Column: Farmers Aren’t Price Makers—We’re the Canaries in the Food System Coal Mine
Ken Polehn
By Ken Polehn
When people talk about raising the minimum wage, most picture fast food workers or baristas. What they don’t picture is the family farmer—like me—who grows the fresh fruit those same workers eat at the end of their shift.
For decades, we’ve been asked to do more with less. More regulations. Higher labor costs. Rising fuel, fertilizer, packaging, and freight prices. Meanwhile, the price we receive for our crops has stayed stuck in the same place for over 40 years. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, most of us are earning less than our parents or grandparents did when they were growing the same land.
The truth is simple and brutal: we don’t set the price for the food we grow. We're price takers in a market dominated by powerful packing houses, grocery chains, and global import-export brokers. In my case—growing sweet cherries and pears in the Columbia River Gorge—that means harvesting a crop on someone else's schedule, under someone else’s terms, for someone else’s profit.
People assume that because retail prices have gone up, farmers must be making more. But that’s a lie told by spreadsheets. You can pay $3.99 for a pound of cherries at the store, and I might see thirty cents of that—if I’m lucky. The rest gets swallowed by a system built to extract value from the land, the labor, and the people closest to it.
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:
Fair pricing models that ensure farm gate returns reflect the true cost of sustainable production.
Support for local and regional food systems that let producers build direct relationships with customers.
Enforcement of antitrust laws against monopolistic packers and retailers.
And yes, a recognition that economic justice must extend to both farm workers and the families who hire them.
Because if farmers go broke, the country goes hungry. And by the time we all notice, it’ll be too late.
About the author
I was born in 1961 into a second-generation farm family in The Dalles. I grew up on a tractor seat, moving irrigation pipe with my sisters before school, and spent my summers picking cherries alongside the children of migrant families who returned year after year. My wife, children, and parents have all worked the same land. I’ve served as county Farm Bureau president, sat on the county fair board, and continue to support 4-H and FFA. I’ve seen firsthand what happens when farmers are squeezed out—not just of business, but of the conversation.
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