Same price as 1984. Everything else costs more.

In the Black Dirt onion country of Orange County, growers were getting $5.25 to $5.75 for a 50-pound bag of onions in 1984. In 2020 the offer was $7.00 a bag — about what it was forty years ago, while seed, fuel, labor, land, insurance, and equipment all went up. Adjusted for inflation, that 1984 price would be $13 to $14 today.

Chris Pawelski's family farmed that dirt for a century. Prices fell from $28 a bag to $12 in a matter of weeks in the 2019–20 season, under the cost of production. In April 2020 the Pawelski farm shut down. This is not a story about one bad year. It is what the system is built to do.

The apple grower gets the same deal. The packer and the chain set the price.

New York is the second-largest apple state in the country, and Wayne County is its biggest apple county. Almost none of those apples are sold by the family that grew them. They go to a packer, who sells to a chain, and the price flows backward: the retailer decides what the apple will sell for, the packer takes its cut, and whatever is left is the grower’s “price.”

The apple industry’s own trade association explains the mechanism in one sentence: supermarkets use core apple varieties as loss-leaders to bring shoppers in the door, and the cost of that discounting is “passed back down to the grower.” The chain runs the sale. The grower pays for it. USApple’s 2026 outlook calls the result what it is — negative margins in a year of full harvests.

An onion in Orange County, an apple in Sodus. Different crop, same structure: one seller at a time facing a buyer who does not have to negotiate.

Who keeps the other 84 cents?

The USDA's own numbers say a farm gets 15.9 cents of every dollar Americans spend on domestically produced food. Trucking, packing, and grocery margins take the rest — and those layers have been consolidating for decades.

When a handful of buyers face thousands of individual farms, the buyer sets the price. Growers describe internet bidding systems that push wholesale prices down with no way to see what the buyer is paying anyone else, and no other buyer to turn to. The onion farmer does not negotiate. He is told.

That is not a free market. It is a market with one side missing. And the same playbook — get big enough that the people who supply you have no choice — is how a few giant companies came to sit between every producer and every customer, whether the product is an onion or a search result.

Federal produce law says the buyer has to pay you. It never says the buyer has to talk to you.

The Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA), a 1930 federal law run by USDA, licenses produce dealers, sets a code of fair business practice, and runs a trust so that a grower who ships onions eventually gets paid for them. That mattered in 1930 and it matters now.

But PACA governs whether you get paid, not what you get paid. Nothing in federal produce law requires a distributor or a chain to negotiate with the grower, to disclose the price it pays anyone else, or to buy from local farms at all. A buyer can post a take-it-or-leave-it number on a bidding screen and never pick up the phone — and with a perishable crop that sprouts in sixty days, "leave it" means dumping the harvest. In 2020 New York's own senators had to ask USDA for a "top-to-bottom review" of fruit and vegetable pricing because farmers cannot see the market they are selling into.

Albany cannot rewrite a federal statute. Albany can decide how New York's own money, contracts, and markets are run — and that is where the fight is.

Get the insurance company off the farm's books.

Farmers are self-employed. Most have no employer plan. More than 27% of agricultural workers buy coverage on the individual marketplace, against 6% of the country as a whole. When the enhanced federal subsidies expired on December 31, 2025, farm families' premiums doubled, tripled, and in some cases quadrupled in a single renewal.

The New York Health Act replaces premiums, deductibles, and networks with one public plan for every New Yorker. For a family farm that means no premium line in the budget, no spouse working off-farm to carry the coverage, and no medical bill that ends with selling land. The RAND analysis of the Act found similar or lower long-run costs for the state as a whole, assuming every federal waiver is granted. It also reduces what your school district and town pay for employee coverage, and every dollar of that comes straight off the property-tax levy — the same levy a farm pays on every acre.

Follow the Health Care Money →

Let the farm sell power the way it sells produce — except this time, at a fair price.

A farm has roofs, barns, ponds, manure, and open acres between the rows. Albany's rules today are written so that the utility owns the generation and the farm is a customer. My energy plan turns that around: locally owned public power — towns, schools, co-ops, municipal utilities like Fairport's — with NYPA as the builder and financier, not the owner.

Cheaper power lowers the cost of cold storage, irrigation, and milking. Owning the power turns a cost into revenue. Both happen locally, and neither one goes through a middleman.

The distributed energy plan →

Fair prices for what farms sell. Fair costs for what farms buy. Keep the difference here.

Fair pricing is not a subsidy and it is not a price control. It is three plain principles, and Albany has the tools for every one of them.

Vote November 3. Bring the farm with you.

Every dollar from $5 to $250 is matched by New York's public campaign finance program — up to 12 to 1. A $20 gift becomes $260 of outreach to voters in Webster and Wayne County, with no corporate money attached.

Volunteer: friends@friendsofbutch.com · call or text 585-746-9235