Salad Bowl of the World · Episode 9 of 14 · 11 min
Making the Market
By 1930 the valley was loading twenty thousand refrigerator cars of lettuce a year without knowing what any would sell for. The old consignment system invited fraud, which Congress criminalized in 1927 and regulated in 1930. A federal price wire, brokers, and sales made at the shed shifted the risk onto the grower-shipper. Stanford economist William O. Jones studied exactly this, then applied the same questions to African food markets.
Who's who
- William O. Jones+1 more episodeStanford economist who studied the lettuce industry's risk and African food markets
- Henry L. Strobel+2 more episodesFirst president of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association
Where it happens
- Salinas Valley, California+7 more episodesShipped about 20,000 rail cars of lettuce a year by 1930
- New York, New YorkTerminal market where commission merchants sold consigned cars
- Chicago, Illinois+15 more episodesTerminal market for consigned produce
- Stanford University, California+8 more episodesHome of the Food Research Institute where Jones worked
- Tropical AfricaFocus of Jones's later staple-food marketing research
Timeline
- 1915The USDA Market News Service begins with a telegraphed strawberry price report.
- March 3, 1927The Produce Agency Act makes dumping or falsely accounting for consigned produce a federal misdemeanor.
- June 10, 1930The Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act licenses merchants and brokers and makes perishable contracts enforceable.
- Summer 1930Fifteen shippers found the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association.
- 1947William O. Jones takes his Stanford doctorate with a dissertation on the Salinas Valley.
- May 1951Jones publishes a case study of risk distribution in the California lettuce industry.
Still debated
The exact title of Jones's dissertation is unverified, and the specific argument of his 1951 paper was not checked against the full text. Whether diversion of unsold cars in transit was as central to lettuce as to citrus, and the usual diversion points, could not be verified.
