Where Do Our Fruits and Vegetables Come From?

American farmers grow a lot of crops. In 2022, they produced $280 billion worth, half of which was corn and soybeans. Most of the corn and soybeans are used to feed animals (which people eat) or vehicles (which people drive). But farmers also grow a lot of food that people eat, including $34b of fruit and tree nuts and $28b of vegetables in 2022.

Most domestic fruit and vegetables are grown in the west. California grows about three quarters of the fruit and tree nuts and almost half the vegetables. Washington and Florida are the next largest producers of fruit. Those two states, along with Idaho, Arizona, and Oregon contribute vegetables. Production has grown in value over time (even after adjusting for inflation).

The weather in California is pretty good, but not good enough to grow tomatoes and avocados year round. American consumers are now spoiled by fresh fruit and vegetables available any time of the year. In fact, I had avocados and tomatoes from Mexico with dinner tonight. In addition, low production costs and efficient supply chains have encouraged more fruit and vegetable production in other countries for export to the United States.

America now imports 60% of the fresh fruit and 35% of the fresh vegetables it consumes, up from 30% and 8% in 1980.

American has never grown its own bananas and still grows almost all its apples. For many other fresh fruits, the import percentage has grown over time. Avocados are the most notable, with the import percentage grown from zero to 90 in the past 40 years (see this Ag Data News article for more). More than half of grapes also are imported.

Of the most purchased fresh vegetables, tomatoes and bell peppers have experienced large growth in imports, each rising from 20% to 70% in the past 30 years (see this Ag Data News article on tomato imports). Broccoli imports have surged recently.

Mexico is by far the largest source of fruit and vegetable imports, totaling $20b in 2023. President-elect Trump has floated the possibility of a 25% import tax (tariff) on imports from Mexico. When these taxes are passed along to consumers at the grocery store, as is likely, it will cost Americans an extra $5b per year, or $15 per person. This is not a large amount in aggregate, but it will hit products that are sourced mostly from Mexico hard. We are likely to see significant price increases for avocados, tomatoes and bell peppers.

Source: USDA ERS

Fruit and vegetables make up only 4% of US imports from Mexico, so they would be a small player in the economic effects of tariffs. Most of US trade with Mexico is intermediate goods in supply chains for manufactured goods. Nonetheless, as we have seen with egg prices in the past two years, increases in grocery prices are very salient to consumers.

I made the graphs with this R code.