If you are in quarantine, I hope you are thinking about the importance of farming
You’ve stocked up on non-perishable items, are staying home, and are finding way to support those on the frontlines in the healthcare industry, now what?
This pandemic has helped us realize what our vital needs are and we are supporting those affected and still on the frontlines, but I can’t help but think that we are missing out on recognizing and supporting a key player of our functioning society. Farmers.
Ensuring you have food stocked in your pantry means it comes from somewhere. Unless you are fortunate enough to be living off your own land this means you went to your local grocery store and loaded your cart full of products that came from a farmer at one point or another. Even your Mac and Cheese once sat in a wheat field.
I think that this crisis has also pointed to the importance of locally produced food. When the shelves are empty at the grocery store you have to wait not only for that food to be harvested but packaged, shipped, and unpacked/shelved at your store. Local markets and farmers have an obvious advantage to meeting needs, and across the country small producers have responded by offering drive thru markets and using PPE in harvests to continue to provide good food to their community in this crisis.
Thankfully, the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act does have an addition of $14 billion to the Agriculture Department’s Commodity Credit Corp spending authority, and authorizes another $9.5 billion for U.S. farmers affected by the fast-spreading pandemic. However, this additional $9.5 billion would be used for livestock producers affected by the pandemic, such as cattle ranchers, hog, and dairy farmers. So it would likely touch large scale industrial agricultural producers, not our local farmers (here I am going to resist breaking into a rant about topsoil health). COVID-19 has exposed a critical need to support and expand our local farms and food systems.
I think this crisis also allows us to view our own personal property a bit differently. If suburbanites put the amount of care and attention into a side yard garden as they do into their lawns they may be able to feed their own families. We could then compete with the neighbors for the highest potato yield not the most trim green mat (often which are perforated by loads of fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides that runoff into our freshwater systems killing native flora/fauna and creating toxic algal blooms that have a gargantuan price tag to manage-whew that rippling effect just keeps going).
Victory Gardens became popular across the globe in the World Wars as a way of reducing the pressure on public rations but ended up boosting morale and making everyone a producer. Food storage and waste should become a topic of interest again as we seek to maintain the rations we have left in our fridge and pantry. These solutions would also allow our local food producers to fill in gaps that backyard farms cannot.
Two projects in Indiana are seeking to support local food production in these times. Growing Places Indy is an Indianapolis based nonprofit that is creating the Produce with Purpose Fund to focus staff time to connect local farmers and food producers to alternate paths of distribution in these times, check out their campaign here.
A local ice cream shop, An Udder Sensation, in Monticello Indiana is responding to this crisis by raising funds to sustain their employees and operations. They also are creating new menu options for healthy convenient meals, as they recognized this was needed in the weeks following the pandemics onset.
There are so many solutions to consider when it comes to our local food systems but ultimately they should be self generated and uniquely tailored to your community’s opportunities and needs. If you know a small business or food producer looking for support in these times head to Patronicity.com to explore crowdfunding as a potential tool.
