For years, fruits and vegetables have been treated as afterthoughts in agriculture policy, but with each farm bill comes a little more help.
Producers of specialty crops—generally defined as fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts—face the same issues as commodity growers in trying to match supply and demand, with a twist. New Deal-era laws allowed them to form marketing cooperatives and established grading standards to make sure that only the highest-quality and most beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables are sold in grocery stores while the rest of the crop goes to freezing and canning.
These programs, along with strict food-safety and pesticide-related rules on imports and the purchase of excess production for use in the schools, have helped stabilize prices.
But Congress did little else for the industry until the 2002 farm bill provided the first block grants for research on specialty crops and the 2008 rewrite added mandatory funding for the specialty-crop grants.
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