An Analysis by the American Farm Burea measured against a 2010 baseline, reveals United States fresh fruit imports are up 69 percent by volume while domestic fruit production has fallen 32 percent. The two curves crossed in 2013 and have not converged since.
While U.S. domestic fruit production is decline, America’s population expanded by 10 percent.
Between 2020 and 2025, pesticide costs rose 25 percent, fuel 31 percent, fertilizer 37 percent, and labor close to 50 percent, while average cash expenses on specialty crop farms passed $466,000 in 2023, up 47 percent from 2021.
Fruit offers few tools for absorbing that: crops are perishable, harvest windows are short, storage is rarely an option, and there is no futures market to hedge a price collapse.
As domestic volume has contracted, imports have taken the space. Figures from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) show imports supplied 59 percent of US fresh fruit availability in 2023, up from 50 percent in 2007, leaving domestic sources at roughly 41 percent.
Much of that growth still fills genuine seasonal gaps, but the report’s crop-level analysis finds imports increasingly arriving earlier and staying later, a pattern USDA economists call market window creep, which concentrates competition in the early and late weeks when domestic growers have historically earned the prices that carry a season.
The AFBF’s conclusion is that trade remains necessary, but a shrinking domestic base leaves US fruit supply more exposed to weather, political instability, and food safety events abroad.