This can be done with pd.melt()
:
# value_name is 'value' by default, but setting it here to make it clear
pd.melt(x, id_vars=['farm', 'fruit'], var_name='year', value_name='value')
Result:
farm fruit year value
0 A apple 2014 10
1 B apple 2014 12
2 A pear 2014 6
3 B pear 2014 8
4 A apple 2015 11
5 B apple 2015 13
6 A pear 2015 7
7 B pear 2015 9
[8 rows x 4 columns]
I'm not sure how common "melt" is as the name for this kind of operation, but that's what it's called in R's reshape2
package, which probably inspired the name here.