Pick-your-own produce model offers farmers benefits and risks; it's part of agri-tourism, which has tripled since 2002

Tanner's Orchard near Speer, Ill., has offered U-pick since 1947.
The orchard has 11,000 apple trees. (Photo from Tanner's website)

Strawberries, peaches, berries, apples, pumpkins and a delightful December pine: The list of pick-your-own wonderfulness can start in May and go through year's end. But U-pick origins were born out of desperation, and in a culture of "instant-everything," its success is a curiosity.

"The concept first emerged during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when prices for fruit and vegetable crops reached historically low levels as war-torn countries began to recover and no longer relied on U.S. exports," reports Shelby Vittek of Ambrook Research. "For many growers, it was cheaper to leave their crops in the field to rot than to harvest and sell them for a pittance. That's when a ragtag bunch of cherry growers in Wisconsin decided to offer their fruit directly to the public for pennies a pound. The only catch was they'd have to come out to the farm to pick the cherries themselves. And so the bustling pick-your-own industry was born."

The model offers benefits, "reduces a farm's reliance on labor for harvesting, and eliminates the need for working with distributors, giving farms immediate access to the profits," Vittek writes. "Agritourism has boomed over the last two decades, with revenue more than tripling from 2002 to 2017. According to the USDA, agritourism revenue grew from $704 million in 2012 to $950 million in 2017. Pick-your-own farms have played a key role in that growth."

Pick-your-own operations also have unique costs and risks. Megan Bruch Leffew, a value-added agriculture marketing specialist at the University of Tennessee, told Vittek, "Consumers don't often know how to appropriately pick and can damage plants, so there's a loss aspect that needs to be built in when folks are pricing product." Also, "You need some added risk management and insurance," and "People are going to need access to a restroom, handwashing, and other things."

Poor weather "has the potential to wipe out an entire crop for a U-pick farm," Vittek notes. "This year, fruit growers across the country have experienced significant crop loss after erratic weather. Georgia lost more than 90% of its peach crop this year due to an abnormally warm winter."

But pick-your-own seems to have crowd appeal, even when a crop is scarce. "Our culture is starving for connections to nature. It's one more way that people can feel connected — connected to their food, connected to where they live," Anu Rangarajan, director of the Cornell University Small Farm Program, told Vittek. "U-picks do a huge service for connecting people to our food system, and especially the seasonality of food … and [gives farmers] the opportunity to have important conversations with people who can support agriculture more actively."