Farm Bureau: Support for specialty crops is "essential"

Source: American Farm Bureau Federation

For specialty crop farmers, 2025 has offered little relief from mounting financial pressures. Markets that once delivered stable margins are now marked by volatility, while production expenses continue to rise faster than prices. Trade uncertainty further threatens already-thin farm-gate revenues. Despite generating more than $75 billion in annual farm-gate value – over one-third of all U.S. crop sales – specialty crop producers operate with far fewer risk-management and safety-net tools than other farmers. The result is a widening cost-to-revenue gap that is placing broad swaths of the specialty crop economy under severe financial strain.

Image credit - American Farm Bureau Federation

Specialty crops encompass more than 350 commodities across 220,000 farms, accounting for roughly one-fifth of U.S. agricultural cash receipts. Yet the diversity that makes the sector so economically important also heightens its vulnerability. Each crop carries unique production systems, marketing channels, labor needs and biological risks. These differences have made it historically challenging to design an effective safety net and also complicates access to reliable economic data. Unlike other commodities such as row crops, milk, cattle or hogs, many specialty crop producers lack consistent, up-to-date, publicly reported cost-of-production and farm-gate price data. For many crops, USDA does not publish average prices until well after the year ends, if at all, and even then, prices often represent only a subset of the market, such as fresh or processed.

This lack of consistent data should not be mistaken for a lack of hardship. One part of U.S. agriculture benefits from publicly supported, frequently updated market information; the other does not. That gap makes it significantly harder to quickly and credibly quantify the economic losses specialty crop farmers are absorbing.

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