"Pick-Your-Own" Isn't Charming. It's Desperation in Disguise.

You’re not visiting a U-Pick farm for the experience. You’re working for free.

They hand you a basket and call it tradition. They romanticize it as “connecting with your food,” but let’s be honest: no one romanticized berry picking when it was migrant labor in the sun for $2.35 an hour. Now it’s just dressed up in gingham and nostalgia.

U-Picks exist because the farmer can’t afford to pay help.

Because margins are razor-thin, labor is expensive, and the food system is rigged so badly that the only way to stay afloat is to outsource the harvest to customers and call it agritourism. You’re the solution to a broken model, one that pays farmers pennies while grocery stores mark up your food by 400%.

They sell it to you as an experience. As family fun. As something wholesome to post on Instagram. But underneath the sun hats and photo ops is a farmer who can't make ends meet unless you show up, do the work, and pay for the privilege.

And most U-Picks don’t charge more for that experience. They charge less. The price is discounted because you did the harvesting. Because someone figured out how to cut labor costs and make it feel like a perk. You don’t just become the labor. You become the discount.

That’s the game: too much land, not enough help, but still expecting all the revenue. The fields are too big to manage, the labor pool is too thin to hire, so the public gets invited in to pick the crops and pay at checkout. It’s not a business model. It’s a patch job.

This is what late-stage capitalism looks like in agriculture. We’ve hit the point where farmers are forced to sell not just the food, but the act of harvesting it. You don’t just buy the apple. You buy the labor. You become the labor.

This isn’t how it used to be. Farms used to hire crews, pay wages, and get food to market. But between input costs, insurance, licensing, transportation, and market manipulation by grocery chains and distributors, that model became unsustainable for small farms. Now, the only way to survive is to commodify authenticity and invite people to come cosplay poverty on the weekends.

But you don’t see that part. You see a smiling family filling buckets and baskets. You see the curated signs and homemade jam in the gift shop. You see a lifestyle you’ve been told is simple and beautiful. You don’t see the burnout. The unpaid hours. The mountain of paperwork. The farmer calculating if they made enough this weekend to cover feed next week.

You aren’t picking for joy. You’re picking because the system demands it.

And the only reason it works is because the same system alienates you from labor so thoroughly that it becomes a novelty. So disconnected from food production that harvesting your own strawberries becomes a memory worth making.

They made food a luxury. Then they made labor a lifestyle. And they’re laughing all the way to the bank.

We’ve been asked if we’d offer U-Pick. It’s a fair question. But the answer is no. Not because we don’t think people would enjoy it, but because we looked at what U-Pick really is and realized we’d just be replicating the same exploitative logic. Whether it’s fruit or wildflowers, the mechanics are the same: unpaid harvest labor made palatable through aesthetic and story. We’d rather grow it, cut it, and offer it honestly than sell people the experience of working for free. And we’re not desperate. We won’t ever be. That’s the whole point of building something real. So you don’t have to sell pieces of it just to stay alive.