When people talk about fixing the price of vegetables ahead of harvest, locking it in so farmers know exactly what they'll earn and consumers know exactly what they'll pay, it sounds sensible. It sounds like stability. It is, in fact, one of the more dangerous ideas in agriculture, and we've watched it tested and fail more than once.
Here's what actually happens on a farm. Income isn't the same as price. Income is price multiplied by production, by yield. A farmer can go bankrupt on a good price if the harvest is thin, and just as easily go bankrupt on a strong harvest if the price collapses. The spot market, through which we sell around 75% of our carrots on South Africa's National Fresh Produce Markets, exists because it's the only mechanism that responds to both halves of that equation in real time. Supply and demand set the price every single day. Nobody negotiates it in a boardroom six months before anyone knows what the weather did. That matters because it means the price a farmer receives today reflects today's actual supply and demand, not a guess locked in months earlier that's since gone stale in one direction or the other.
Pre-negotiated pricing, the kind that gets marketed to farmers as a safety net, works the opposite way. A buyer agrees to a fixed price for future produce, often below where the market will eventually land, and charges for the certainty. If the market moves up after the deal is signed, the farmer can't sell elsewhere for the better price. He's locked in. If the market moves down, the buyer wins twice. This isn't complicated, and it doesn't take much more than a calculator to see it. Yet it keeps getting sold to farmers as the safer option.
We call the spot market a shock absorber for a reason. Remove it and the whole system stiffens. Retailers who currently compete for produce on transparent daily pricing start ruling the floor price instead of discovering it. Farmers who signed future contracts at what looked like a fair price find themselves undercut the moment the market tells a different story. And the people who lose the most in a rigid, pre-fixed pricing system aren't the big operations that can absorb a bad year. It's the smaller traders and smaller farms who had no leverage to negotiate a good fixed rate in the first place.
There's a second reason we stay on the National Fresh Produce Markets, and it has nothing to do with price. It's the only channel where our name survives all the way to the shelf. Sell into a retailer's private label programme and the branding disappears the moment the box leaves our yard. A shopper scanning the vegetable aisle has no way of knowing who actually grew what's in front of them, whether it was grown well, or whether that farm will even be there next season. That anonymity doesn't protect anyone. It just means the only people who can tell a good producer from a mediocre one are the producers themselves, and they're the ones with the least power to do anything about it.
A market with thousands of competing sellers, all visible, all pricing in the open, keeps everyone honest in a way a handful of large retail buyers never will. That's not nostalgia for how farming used to work. It's a fairly blunt read on where the power sits in a supply chain and who benefits from keeping it there.
None of this means the spot market is perfect, or that every farmer should sell every box through it. But the case for scrapping it in favour of something that feels safer on paper doesn't hold up once you actually run the numbers. We'd rather keep making that argument loudly than watch the shock absorber get quietly removed because nobody thought it was worth defending.