Definition
A produce broker is a person whose occupation is to buy or sell agricultural or farm products, typically acting as an intermediary between producers and buyers rather than holding title to goods as a principal.
The term carries two related but distinguishable functions: (1) acting as a broker proper — negotiating transactions on behalf of others without taking ownership of the goods — and (2) acting in a buying or selling capacity on one's own account in agricultural markets. Historical statutes and cases did not always draw this line sharply, using "produce broker" to describe anyone commercially occupied in the trade of farm products, whether as agent or dealer.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A dealer in natural products, especially those imported from colonies or foreign countries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No distinct entry; the term would have been understood as a trader or middleman dealing in the produce of the land.
The legal meaning is narrower than the Wiktionary definition. While common usage emphasizes imported or colonial goods, the legal definition in American law centers specifically on domestic agricultural and farm products, tied to federal commercial regulation of agricultural markets rather than import trade. A researcher who imports the ordinary meaning risks misreading the statutory and case-law context, which is rooted in domestic farm commerce.
Common Confusion
PRODUCE BROKER vs. COMMISSION MERCHANT vs. FACTOR: These three terms overlap substantially in historical sources and are often used interchangeably in older texts, but they carry distinct legal weights. A commission merchant receives goods on consignment and sells them for a fee, typically taking possession. A factor is a more general term for an agent who sells goods entrusted to them by a principal. A produce broker, in the strictest usage, negotiates sales without necessarily taking possession or title. Bouvier explicitly cross-references all three, signaling that courts and commentators recognized the blurring. Researchers using 19th-century materials should not assume any of these terms implies a precise agency or ownership relationship without examining the specific statutory or contractual context.
Why It Matters in Research
The term "produce broker" is a creature of 19th-century federal commercial regulation and appears with its sharpest legal definition in the period following the Civil War, when Congress began taxing and licensing trades in agricultural markets. The statutory hook in Black's — the reference to 14 U.S. Stat. at Large 117 — points to the Internal Revenue Act framework of the 1860s, which imposed license taxes on various trades including produce brokers. This situates the term firmly in a tax and licensing context, not in agency or contract law per se.
Researchers should note:
- The term is largely dormant in modern general commercial law. Its functional descendants appear in agricultural commodity regulation under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA) and related USDA licensing frameworks, where "dealer," "broker," and "commission merchant" are separately defined terms of art. Do not assume the historical definition maps cleanly onto modern PACA categories.
- The overlap with "factor" and "commission merchant" in the historical corpus means that a search for produce broker alone will undercount relevant cases. Searches should include all three terms plus "agricultural broker" for thorough coverage of pre-20th-century materials.
- The term rarely appears in equity or property law contexts. Its natural home is regulatory, tax, and commercial law — civil litigation arising from agricultural transactions and federal licensing disputes.
- State law variations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries added their own licensing schemes for produce brokers, so the term may carry different statutory definitions depending on the jurisdiction and period under examination.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's 1st and 2nd editions are in close agreement, offering the same functional definition: a person whose occupation is to buy or sell agricultural or farm products. The 2nd edition adds the full case citation (U.S. v. Simons, Fed. Cas. No. 16,291), which arose in a federal criminal prosecution under the revenue licensing statutes — useful confirmation that the term's legal significance was primarily regulatory.
Bouvier adds meaningful context by cross-referencing BROKER, COMMISSION MERCHANT, and FACTOR, implicitly acknowledging that the term does not stand alone as a precise legal category but must be read in relation to adjacent agency and trade concepts. This cross-referencing is more informative than the bare definition the other sources provide.
None of the historical dictionaries address the principal/agent distinction with precision or discuss what duties, if any, a produce broker owed to the parties on whose behalf transactions were made. Researchers seeking that analysis will need to look to treatises on agency and factor law, not to the dictionary definitions.
Jurisdictional Note
The core historical definition derives from federal statute and federal case law. State licensing regimes for produce brokers varied considerably from the 1870s onward, and some states classified the same intermediary differently depending on whether they took possession of goods. Modern practitioners and researchers working in agricultural commodity disputes should consult current USDA definitions under PACA, which supersede the 19th-century statutory framework in most contexts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
business_116: Special Topics — Regulation of Broker-Dealers (The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia). Relevant for the regulatory and licensing dimensions of broker classification.