that these are exclusive markets in some locations. I would say that the managers and the boards for these markets can be “snotty.”
We have a handful of taxpayer funded and state run farmers markets in NC which are part of NCDA. They are normally located on busy exits on the Interstate and have become somewhat of a tourist attraction. We sold berries for several years when one opened here in 1990. That market was split into separate areas for farmers, retailers and wholesalers. No reselling produce in the farmer’s area was allowed and I saw several farmers dismissed from the market for buying rather than growing, Our local NCDA market has grown to the point that it is dominated by larger growers who can afford to staff their booth 7 days a week which makes it hard for a seller to get a space for Saturday.
I’m not sure what these markets cost the taxpayer but I believe they were initially opened to create markets for farmers to sell produce after the demand for growing Tobacco evaporated.
I’m not a big fan of government spending on many projects either. I have learned to consider the benefits of funding for farmers markets not too different than the benefits of funding for variety trials or plant breeding.
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Try drying your figs. That changes the flavor quite a bit and they are really good then.
I prefer the “fake markets” to the “real markets.” I like the community aspect of the main farmers market in my county, for one thing. Pretty much anyone can show up on any market day and sell whatever he happens to have extra in his garden, and there are a notable number of retired and semi-retired growers that do that, especially in the middle of the season with things like sweet corn or watermelons. That also allows people to try out the market for just a week or two or three, which sometimes helps new growers to decide to scale up and make bigger commitments. And some of these people that don’t come very many times sell really cheap, because they’re approaching it like a hobby instead of a business. Sometimes they’re content to all but give their produce away rather than let it go to waste. Of course, some farmers might look at that as unfair competition, but there are lots of other things I can grow as a full-time farmer, and I think those sorts of hobby growers do more to attract customers to the market than they compete with me. And if they don’t sell at my market, they’ll likely find another way to sell or give away what they’ve grown, so why not let them attract more customers to our market?
There is a growers only rule at our market, but there’s basically zero enforcement. And I really don’t trust that the markets that are enforcing rules are catching much of the cheating anyway. It’s just way too easy to cheat, especially at the margins, and way to difficult to catch cheaters. And there’s some “cheating” that I think ought to be allowed anyway. I have a friend, for example, that sells at the market in the summer but often doesn’t have enough to justify continuing through the last couple months of the farmers market season. Our market has allowed us to take his produce to the market and sell it for him – when he’s had things that we haven’t had (or sometimes after selling out of what we’ve grown) we’ve sold his things, clearly labeled as such, and given him 100% of the proceeds from those sales – and that helps him to get as much as possible out of the effort he puts into it. On average we’ve probably done something like this less than one market per year, but if farmers are willing to help each other out (even if there’s profit involved), why not? The cheaters are going to do it anyway, so why not allow other growers to do it openly?
And as a farmer that’s sold at both “real markets” and “fake markets,” another thing I like about the “fake markets” is that customers are rightfully more suspicious. Customers know that you can’t trust everything at the market to actually be what it’s advertised as, so they make more of an effort to get to know the farmers they buy from, and they’re more loyal to those farmers they then get to know than I think they would be if they were just trusting the market. I can see that this might be different from farmers that are a lot more specialized than I am. About half of my sales come from a fairly small number of loyal customers that are spending over $500/year with me, and that’s only possible because I have a lot of different things to sell them. If I were just selling one or two things, in order to make the same total amount of money, I’d have to sell to a whole lot more customers, and then getting to know them and enabling them to get to know and trust me the way they do now wouldn’t be possible, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing if the farmers market model gives a little edge to more diversified farmers. (Of course, I’m biased.) And it makes farmers market fees a whole lot cheaper, too.
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