California Agriculture

Marketing orders allow farmers to collectively fund industry-wide services that may be difficult to provide through a voluntary approach. But not all farmers support collective approaches. We employed ballot data from U.S. Department of Agriculture and survey data we collected to explore why farmers in California voted to terminate the federal fresh peach and nectarine marketing orders in 2011 and the implications of this termination. Even after controlling for other factors, we found that farmers who produced more were significantly less likely to vote for continuation. We also found that detailed industry information provided via the marketing orders was significantly more important to respondents voting for continuation, and respondents with more organic production were significantly more likely to vote for continuation. These results suggest farmers may have lost important production and marketing resources due to termination of the orders, with evidence that smaller farms were more affected. This termination may thus have accelerated the exit of farmers from this industry.