CALIFORNIA FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAM - PART 2

A MARXIST WORLD-ECOLOGY ANALYSIS
By: Marcelo Brasil

5. The power of farm labor contractors over labor supply chains

The district-level logic of cheap procurement, established through trade policy and the appropriation of extra-human and human natures, is operationalized by the specific structure of the migrant labor supply chain. A key mechanism is the use of third-party labor intermediaries contracted through programs like H-2A visas. It has been reported that “sixty-one percent of farmers…hired a farm labor contractor to recruit employees.”(“Survey: California Farms Face Continuing Employee Shortages,” 2023)

These third parties, known as Farm Labor Contractors (FLCs), enable companies like Wonderful Citrus, HMC Farms, and Sun Pacific Farms – all of which have contracts with SDUSD and other schools – to outsource recruitment to firms like “Fresh Harvest.” (US Department of Labor (2022). This practice reduces costs and increases profitability. Farmworkers employed by FLCs, who represent approximately two-thirds of California’s crop workers, typically earn less than direct hires. A University of California Davis (UCD) study identifies FLCs as the largest single employers of California workers, and workers at Wonderful Citrus are no exception. There, contracted workers – who typically fill less than two bins of mandarin oranges during an eight-hour shift – earn on average around US$12 an hour, on a piece-rate basis. This is where FLCs extract profit. FLC commissions are typically 30% to 40% of Farm Worker Wages. (UC Davis, 2025) If Wonderful Citrus allocates US$15 per hour for labor, the FLC may pay the worker US$12, retaining US$3 as profit. Additional revenue streams for FLCs include recruitment fees and transportation costs, which can burden workers with significant debt. In comparison, Wonderful’s direct hires performing the same work, according to Salgado, earn at least US$15 an hour. (Bloch, 2019)

This structure adheres to what Intan Suwandi identifies as a core neoliberal logic: production “is increasingly organized in global commodity chains (also known as global supply chains or global value chains), governed by multinational corporations straddling the planet” (p. 1). Suwandi’s analysis demonstrates how neoliberal capitalist imperialism functions through arm’s-length contracting and the externalization of costs to maximize profits. Corporations and farmers “increasingly prefer to externalize their operations because forcing outsourced producers into intense competition with one another is a more effective way of driving down wages and intensifying labor than doing so in-house through appointed managers.”(Smith, 2016:81)

Farmers also use FLCs to deflect liability; if labor violations occur, the contractor, not the farm, is typically held responsible. For instance, in a case against Wonderful Citrus, it was reported that “of these 33 individuals, it appears 12 individuals were Wonderful direct hires and 21 worked for farm labor contractors providing labor to Wonderful”(State of California Agricultural Labor Relations Board [ALRB], Admin. Order No. 2024-04, March 18, 2024)., including contractors such as Guerrero Labor Contractor, O.F.R. Incorporated, Kern Labor Contracting Incorporated, and Paragon Personnel. Investigations detect labor law violations in 70 to 80% of FLC cases, fueling perceptions that FLCs systematically exploit farmworkers. (Gifford Center for Population Studies, UC Davis, 2025) Such a system solidifies the “cheapness” required for profitable appropriation, a dynamic partly realized through the Farm to School program. The substandard material conditions provided by FLCs are a direct result of this cost-cutting imperative, and the literal fruits of this labor are ultimately served on a student’s plate. Consequently, many “farmers reap over US$7 billion from the harvest of valuable commodities like almonds, grapes, and pistachios.”(Bloch, 2019) This model illustrates how school procurement metabolically functions: cutting costs through neoliberal outsourcing is the operational norm.

While migrants provide cheap labor for farms, schools decide how to procure goods, effectively benefiting from this system without socializing costs. This process begins with district personnel like the Nutrition Director and the Farm-to-School Specialist – positions with higher salaries than teachers and cafeteria workers – who design menus and select vendor farms like Wonderful Citrus, Dole, Kingsburg Orchards or Sun Pacific Farms. They then issue a purchase order to a local produce distributor, for example, SDUSD and SUHSD use American Produce Distributors (APD).(San Diego Unified School District & American Mushroom Inc., 2022) APD finalizes deals with selected farms and delivers the produce to school sites. The simplified chain is: SDUSD orders from APD → APD procures from farms → APD delivers to schools.

This managerial process exemplifies capitalism as a world-ecology where specific actors make sourcing decisions based on a logic of accumulation by appropriation generated by imperialism. The produce – picked by migrant workers, transported by trucks running on stolen Venezuelan oil (Matza, 2025), delivered to school yards, and prepared by an underpaid, and overworked precarious cafeteria staff at 17.16 dollars an hour, almost entirely female 93%… more likely to be Black or Latino… 35.9% of food service workers in California are migrants (Hinkley, Sara. 2024)– is ultimately served to the future labor force – a fitting Cecil Rhodes’ model of imperial provisioning. On top of this, SDUSD just recently eliminated 221 classified positions because of a $47 million budget deficit; this includes bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and special education aides—workers essential to the daily functioning of schools. (Hessedal, 2026). Having established these material mechanics, the program then obscures them beneath a veneer of “free market” ideology under “fiscal discipline,” a discipline applied not to vendors or administrators but to the most vulnerable workers, who according to an interview with a cafeteria worker, even before these layoffs, they were “understaffed, and do not have breaks.” (Interviewee B, 2025)

This hierarchy extends beyond the supply chain into the school itself. Administrators–and their lavish salaries (superintendents in SDUSD currently hold a $445K salary, and principals currently hold a 175k salary)– at the school are dependent on not only exploited farm workers, but also on the appropriation of unpaid human and extra-human nature for their benefit, especially when standardized testing or “performance standards” and attendance is part of how an administrator is measured… .or an important metric that measures “highly effective teachers” or “high performing schools.” (Commission on Teacher Credentialing 2014, 5) Moreover, a high performing school can only attain that if students are well nourished. “School Nutrition Association” did a study that read “on average students who eat school breakfasts have been shown to achieve 17.5% higher scores on standardized math tests, and attend 1.5 more days of school per year.” (School Nutrition Association, 2022) Therefore, the school’s own reproduction is inseparable from the search for “cheap” nature.

6. Vendor case studies: The imperial architecture of “local” food

The theoretical framework and procurement logic establish a systemic imperative for “cheapness.” This section analyzes specific corporate vendors to demonstrate how that imperative is materially realized through business models built on imperial supply chains, political power, and exploitation of workers. These case studies reveal the concrete architecture of the “local” food served in schools.

6.1 Wonderful Citrus and HMC Farms: Guaranteed markets and militarized capital

This analysis raises a critical question: does supplying schools function as a guaranteed market for agricultural capital? Historical precedent suggests it does. In the 1960s, consumer boycotts targeted California grapes to protest unfair labor and anti-union practices led by the United Farm Workers. In response,

“Growers, in their greatest coup, successfully petitioned the US Department of Defense to buy the grapes which consumers didn’t want to eat, and [fed] them straight to the troops in Vietnam. In 1968, the military bought 6.9 million pounds of fresh grapes. By 1969, they bought 11 million pounds, with shipments to Vietnam increasing five-fold.” (Patel, 2008: 69)

This dynamic mirrors the current Farm to School program: even amidst potential market fluctuations or ethical scrutiny, growers would likely secure a guaranteed buyer in the Department of Education, just as they did in the Department of Defense, also referred to as the Department of War. In Farm to School’s grant program, it is clear “....to incentivize farmers and ranchers….a sustained market for those products through school food purchasing.” (Socolar and Bowles, 2025) The irony is compounded by the fact that much of the farm and reproductive labor originates from regions devastated by environmental catastrophes often induced by the U.S. military, a key appendage of U.S. imperialism that is often erased from promotional discourse.

Connecting war to environmental damages is essential to a world-ecology lens. Frontiers deemed “empty” or “hostile” are appropriated by the capitalist class, a process often secured through invasion or conflict to guarantee nature’s “free gifts.” In war, “most nature, including most humans, was sacrificed in service to the productivity of wage-labor” (Moore, 2017: 94). Capitalism’s dual need is for “cheap nature” as both input (e.g., cheap fertilizer) and output (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions) (Foster, 2000). Public school procurement functions within this same frontier logic, absorbing commodities (including migrant workers who flee) produced in militarized ecological sacrifice zones.

The case of Wonderful Citrus, a supplier to San Diego Unified and many other school districts, exemplifies this nexus. Owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the company benefits from a guaranteed school market. At the 2024 International Fresh Produce Association, Nancy Johnston, Senior Director of Foodservice Sales at Wonderful Citrus, stated: “Kids are next generation consumers, but they’re also today’s consumer. And with schools serving such a large number of students on a consistent basis, we want to ensure they know about our great tasting mandarins, and then also tell their parents to look for Halos the next time they’re at the supermarket.” She further revealed the strategic necessity of this market when she said: “Working with the K-12 sector isn’t always easy, but it’s a market we can’t afford to ignore.” (“IFPA Meetings Connect K-12 School Menu Planners with Growers, Processors,” 2024).

Wonderful’s empire is bolstered by state and military support. For instance, the Port of Los Angeles signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the City of Shafter, California, and The Wonderful Company to promote more efficient trade connections with the Central Valley, focusing on boosting U.S. exports.(The Port of L.A., 2025) This agreement illustrates how public infrastructure subsidizes agribusiness expansion. The Resnick’s are major donors to politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom (his wife Jennifer Newsom serves as co-chair of the California Farm to School Working Group) and Representative Jim Costa (who maintains the milk lobby), leveraging influence to advance an economic agenda spanning from Californian schools to Western Asia. They also support Republican Representative David Valadao, who has advocated for policies to “make the Middle East even less stable and increase the likelihood of war in the region.” (Todd, 2022) The Resnick’s support aims to protect their lucrative pistachio monopoly from international competition, particularly from Iran. Valadao also has “...commended President Trump for taking decisive action” against Iran, in the 2026 attacks. Furthermore, they have funded think tanks lobbying for aggressive foreign policy, including supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine on Palestinians and favouring hostile sanctions and opposition to any Iran nuclear deal. (Blumenthal, 2018) Thus, a corporation supplying school lunches actively profits from and promotes militarism to secure its markets, normalizing genocide and war as a backdrop to student life.

Lastly, The Resnick’s control 57% of the Kern Water Bank, one of California’s largest underground water storage facilities designed to manage droughts. Their philanthropic branding – such as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Student Union at California State University Fresno – obscures a reality where educational institutions are clients of a corporation willing to promote genocide and risk war for market dominance. This imperial logic extends to other major vendors, such as HMC Farms, whose owner Harold McClartney champions exports to “food-insecure” nations like sanction-ravaged Cuba, viewing them not through solidarity but as opportunities for market penetration within an unequal global trade system. McClarty said that “....the more markets we have available, the more legs we add to the stool that supports us,” (Rodriguez, 2015) which also echoes McClartey’s logic to “introducing good-tasting, crunchy and sweet grapes to kids is a priority, starting with grammar school exposure.” (Prevor, 2022)

6.2 Dole: Plantation legacies and structural adjustment

Promotional material from school districts reveals a reliance on corporate vendors and the frontier logic of appropriation. An Instagram post from @sandicoastcafe (SDUSD’s nutrition account), using the hashtag “farm to school”, showcases its relationship with Dole and Wonderful Citrus. Dole, headquartered in Ireland for tax advantages, grows bananas in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and the Philippines. The U.S. Bureau of International Labor Affairs has reported forced and child labor in the banana sectors of some of these countries. This practice continues Dole’s historical legacy of plantation colonialism, notably in Hawaii, where it suppressed Indigenous populations (Fujii, 2025), and Sanford Dole became the first president of the Hawaiian Republic. Countries like Costa Rica became victims of SAPs, “hit hard by debt payments and was one of the first countries in the region to default on its loans” (Ferreira et al. 2018). The same script followed: devalued currency followed by a wave of privatizations with foreign transnationals eager to capitalize on “cheap” agricultural commodities.

“The Costa Rican government launched a number of initiatives with the help of the United States Agency for International Development and other international actors (the WTO) to further develop infrastructure (transportation, processing plants, etc.) and reduce domestic barriers to trade for transnational agricultural firms.”

Furthermore,

“[T]hrough structural adjustment, international financial institutions obligated the Costa Rican state to adopt policies that favored firms like Del Monte and Dole, such as tax exonerations for foreign entities, financing for farming organizations, incentives for agricultural research, and exemptions from environmental health laws” (Brown, Flint, & LaMay, 2020) (Vagneron et al. 2009).

These lax laws have made Costa Rica a leading global user of pesticides, with application rates as high as 34.45 kg per hectare annually (Vargas Castro, 2022). Within this arrangement, “wages in the banana industry have remained stagnant for years, keeping workers impoverished.”(Link, 2025) The Farm to School program is thus built upon a plantation model, feeding what can be termed a ‘plantation mentality.’

6.3 Hormel/Applegate: The “Non-Local” Frontier

Some “non-local” vendors like Hormel Foods in Nebraska (owner of Applegate farms, a vendor to SDUSD), also reliant on migrant labor, exemplify a plantation regime with its focus on quantity and speed. A worker testimony from a Hormel plant in 2018 describes the brutal reality:

“[T]he speed of the line had jumped recently – from 1,000 pigs per hour to more than 1,100 – and Lopez was having trouble keeping up…As her co-worker reached for another shoulder, Lopez rushed to clear the cutting area, and her fingers slipped toward the saw blade...Her index finger dangled by a flap of skin, the bone cut clean through. She screamed as blood spurted out” (Genoways, 2014)

As students rush to the lunch line – a daily ritual marketed by SDUSD’s nutrition instagram account – the centrality of food to school operations is clear. Lopez’s experience reveals how the school not only depends on but actively supports and enables this violent, unequal exchange. (Bacon, 2018) An analysis of procurement contracts and public reporting for major vendors, including Wonderful Citrus, HMC Farms, Stehly Farms, Pitman Family Farms, reveals a consistent pattern of labor violations, reliance on exploited migrant labor, and documented hazardous working conditions. This directly links the school lunch program to imperial supply chains.