Local farms have been slammed with demand this spring, and credit it to the appeal of shorter, more reliable supply chains in the face of a global pandemic. Many farmers hope the support will continue after their customers go back to work.
In Rindge, Craig Jensen of Sun Moon Farm said they’re selling four times the usual volume of salad greens. Sales didn’t falter at the Connolly Brothers Dairy Farm in Temple even after the usually lucrative Maple Month was canceled, co-owner Chris Connolly said. The farm stand is now staffed full time after traffic more than tripled.
Anticipating high demand, several farms have asked the Cheshire County Conservation District for help taking new forms of payment, District Manager Amanda Littleton said.
“One new farm stand was saying [they’ve] never taken credit cards or EBT cards, but know it’s going to be important,” she said.
Wayne Colsia of Lyndeborough’s Paradise Farm, which sells a variety of meat products, said he was too busy to be interviewed. Mason’s Hungry Bear Farm, run by Gene Jonas, sold out of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares in record time, as did Jaffrey’s Foggy Hill Farm, according to owner Christine Pressman.
“I think a lot of it did have to do with coronavirus,” Jonas said.
“The want for something fresh when you’re feeling cooped up is definitely a part of it… spring greens feel optimistic,” Jensen said. “You eat spring lettuce and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, winter’s not forever…’ People, now more than ever, love that feeling.”
“Some of our new customers are very panicky about payment, you can feel the anxiety level,” Pressman said, when they call to verify that the farm received their check. Some of her new customers are asking if there will be enough produce to preserve, even though the CSA doesn’t begin deliveries until June, she said.
Even if there is no national shortage of food, panic-buying behavior has created real short-term shortages in the grocery store, Connolly said, which can leave a customer spooked and searching for more reliable options. Add to that grocery stores’ physical distancing protocol, no eat-in restaurants, and more time than ever to pick up food from a farm and prepare a meal at home, and local farms are more appealing than ever.
“There’s so much uncertainty. If all you do is watch the news, you can really get wound up on what’s going on out in the world,” Connolly said. “People have been talking about this for years and finally it happened. Luckily some of us were kind of prepared,” he said.
“I think the smaller the farm, the better this year,” Pressman said. Erratic changes in market demand and worker availability are putting strange pressures on the country’s industrial-scale farms, she said. Livestock farmers have been left without a market as meatpacking plants owned by giants Smithfield and Tyson close temporarily over COVID-19 outbreaks, and dairy farmers selling to conglomerates have had to dump milk when processors were unable to quickly change production over from industrial-scale products that would typically go to restaurants and schools. This has affected New Hampshire’s dairy farmers, who control the majority of the state’s farmland, Littleton said. Connolly said he’s felt the rub with the fraction of milk his farm sells to Hood, but fortunately, that’s not their only market. “Thank God we’ve got a retail operation,” he said.
You don’t have to tell the Monadnock region’s farmers that they’re serving an essential purpose right now. Many cite a sustainable food supply chain and supporting a healthy, connected local community as the very reason they got into farming, and welcome the additional support they’re receiving from longtime customers and new faces alike.
“They’re coming to support us, they feel connected and responsible to keep us going. We’re supplying them with something that they feel is important,” Connolly said.
That said, many farms have had to scale down their typical community-building habits. At Foggy Hill Farm, CSA members typically mingle and share recipe ideas as they select produce at their weekly pick-up. Now, customers will receive an email of what’s in their shares and pick it up curbside, Pressman said. Sun Moon Farm has had to suspend their weekly potluck dinners.
The pandemic has also affected farms’ labor supply. Physical distancing recommendations halted Sun Moon’s practice of inviting CSA members to volunteer in the fields. The farm usually hosts two or three seasonal interns, college students from out of state who live and share meals with Jensen’s family.
“We don’t know how to do that in a responsible way,” this year, he said.
In lieu of volunteers and interns, and with virus concerns interrupting their typical childcare support system, Jensen and his wife are doing all the work. After his five year-old son goes to bed, Jensen hangs a lantern in the greenhouse and harvests salad greens.
“It’s quiet, it’s beautiful, but that’s not sustainable,” he said.
Pressman said she’s also been doing her farm chores at odd hours of the day and weekends since her kids began remote learning from home. “Those hours they’d be at school are where I’d be most dedicated to farming,” she said. Her husband, who works an off-farm job, has been helping her out.
At Ledge Top Farm in Wilton, the stay-at-home orders are actually helping Tom Mitchell meet demands. He was able to scale up faster this spring because his usual crew of college students came home early.
On the other end of the spectrum, Hungry Bear Farm received several email requests in helping out this year, “which is quite unusual, in years past I’ve never had that kind of response,” Jonas said. He usually operates solo, and said he has enough good help to accommodate this year’s bump in production.
Farms also differ in their ability or willingness to adapt to the increased demand. Dairy and meat sales are booming at Connolly Brothers Dairy. Although the cows produce more milk every day, replenishing the highly-sought meat supply is more difficult. Meat has to be processed at a USDA-approved slaughterhouse per state regulations, and they typically schedule six months out – not to mention the time it takes to raise a cow or pig to maturity. “Once you’re sold out, you’re kind of sold out til your next scheduled appointment,” Connolly said.
At Ledge Top Farm, Mitchell is responding to customer interest by putting more plants in every day. Other operations don’t feel they have the same opportunities. “We’re not that nimble,” Jensen said. The crop rotation he set last December governs what’s growing in his fields through October, which makes it too late to respond immediately to the volume and type of produce customers want, he said. “In usual years [the extra demand] would be encouraging, but now it feels like pressure,” he said.
The public seems to be experiencing a wakeup call about the importance of local farms, Connolly said, a lesson he hopes will stick as the world returns to normal – although he doesn’t necessarily see that as a short process. He’s also not willing to make sweeping operational changes based on the last months’ high demand. Jensen said he felt similarly. “If I knew [the quadrupled sales of salad greens] would continue, I could have a completely different business,” he said. “But I anticipate that when things go back to normal, a lot of customer trends will also go back to normal.”
“My hope is that this is a moment where people wake up to [see] that our world needs to be different,” he said.