California’s avocado growers, once symbols of American agricultural ingenuity and abundance, now face an existential crisis. A flood of Mexican imports, enabled by trade policies that favor foreign producers, combined with crushing domestic regulations, has driven prices into freefall and halved the number of family farms in the state over the past decade. As the Trump administration reviews the USMCA, these farmers are rightly demanding seasonal protections to preserve a vital domestic industry.
This is not merely a story about produce prices. It reveals a deeper failure in how America stewards its land, its workers, and its economic sovereignty. While California growers battle high labor costs, stringent water rules, and environmental mandates, Mexican avocados enter the U.S. market with minimal barriers under current agreements, often produced under conditions that would never pass muster here.
The Numbers Tell a Sobering Tale
Andy Sheaffer of Vista Punta Gorda farms in Ventura has farmed avocados for two decades. Last year, he sold fruit at over $2 per pound early in the season. By the end, prices had collapsed to between 75 cents and $1.10. “If the trend continues,” he warned, the conversations among growers turn grim. Volatility has given way to consistent losses.
Ken Melban, president of the California Avocado Commission, reports that the state’s grower count has plummeted from roughly 6,000 a decade ago to about 3,000 today. Mexico now supplies around 85 percent of the U.S. avocado market, with massive shipments exceeding projections and flooding the market during California’s peak harvest. One recent quarter saw imports equivalent to nearly an entire season’s domestic production.
Sheaffer highlights the stark labor disparity: he pays over $20 per hour for workers, while Mexican labor costs hover around $12 per day. Add California’s regulatory burdens—water restrictions, environmental compliance, and more—and the playing field tilts heavily against American producers. Yet consumers rarely see savings at the grocery store; middlemen capture the margin while farmers absorb the pain.
Trade Policy at a Crossroads
With the U.S. signaling it will not simply renew the existing USMCA framework, opportunity knocks for targeted reform. The California Avocado Commission proposes a seasonal tariff-rate quota on Mexican imports from March through September, California’s primary harvest window. A baseline volume could enter duty-free, with substantial tariffs—growers suggest 25 to 50 percent—on excess shipments.
This approach does not seek to end trade but to introduce fairness. American farmers operate under rule of law, paying living wages and meeting high standards for safety and sustainability. Mexico’s industry, by contrast, contends with cartel influence, violence, and environmental concerns including deforestation. Unfettered access rewards lower standards and punishes excellence.
“We’ve elected these politicians who have decided to impose these regulations and these labor cost increases on us because they value that as an important component. But then, on the flip side, we’re allowing these countries who don’t have that same value system basically unfettered access to our market.”
Critics warn tariffs raise consumer prices. Yet growers counter that farm-gate prices have dropped sharply while retail remains stable. Any modest increase would primarily trim importer and retailer margins, not burden families. More importantly, preserving domestic production safeguards long-term food security and rural economies.
The Human and Moral Cost of Neglect
Behind the statistics lie families, multigenerational farms, and communities built on honest work. The decline of California’s avocado industry mirrors broader trends: policies that export jobs and import dependency while domestic producers struggle. This inverted patriotism—burdening Americans while subsidizing foreign competition—contradicts the principles that built this nation’s strength.
As negotiations proceed, the administration has a chance to prioritize American farmers. Protecting them is not protectionism; it is prudent stewardship of the blessings God has given this land. In the face of global pressures, wise policy recognizes that strong domestic agriculture undergirds national resilience.
“And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them.” (Deuteronomy 28:13)
California’s avocado farmers stand as a test case. Will policymakers heed their warning and level the field, or will another slice of American heritage wither under the weight of unequal trade? The answer will say much about whether we still value the dignity of work, the sovereignty of our borders, and the future of our farms. The time for substantive action is now.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
