A canopy of vines shades workers from the blazing Sonoran sun as they reach up to pick bunches of pale-green table grapes overhead.
One worker at this 1,400-acre vineyard pops a grape into his mouth with a crunch. The rest of the bunch will most likely arrive by nightfall in Arizona, more than 100 miles away, said Alejandro Villaseñor, who oversees production at the Pozo Manuel grape farm.
These Cotton Candy variety grapes are extra sweet and sell well in U.S. grocery stores, Villaseñor said. The farm’s harvest calendar means Pozo Manuel can get grapes to U.S. consumers slightly before California table grape producers kick off their harvest.
“We are harvesting in a time of the year where there is nobody harvesting but us,” Villaseñor said.
The cross-border flow of fresh produce from Mexico to the United States is a multibillion-dollar endeavor. It has changed the way Americans’ refrigerator shelves look over the past three decades, experts say, helping ensure U.S. consumers can buy fresh fruits and vegetables year-round.
Key to that availability is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which keeps many goods traded between the three countries tariff-free. The future of the trade deal is unclear as negotiators duke it out ahead of a mandated review this summer.
At the White House last week, President Donald Trump suggested perhaps his country would be better off without the USMCA, which he negotiated in his first term as he sought to replace NAFTA.
“I don’t know that I’m going to renew it,” Trump said. “Because to be honest with you, the United States does much better. We don’t need anything that Canada has, we don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have.”
But many agricultural economists say the United States does, in fact, need what Mexico has. That includes the vast swathes of green fruit and vegetable fields that punctuate the landscape in Mexican states like Sonora.
Billions of dollars a year of fresh produce crosses into Arizona from Mexico annually. More than $275 million of that comes from table grapes, according to the University of Arizona. The steady U.S. demand for fresh produce from Mexico has allowed producers to swell in size.
During the grape harvest season, more than 1,000 migrant workers from farther south in Mexico live and work at Pozo Manuel. In addition to the vineyard and the grape-packing facility, there are dorms, a gym, a cafeteria, a bakery, a doctor and a dentist.
As operations like this have grown, trade has revolutionized which fruits and vegetables are available to Americans, said University of California, Davis agricultural economist Daniel Sumner.
“Canned fruits in the United States have gone way downhill, whether it’s peaches or pears or you name it, because people have access to fresh berries and other fresh fruits year-round,” Sumner said.
The USMCA is now likely to undergo months, if not years, of negotiation. Farmers are used to dealing with a certain level of uncertainty, like weather and changing consumer demands, Sumner said.
“The political uncertainty is harder,” Sumner said. “And right now we’re dealing with a set of politicians who are seemingly unpredictable and maybe even creating uncertainty on purpose.”
The United States and Mexico have been in ongoing negotiations ahead of the July 1 deadline to decide whether to renew the trade pact for 16 more years. Those negotiations have largely excluded Canada, which has some observers wondering if the U.S. administration is considering replacing the trilateral agreement with two bilateral agreements.
That could give the United States more control over negotiations, said Texas A&M University agriculture economist Luis Ribera. The United States’ purchasing power makes it a formidable negotiator, which means Ribera isn’t surprised to see the administration drive a hard bargain.
“What I’m not sure of is the end game,” Ribera said. “If the end game is to try to lower tariffs across the board, I’m all for it. But if it keep tariffs high, I’m not for it.”
Putting tariffs on certain agricultural products from Mexico could benefit some U.S. farmers, but negotiators should be wary, said former U.S. Department of Agriculture chief economist Joe Glauber.
“If one country starts talking about seasonal tariffs, that works both ways. You could have seasonal tariffs on U.S. corn, you could have seasonal tariffs on U.S. soybeans,” Glauber said.
Conversations between the United States, Mexico and Canada are likely to go beyond agriculture and manufacturing.
The negotiations are happening at a tense time for the United States and Mexico politically. The United States recently indicted several Mexican officials accused of aiding drug cartels, and Trump has made cracking down on criminal groups in Mexico a political goal — including by threatening U.S. military action.
“Mexico and Canada have to consider everything that comes out of the administration’s mouth right now is extremely important and they should take it very, very seriously,” said Jaime Chamberlain, a produce distributor in Nogales, Arizona, who buys produce from Mexico to distribute in the United States.
Ultimately, he said, the United States and Mexico need each other.
“We cannot feed our own domestic population,” Chamberlain said. “We need each other to feed each other.”
Back at Pozo Manuel, red-winged blackbirds swoop low between the rows of table grape vines.
Villaseñor agrees that the United States and Mexico are too intertwined to fully extract from one another — like the grape vines twisting overhead. But tariffs would likely mean higher prices.
“The ones who are going to suffer will be the consumers,” Villaseñor said.
For now, his focus is on taking care of the vines that produce the grapes that keep this operation in business.
“We have a good product here,” Villaseñor said. “There’s not going to be a big problem if we are doing our best.”
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