Competing Across the Calendar - The Growing Squeeze on U.S. Produce

Aug 14, 2026

By Daniel Munch

Key Takeaways

Labor, input and regulatory expenses have climbed sharply, making it harder for domestic produce growers to recover costs, invest in their operations, and keep up with consumer demand. Since 2010, U.S. fruit production has declined 32% and vegetable production has fallen 10%, while fresh fruit and vegetable imports have each increased about 70%.
Foreign supply still fills important seasonal gaps and supports year-round consumer demand, but imports are arriving in greater volumes during active domestic seasons, adding lower-cost competition when growers must market highly perishable crops.
Import pressure extends across a range of fresh produce markets. The pattern varies by commodity, from higher year-round import volumes for lettuce and cabbage to sharper overlap during important blueberry, strawberry and tomato harvest windows. Together, these examples show that growing competition is not confined to a single crop, region or season.
Growing dependence on foreign production can create food security risks. As U.S. production declines, more of the nation’s fresh produce supply becomes exposed to political instability, extreme weather, food-safety disruptions and regulatory decisions governed by other countries. Trade will remain essential, but a resilient food system requires U.S. farmers to be able to profitably grow fruits and vegetables here at home.

Fresh produce markets run on strict timing. Fruits and vegetables are highly perishable, harvest windows are often short, and growers generally cannot store a crop while waiting for prices to improve. A few weeks of excess supply can determine whether a season ends in profit or loss.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids