Market conditions

The market you would be selling into.

Real published data on Central Valley commodity prices, the input costs that move a processor's margin, and the borrowing environment that decides what a buyer can finance. Every series below is sourced and dated. None of it is ours — we just read it for a living.

Commodity data through 2025 crop year Cost indexes through August 2026 Compiled September 2026
01 — What you grow or process

Grower prices, ten years back.

Season-average prices received and production, straight from USDA NASS. Pick a commodity. Gaps are left empty rather than filled in — where the agency has not published a price, neither have we.

 

 
 
What it means
 
02 — What it costs to run

Every input except the crop.

Producer price indexes for the costs a packing or processing operation actually carries. All five are indexed to January 2016 = 100 so they sit on one scale — the published indexes use two different base years and cannot be compared as levels.

Input cost pressure since 2016

Jan 2016 = 100 · not seasonally adjusted
Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index by Industry, retrieved via FRED. Series PCU311311, PCU31143114, PCU484121484121, PCU3222132221, PCU4931249312. The most recent four months are provisional and subject to revision.
What it means
Freight and packaging moved far harder than the food price index itself, and neither has come back to where it started. If your pricing has not been revisited since 2021, the margin compression is sitting in your financials as a mystery rather than as a documented, explainable change — and an unexplained margin decline is the single most expensive thing to walk into diligence with.
03 — What a buyer can borrow

The rate environment sets your buyer pool.

Almost every lower-middle-market deal is financed. What a buyer can pay is a function of what a lender will lend against your earnings, and at what cost.

Bank prime loan rate and fed funds

Monthly, percent
Federal Reserve via FRED, series MPRIME and FEDFUNDS. Monthly averages.
What it means
Prime peaked at 8.50% and has come down, but it is still roughly double where it sat through 2021. Higher money costs the buyer, and the way that shows up in an offer is structure, not headline price — more of the consideration moves into seller notes and earnouts. Clean, verifiable earnings are what let a lender fund more of the deal at close, which is the difference between getting paid now and getting paid if.
How to read this — and how not to

This is public data, not a valuation. Nothing here tells you what your business is worth. It tells you what the market around it has been doing. Two businesses in the same commodity, same year, sell at very different numbers — the difference is almost never the commodity.

Gaps are real gaps. Where USDA has not published a season-average price, the chart shows nothing. Pistachio prices are missing for 2016, 2017, and everything after 2023 because the agency stopped collecting them; processing tomato figures before 2023 are contract prices from a different source, not NASS averages. We have not filled a single one of those in by estimate.

Revisions happen. USDA revises crop figures for years after publication and BLS revises the last four months of every PPI series. Figures here reflect the most recent published vintage as of September 2026.

Units are not comparable across commodities. Almonds are shelled pounds, walnuts are in-shell tons, oranges are packinghouse-door boxes. Read each chart on its own.

Your numbers matter more than these ones.

The market is the market. What decides your outcome is whether a buyer can verify your earnings, and whether the business runs without you. Fifteen minutes and I will tell you where you actually stand.

Book a 15-minute call