Postharvest Crop Activities (except Cotton Ginning) — U.S. Industry Primer

NAICS 2022 code 115114

1. Overview

Postharvest crop activities are the services that turn a freshly harvested crop into something a buyer will accept: cleaning, sorting, grading, drying, curing, cooling, waxing, fumigating, shelling, and packing. This is the industrial step between the field and the grocery shelf, the food processor, or the export container. When you buy a bag of mandarins or a clamshell of blueberries, an operation in this line sized it, washed it, sorted out the defects, cooled it, and boxed it [1][2].

Why it matters: this is essential, non-discretionary infrastructure for the roughly one-third of U.S. agriculture that reaches consumers as fresh or fresh-cut product. Nearly every fresh fruit, vegetable, and tree nut passes through it. The catch for investors is that almost none of the industry is a stand-alone, publicly traded business. It is dominated by grower-owned cooperatives (member-owned associations that pack and market their members' crops) and by private, often family-owned packing houses. The federal statistics that count it as a separate service industry capture only a sliver of the real activity.

The ways in differ by investor type. Public-market exposure is indirect: you buy vertically integrated grower-packer-shippers whose packing houses sit inside a larger farming-and-marketing business (Mission Produce, Fresh Del Monte, Dole, Limoneira), or the adjacent cold-storage landlords and equipment makers. Private-market exposure is the more direct route: family packing houses, custom (fee-for-service) operators, cold-storage and ripening assets, and private-equity roll-ups of produce handling. Pure cooperatives are member-owned and cannot be bought as equity — participation there means being a grower-member.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 115114 covers establishments primarily engaged in performing services on crops after harvest to prepare them for market or further processing — crop cleaning, sun drying, shelling nuts, fumigating, curing, sorting, grading, packing, and cooling (including pre-cooling and hydrocooling of fresh produce) [1][2]. Corn drying, potato curing, and seed cleaning fall here too. The defining idea is that the work is a service on someone's crop, classically done on a custom or fee basis, though in practice it is often folded into an integrated grower's own operation.

What it explicitly excludes — and the adjacent codes it sits next to:

• Cotton ginning → NAICS 115111 (carved out of this code by name) [1].
• Soil preparation, planting, cultivating → NAICS 115112, and crop harvesting, primarily by machine → NAICS 115113. These are the before and during steps; 115114 is the after step [3].
• Farm labor contractors and crew leaders → NAICS 115115, and farm management services → NAICS 115116 [3].
• Artificial drying and dehydrating of fruits and vegetables (industrial dehydration into a shelf-stable product) → NAICS 311423, a food-manufacturing code [1].
• Custom grain grinding for animal feed → NAICS 311119, and tobacco stemming and redrying → NAICS 312230 [1].
• Buying produce for resale and preparing it for market (merchant wholesaling) → NAICS 424480 [1].
• Storage-only operations, including bulk farm-product warehousing → generally NAICS 493130 [9].

The line between "postharvest handling" (115114) and "food manufacturing" (sector 311) is roughly the line between preparing the raw commodity and transforming it. Washing, waxing, and boxing an orange is 115114; turning it into juice concentrate is manufacturing.

Ownership mix. Four models coexist:

1. Grower cooperatives — member-owned associations that pack and market the members' crop and return the proceeds. These handle enormous shares of certain commodities: Sunkist Growers is owned by more than 1,000 citrus growers, runs a network of independently owned member packinghouses, and handles a large share of the California and Arizona fresh-citrus crop (industry accounts put it around two-thirds) [24]; Blue Diamond Growers represents roughly 3,000 almond growers; Sun-Maid is a raisin and dried-fruit cooperative of family farmers; Ocean Spray represents 700-plus cranberry growers and about 70% of North American production [25][26][27].
2. Vertically integrated grower-packer-shippers — companies that farm, pack, and market under one roof (Mission Produce, Fresh Del Monte, Dole, Limoneira).
3. Private and family-owned operators — from independent custom packers that pack fruit for many growers on a per-carton fee, up to large private firms such as Taylor Farms (fresh-cut salads and vegetables) and The Wonderful Company (nuts and citrus); some are private-equity-backed, such as Grimmway Farms (carrots), owned by Teays River Investments [28][29][30].
4. On-farm operations — grain drying and produce cooling done by the farm itself, which the government usually classifies under crop farming rather than as a separate service.

Because an integrated grower that packs its own crop is often coded primarily as a farm, wholesaler, or food manufacturer rather than 115114, the companies named in this primer are exposure proxies, not a clean census of establishments in the code.

3. How big it is

Federal business statistics count 115114 as a modest service industry. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) for 2023, employer establishments in this code numbered roughly 1,000, with about 26,330 paid employees and annual payroll of about $1.478 billion [4]. First-quarter (January–March) payroll was about $329.8 million — roughly 22% of the annual total, a bit under an even quarter's 25%, consistent with a seasonal, harvest-weighted work calendar [4]. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) sets the small-business size standard for this industry at $34 million in average annual receipts, meaning the government treats even fairly large packing operations as small businesses [6]. That threshold is an eligibility measure, not an estimate of industry revenue. CBP does not publish a receipts/revenue total for this specific code, so we do not state one; the supplied federal figures also do not include output, capacity, profitability, concentration, or nonemployer counts.

Why those numbers undercount the real industry. Several structural reasons:

• In-house handling is classified elsewhere. When a grower or a cooperative packs and cools its own crop, the government generally assigns that activity to crop farming or to the cooperative's primary commodity, not to the 115114 service line. Sunkist's packing houses, Blue Diamond's hulling and shelling plants, and Dole's roughly 75 packing houses do not show up as 115114 service establishments even though the physical work is identical [10][24][25].
• Extreme seasonality. The 26,330 annual-average headcount understates peak employment. Packing houses staff up for a compressed harvest window and shed most workers the rest of the year, so peak-season employment is a large multiple of the annual average [4].
• CBP coverage limits. CBP is an employer-establishment series. It excludes the self-employed, businesses without employees or an employer identification number, agricultural-production employees, and most government workers — all of which understate a contractor-heavy, small-family-business, on-farm activity [5].

For scale context, the private research firm IBISWorld sizes the broader "Crop Services" grouping — all of NAICS 1151, which bundles 115114 with soil prep, harvesting, labor contracting, ginning, and farm management — at about $32 billion in revenue across roughly 73,000 businesses, a reminder that the support-services layer of U.S. agriculture is far larger than the narrow postharvest slice the 115114 code isolates [7].

4. The investable universe

There is no pure-play, publicly traded postharvest-services company. The closest public exposure is through vertically integrated grower-packer-shippers, whose packing houses are the postharvest business embedded in a farming-and-marketing company, plus two adjacent groups: cold-storage landlords and equipment makers.

A note on Calavo Growers (formerly CVGW, Nasdaq): Mission Produce completed its acquisition of Calavo in May 2026 (announced at roughly $483 million, about $27 per share), combining two of the largest North American avocado packer-marketers and adding Calavo's fresh-cut/guacamole and prepared-food operations. Calavo was removed from Nasdaq and is no longer a standalone public company [15][16][17][18].

Adjacent public exposure (not classified in 115114, but tied to the same crops):

• Cold-storage REITs. Americold Realty Trust (COLD, NYSE; ~230 facilities) and Lineage (LINE, Nasdaq; the largest temperature-controlled-warehouse operator, ~480 sites) run refrigerated warehouses and, increasingly, handling services such as produce grading, bagging, and ripening that overlap the postharvest step [21][22]. A REIT (real estate investment trust) is a landlord structure that passes most income through to shareholders.
• Equipment makers. JBT Marel (JBTM, NYSE) supplies the sorting, sizing, and processing lines that packing houses buy; Tomra (Oslo-listed) and others make the optical sorters. These sell the picks-and-shovels, not the service.

Major private and cooperative owners (member-owned or private — generally not investable as public equity): Sunkist (citrus), Blue Diamond (almonds), Sun-Maid (raisins), Ocean Spray (cranberries) [24][25][26][27]; The Wonderful Company, a large private grower-packer of almonds, pistachios, and citrus (owner of the Halos and POM brands) [29]; Taylor Farms in fresh-cut [28]; and Grimmway Farms, private-equity-owned [30]. Beneath them sit thousands of independent, family-owned packing houses and custom operators — the bulk of the establishment count.

5. How the money works

At bottom there are three business models, and most companies mix them:

1. Fee-for-service packing — the operator charges the grower by bin, carton, pallet, or pound to clean, sort, cool, and pack the crop. Commodity-price risk is low; utilization, labor, quality, and equipment costs are everything.
2. Merchant handling — the operator buys or takes title to the produce and resells it to wholesalers, retailers, or foodservice. Margins can be higher, but it adds inventory, price, credit, and spoilage risk.
3. Vertical integration — the operator combines farming, harvesting, packing, marketing, and distribution, capturing the grower return and the packing margin and the marketing spread. Supply control improves, but results swing with crop volume, commodity prices, and land/water costs.

For the pure service model, owners make money on throughput and the fee (or margin) per unit handled, not on owning the crop's price risk. The economics rest on a handful of industry-specific levers:

• The packing fee. A custom or cooperative packer charges a per-carton or per-pound fee that bundles the box, labor, materials, cooling, and marketing. University of California cost studies put packinghouse charges in the range of about $4.00 per carton for oranges and roughly $4.90 for lemons; adding certification and decontamination steps pushes the figure higher [31]. Florida citrus packing charges are tracked and published annually for the same reason — they are the core revenue line [32].
• Packout rate. The single most important operating metric. Packout is the share of delivered product that grades out as sellable after sorting — 78,000 saleable pounds from 100,000 delivered is a 78% packout [33]. A high packout means more billable, marketable volume from the same intake and less waste; a low packout (poor crop, pests, weather damage) means the line runs for less saleable output. Packout also drives what the grower gets paid, so it aligns packer and grower.
• Capacity utilization against a seasonal fixed-cost base. Packing houses are capital-intensive — sizers, optical sorters, wax lines, pre-coolers — and most of the fixed cost must be earned back in a short harvest season. Utilization during the window is decisive; an idle sorter still depreciates. This is a classic high-fixed-cost, volume-sensitive business.
• Labor as the swing cost. Sorting and packing are labor-heavy, and labor is the largest variable expense. Limoneira, for example, tied a jump in its lemon-packing costs to higher volume and higher labor costs [19]. This is why the industry is investing in optical sorters and automated hulling/shelling lines to cut labor per unit [23].
• The cooperative model runs at cost. A cooperative is not maximizing a packing margin; it deducts packing and marketing costs from the pooled proceeds and returns the net "pool return" to member-growers. Value accrues to members as growers, not to outside shareholders [24].
• Value-added upcharges. Degreening, ripening rooms (critical for avocados), bagging, fresh-cut, and specialty packaging carry higher fees and margins than plain pack-and-ship — where integrated players like Fresh Del Monte push [13].
• Shrink and perishability. Product is living and decaying; cooling slows it but losses (shrink) between intake and sale are a permanent drag, and a food-safety failure can force a recall of an entire lot.

Metrics an operator or investor watches: peak-season throughput, packhouse utilization, packout, shrink, labor cost per packed unit, energy/refrigeration cost per unit, storage and inventory days, maintenance/expansion capital, grower and customer concentration, and cash tied up in inventory and receivables.

6. What drives demand

• Crop volume — the throughput. Demand for postharvest services is a direct function of how much fruit, vegetable, and nut tonnage comes off the trees and fields. Acreage, yields, and weather set the volume that must be packed. A big crop is a good year for packers; a freeze or failed bloom is a lost season.
• Fresh and fresh-cut consumption and exports. Growth in fresh-produce eating, convenience (ready-to-eat) formats, year-round availability, and export demand (much U.S. citrus, almonds, and produce is exported) all raise the tonnage that needs grading, cooling, and packing to travel.
• Specialty-crop expansion. The long boom in California almonds, pistachios, avocados, and berries has expanded the hulling, shelling, and packing base tied to those crops [23].
• Retailer and food-safety requirements. Buyers increasingly demand consistent grade, packaging, traceability, cold-chain integrity, and audited handling, pushing volume toward sophisticated packing houses and away from informal handling.
• Food-loss economics. Better cooling, sorting, and packaging convert would-be waste into saleable product; the USDA Economic Research Service points to price volatility, labor availability, cold-chain infrastructure, and contractual requirements as key drivers of produce loss and supply-chain economics [8].
• Labor availability and cost. Because the work is labor-intensive and seasonal, the supply and cost of farm and packing labor (including H-2A guest workers) shapes both capacity and the pace of automation.

This industry is seasonal and weather-sensitive more than recession-sensitive: a poor crop cuts packing volume but can raise prices, while a large crop lifts throughput but can pressure selling prices and create capacity bottlenecks.

7. Regulation

• Food safety (FDA / FSMA). Under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Produce Safety Rule sets standards for growing, harvesting, packing, and holding produce, including that postharvest equipment, containers, tools, and the packing environment must not be sources of contamination. Coverage depends partly on whether the activity stays within the "farm" definition or occurs at a regulated food facility; operations that do more than raw packing can also fall under FSMA's Preventive Controls rules [34].
• Produce trading (USDA/PACA). The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) administers the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA), which governs fair dealing, licensing, contracts, and dispute resolution for firms buying and selling fresh and frozen produce [35].
• Grades and marketing orders. AMS publishes grade standards, and federal marketing orders for commodities such as citrus, almonds, and raisins can impose quality, size, packaging, and promotion requirements that packing houses must meet [36].
• Pesticides, fumigants, and worker safety (EPA). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates postharvest fungicides and fumigants and enforces the Worker Protection Standard for pesticide safety [37]. Methyl bromide, once a workhorse fumigant, is being phased out under the Clean Air Act and the Montreal Protocol, forcing packers toward alternatives; maximum residue limits also govern what treatments can be used, especially on export fruit [38].
• Imports and plant health (USDA/APHIS). The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) sets commodity- and country-specific import requirements to manage pests and plant disease — central to year-round sourcing that mixes domestic and imported crops [39].
• Worker safety, labor, and organic. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) covers machinery, forklifts, and cold-environment hazards; wage-and-hour and state agricultural-labor laws (California's farm-overtime rules, for example) bear on the industry's biggest cost; and packing organic product requires compliance with the USDA National Organic Program to preserve the organic claim. State and local rules on water, waste, refrigerants, and zoning also affect facility economics.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The industry is highly fragmented at the bottom and concentrated by commodity at the top. Thousands of small, seasonal, often family-owned packing houses operate alongside a handful of dominant cooperatives that control large shares of specific crops — Sunkist in Western citrus, Blue Diamond in almonds, Ocean Spray in cranberries [24][25][27]. Within a given commodity and region a few large packers set the standard; across the whole industry, no one player is large.

Competition is won mainly on operational reliability, not consumer branding: proximity to growers, dependable peak-season capacity, food-safety and audit performance, packout/shrink/labor efficiency, access to cold storage and transport, long-term grower and retailer relationships, and working-capital capacity. Retailers and foodservice buyers value consistent specification, delivery, and traceability above a shelf brand.

Consolidation is the clear multi-year trend, on several fronts. Among integrated grower-shippers, Mission Produce's ~$483 million absorption of Calavo combined two of the largest North American avocado platforms [15][17]. Business relationships are also concentrating marketing: Limoneira moved its citrus sales and marketing into a commercial packinghouse relationship with Sunkist [20]. In the adjacent cold-storage layer, Lineage and Americold have rolled up thousands of previously independent refrigerated warehouses into two giants [21][22]. And automation is itself a consolidating force: optical sorters and automated shelling lines favor operators large enough to afford them, gradually squeezing sub-scale hand-sort houses [23]. These are observed transactions, not a measured concentration ratio — the federal figures do not publish one for 115114. The direction of travel points toward fewer, larger, more automated, more food-safety-capable operations (a forward-looking judgment, not a settled fact).

9. Risks

• Weather, pests, and disease. No crop, no throughput. Freezes, drought, and disease can wipe out a season. Florida's citrus industry has been gutted by citrus greening (Huanglongbing, or HLB) disease, stranding packing capacity — a concrete case of a crop collapse taking the postharvest business down with it.
• Perishability and food safety. Product decays, and a contamination event or recall can destroy inventory, interrupt operations, and inflict lasting brand and customer damage across a whole lot.
• Labor cost and availability. The dominant variable cost is also a chronic constraint; rising wages, tight labor supply, housing, immigration policy, and worker-safety requirements pressure margins and force capital spending on automation [19][23].
• Commodity-price and grower economics. Merchant handlers and integrated growers can lose money when prices move faster than contracts or inventory can be repriced; and packers depend on growers staying in business — low prices that push growers to pull trees or exit shrink the volume packers can handle.
• Customer concentration. Large retail and foodservice buyers can pressure price and service terms.
• Trade and imports. Import competition (Mexican and Peruvian avocados, imported citrus and nuts), tariffs, border delays, and plant-health restrictions reroute volume and reshape where packing capacity is needed.
• Regulatory and chemical bans. Loss of key fumigants and fungicides (methyl bromide, and pressure on others) raises cost and complexity, especially for export fruit facing residue limits [38].
• Capital intensity and working capital. High fixed costs recovered in a short window make the business unforgiving of a weak crop year; operators may also finance crops and inventory for long periods while collecting from customers later. The low SBA size standard ($34 million) reflects how modest most operators are [6].

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public-market routes. There is no way to buy the postharvest-services industry directly. The practical options:

• Integrated grower-packer-shippers — Mission Produce (AVO) and Limoneira (LMNR) are the relatively direct exposures; Dole (DOLE) and Fresh Del Monte (FDP) are broader fresh-produce companies. In every case the packing operation is bundled with farming and marketing, so you are also taking on crop-price and weather risk, not clean packing-fee economics. Analyze segment results, not headline revenue, since each mixes farming, wholesale, logistics, processing, or real estate [11][12][14][19].
• Adjacent infrastructure — cold-storage REITs Americold (COLD) and Lineage (LINE) for the temperature-controlled-handling angle, and equipment makers such as JBT Marel (JBTM) for the automation build-out. These give exposure to the cold chain and the capital cycle without owning the perishable crop [21][22].
• Valuation tools that fit this cyclical, asset-heavy business: enterprise value to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), free-cash-flow yield, return on invested capital, and debt-maturity analysis — normalized for crop cycles, inventory write-downs, recalls, acquisitions, and one-time weather effects.

Private-market routes are the more direct exposure: independent packing houses with strong grower relationships; cold-storage, ripening, and logistics assets; automation and optical-sorting equipment; contract packing and quality-control businesses; working-capital facilities for merchant handlers; and cooperative- or private-equity-backed platforms. Due diligence should center on peak-season utilization, packout and shrink, grower and customer concentration, the labor model, food-safety history, water and environmental permits, insurance, maintenance capital, and cash conversion. Grower cooperatives (Sunkist, Blue Diamond, Sun-Maid, Ocean Spray) cannot be bought as equity — participation means being a grower-member [24][25][26][27].

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). The long-term opportunity is more about operational improvement than a clean, high-growth industry-revenue story. Steady, essential demand tied to fresh-produce consumption should support capable operators, and the drivers to watch are: the pace of automation as labor stays scarce and costly; continued consolidation among grower-shippers and in cold storage; food-safety and traceability requirements that favor scaled, audited operators; the health of specialty-crop volumes (almonds, avocados, pistachios, berries) that feed the packing lines; and weather and disease shocks that can erase a season's throughput. The best-positioned businesses will combine supply access, efficient facilities, automation, strong food-safety systems, and disciplined working-capital management. The federal data do not support a precise industry revenue, margin, or valuation forecast — so investors should underwrite individual facilities and operators rather than assume the reported employer base represents the full U.S. market. Durable, unglamorous infrastructure with limited direct public-market entry points.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition — 115114 Postharvest Crop Activities (except Cotton Ginning)" and Sector 11 definitions, 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/; https://www.census.gov/naics/resources/archives/sect11.html
2. SICCODE, "NAICS Code 115114 — Postharvest Crop Activities," 2024. https://siccode.com/naics-code/115114/postharvest-crop-activities
3. Ask Kodiak, "NAICS 2022 — 1151 Support Activities for Crop Production (115111–115116)," 2022. https://naics.askkodiak.com/naics/2022/115
4. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns 2023 — NAICS 115114" (establishments ~1,000; employment 26,330; annual payroll ~$1.478B; Q1 payroll ~$329.8M), 2025. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
5. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns Methodology" (employer-establishment coverage and exclusions), 2026. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
6. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards — NAICS 115114 ($34.0 million)," 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
7. IBISWorld, "Crop Services in the US" (NAICS 1151 group; ~$32B revenue; ~73,000 businesses), 2025. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/crop-services/89/
8. USDA Economic Research Service, "Economic Drivers of Food Loss and Waste at the Farm and Pre-Retail Sectors," 2020. https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/95778
9. U.S. Census Bureau, "NAICS 493130: Farm Product Warehousing and Storage," 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/resources/archives/sect48-49.html
10. Dole plc, "Our Business — Our Operations" (~75 packing houses, 12 cold-storage facilities), 2024. https://www.doleplc.com/our-business/our-operations/default.aspx
11. Dole plc, 2025 Form 10-K / full-year results (~$8.5B revenue). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1857475/000185747526000028/dole-20251231.htm
12. Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc., "Form 10-K FY2024" (net sales $4,280.2M), 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1047340/000104734025000009/fdp-20241227.htm
13. The Packer, "Fresh Del Monte and Mann Packing: value-added ripening, sorting, packing, fresh-cut," 2024. https://www.thepacker.com/news/industry/fresh-del-monte-and-mann-packing-two-produce-powerhouses-under-one-roof
14. Mission Produce, Inc., "FY2025 results — net sales ~$1.39B," 2025 (via Food Dive, "Avocado shortages generate record profits"). https://www.fooddive.com/news/avocado-shortage-prices-mission-produce-limoneira/726823/
15. Mission Produce, Inc., "Form 8-K — Completion of Calavo Acquisition," May 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1802974/000119312526246175/d227819d8k.htm
16. Calavo Growers Inc., "Form 8-K — Removal from Nasdaq Listing," 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1133470/000119312526246170/d334380d8k.htm
17. Mission Produce, Inc., "Agreement to Acquire Calavo Growers (~$483M; ~$27.00/share)," 2026. https://missionproduce.com/news/mission-produce-announces-agreement-to-acquire-calavo-growers-expanding-north-american-avocado-business-and-diversifying-portfolio-across-fresh-produce/
18. Calavo Growers Inc., "Form 10-K FY2025" (net sales $648.4M), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1133470/000110465926003786/cvgw-20251031x10k.htm
19. Limoneira Co., "Form 10-K FY2025" (lemon-packing segment revenue ~$49.1M; labor/packing cost increases), 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1342423/000134242325000039/lmnr-20251031.htm
20. Limoneira Co., "Form 10-Q for the period ended April 30, 2026" (citrus sales/marketing relationship with Sunkist), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1342423/000134242326000023/lmnr-20260430.htm
21. Nareit / Americold Realty Trust, "Americold Realty Trust profile" (~230 facilities; handling services incl. produce grading, bagging, ripening), 2026. https://www.reit.com/investing/reit-directory/americold-realty-trust
22. Seeking Alpha, "Lineage: Leading Cold-Storage REIT" (~480 locations), 2025. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4831369-lineage-leading-cold-storage-reit-trading-near-all-time-lows
23. IndexBox, "Nut Processing Machine Market — Wonderful, Olam, Blue Diamond; hulling/shelling automation and optical sorters," 2025. https://www.indexbox.io/blog/nut-processing-machine-market-driven-by-demand-for-value-added-products-to-2035/
24. Sunkist Growers, "About Us," 2026 (grower-owned citrus cooperative; independently owned member packinghouses). https://sunkist.com/en-us/about-us
25. Blue Diamond Growers, "About / Benefits of Almonds," 2026 (grower-owned almond cooperative). https://www.bluediamond.com/benefits-of-almonds/
26. Sun-Maid Growers, "Grower Story," 2026 (farmer cooperative; raisins and dried fruit). https://www.sunmaid.com/about-us/grower-story/
27. Wikipedia, "Ocean Spray (cooperative)," 2025 (700+ grower-owners; ~70% of North American cranberry production). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Spray_(cooperative)
28. Taylor Farms, "Our Story," 2026 (private fresh-cut salad and vegetable producer). https://www.taylorfarms.com/our-story/
29. The Wonderful Company, "Who We Are," 2026 (private grower-packer of nuts and citrus). https://www.wonderful.com/
30. Loeb & Loeb, "Represented Grimmway Farms in Teays River Acquisition," 2021 (private-equity ownership). https://www.loeb.com/en/experience/represented-grimmway-farms-in-teays-river-acquisition
31. University of California Cooperative Extension, "Sample Costs to Establish and Produce Lemons / Oranges" (packinghouse charges ~$4.00–$4.90/carton), 2005–2010. https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/57/c4/57c4611c-f2bb-4bde-9b77-a343ca9f0a62/lemonvs10.pdf
32. UF/IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center, "2022/23 Average Packing Charges for Florida Fresh Citrus," 2023. https://crec.ifas.ufl.edu/media/crecifasufledu/economics/docs/Packing_Charges_Report_20230721.pdf
33. Umbrex, "What is packout rate?" 2024. https://umbrex.com/resources/umbrex-explainers/agriculture-food-explainers/packout-rate/
34. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "FSMA Final Rule on Produce Safety," 2015/2016. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/fsma-final-rule-produce-safety
35. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, "Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA)," 2026. https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/paca
36. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, "Marketing Orders & Agreements," 2026. https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/moa
37. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS)," 2026. https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety/agricultural-worker-protection-standard-wps
38. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Methyl Bromide — phase-out under the Clean Air Act and Montreal Protocol," 2024. https://www.epa.gov/ods-phaseout/methyl-bromide
39. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, "How To Import Plants and Plant Products into the United States," 2026. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant-imports/how-to-import