Producer Attitudes Toward Mandatory Agricultural Marketing Organizations: Evidence from the California Fresh Peach and Nectarine Industry

We examine how various producer-level and farm-level factors affect producers' support for marketing orders, focusing on the California fresh peach and nectarine industries and the 2011 referendum vote in which their marketing orders were terminated. We form hypotheses regarding the effects of different factors. We then employ marketing order referendum voting data and additional data collected via a producer survey to test these hypotheses empirically. Some of our results conform to our predictions. For example, we find that producers with greater production of peaches and nectarines were less likely to vote for continuance of the marketing order. However, some results did not conform to our predictions. We found that gross income from farming and related activities to be insignificant and producers with some organic production or some direct sales are both more likely to vote for continuation. Our results suggests important dimensions of differentiation between producers for policymakers, regulators and industries to consider as they ponder the future of marketing orders.