By Farrah Lynn Ezzeddine

I pulled on my surgical gloves, readjusted my face shield and took a deep breath. Waiting in a line facing me were unmasked seniors and young people. Their primary worry is not the coronavirus pandemic. Nor is it toilet paper. It’s food.

Every Tuesday and Friday about 300 Bay Area families count on the Richmond Emergency Food Bank to provide them with a month’s supply of food. That’s 1,200 families a month. Since the coronavirus outbreak, every Tuesday and Friday may be their only chance to receive food one month.

I heard about the Richmond food bank through a senior in my community, who called to see if I would replace her and other volunteers who pack and distribute food twice a week. I signed up and assured them I could find others. But, volunteers are not as easy to find during this foreboding pandemic.

As the COVID-19 threat continues to shut down the nation, food banks are not exempt. Although allowed to remain open, about 100 food pantries have closed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the last month. The primary reason for the closures is that most of the volunteers are also those most vulnerable to the pandemic: people over 65.

On my first day at the food bank, me and two other volunteers put one carton of eggs, one canister of oatmeal, two slabs of cheese, and an unidentifiable pastry in a white plastic bag. We did this one hundred times. By my third day, the bi-weekly load of grocery store donations had dropped. No bread this time and the bananas are more black than yellow. Also the lines to receive food had grown longer. We turned down five people, one of them because they had picked up some food earlier in the month, the other four because there just wasn’t enough food to hand out.

As panic buying empties out shelves, grocery stores have less and less food to donate. Similar to most public health issues, COVID-19 is not just a threat to one’s immediate health. Like a ripple effect, it has extended its tentacles into issues of food, housing and income, as well as domestic safety and mental health. As tens of thousands of Californians experience job loss and growing financial instability during the statewide shelter-at-home orders, many will join the ranks of the unemployed, undocumented, single-parent, homeless, sick, elderly and disabled who cannot afford food.

How you can help: Check your local food bank’s website for what support it needs. If healthy and able-bodied, you could volunteer. If you have extra food, you could donate it. If you are self-isolating, donate money online, raise awareness by sharing food bank messaging on social media, and advocate for support at the federal level. 

And be mindful: the first week of every month is a critical time because WIC/SNAP benefits — food stamps — are received by low-income families. Give these families a chance to stock up. Be aware of a WIC shelf tag and try to limit purchases of those items.

After safely removing my gloves before heading home, I thought about viruses and trees. A cluster of trees acts as an ecosystem and sacrifices nutrients for sick or struggling trees in an effort to keep all of the trees healthy. Our human community is struggling in the battle against COVID-19 and, like the cluster of trees, we need to do what we can to help those in our cluster. 

As we practice social distancing in the fight against the coronavirus, let us not forget those in our community.   ____

Farrah Lynn Ezzeddine is an epidemiology masters student at the Harvard School of Public Health, ezzeddine@hsph.harvard.edu.

Link to story on the CalMatters web site

By David Yaffe-Bellamy and Michael Corkery

In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.

After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.

The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.

The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

Many farmers say they have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, which have been overwhelmed with demand. But there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb.

And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half their paying customers disappear. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, who has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.

The widespread destruction of fresh food — at a time when many Americans are hurting financially and millions are suddenly out of work — is an especially dystopian turn of events, even by the standards of a global pandemic. It reflects the profound economic uncertainty wrought by the virus and how difficult it has been for huge sectors of the economy, like agriculture, to adjust to such a sudden change in how they must operate.

Even as Mr. Allen and other farmers have been plowing fresh vegetables into the soil, they have had to plant the same crop again, hoping the economy will have restarted by the time the next batch of vegetables is ready to harvest. But if the food service industry remains closed, then those crops, too, may have to be destroyed.

Farmers are also learning in real time about the nation’s consumption habits.

The quarantines have shown just how many more vegetables Americans eat when meals are prepared for them in restaurants than when they have to cook for themselves.

“People don’t make onion rings at home,” said Shay Myers, a third-generation onion farmer whose fields straddle the border of Oregon and Idaho.

Mr. Myers said there were no good solutions to the fresh food glut. After his largest customer — the restaurant industry — shut down in California and New York, his farm started redistributing onions from 50-pound sacks into smaller bags that could be sold in grocery stores. He also started freezing some onions, but he has limited cold-storage capacity.

With few other options, Mr. Myers has begun burying tens of thousands of pounds of onions and leaving them to decompose in trenches.

“There is no way to redistribute the quantities that we are talking about,” he said.

Over the decades, the nation’s food banks have tried to shift from offering mostly processed meals to serving fresh produce, as well. But the pandemic has caused a shortage of volunteers, making it more difficult to serve fruits and vegetables, which are time-consuming and expensive to transport.

“To purchase from a whole new set of farmers and suppliers — it takes time, it takes knowledge, you have to find the people, develop the contracts,” said Janet Poppendieck, an expert on poverty and food assistance.

The waste has become especially severe in the dairy industry, where cows need to be milked multiple times a day, regardless of whether there are buyers.

Major consumers of dairy, like public schools and coffee shops, have all but vanished, leaving milk processing plants with fewer customers at a time of year when cows produce milk at their fastest rate. About 5 percent of the country’s milk supply is currently being dumped and that amount is expected to double if the closings are extended over the next few months, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

Before the pandemic, the Dairymens processing plant in Cleveland would produce three loads of milk, or around 13,500 gallons, for Starbucks every day. Now the Starbucks order is down to one load every three days.

For a while after the pandemic took hold, the plant collected twice as much milk from farmers as it could process, keeping the excess supply in refrigerated trailers, said Brian Funk, who works for Dairymens as a liaison to farmers.

But eventually the plant ran out of storage. One night last week, Mr. Funk worked until 11 p.m., fighting back tears as he called farmers who supply the plant to explain the predicament.

To repurpose those plants to put cheese in the 8 oz. bags that sell in grocery stores or bottle milk in gallon jugs would require millions of dollars in investment. For now, some processors have concluded that spending the money isn’t worth it.

“It isn’t like restaurant demand has disappeared forever,” said Matt Gould, a dairy industry analyst. “Even if it were possible to re-format to make it an 8-ounce package rather than a 20-pound bag, the dollars and cents may not pan out.”

Those same logistical challenges are bedeviling poultry plants that were set up to distribute chicken to restaurants rather than stores. Each week, the chicken processor Sanderson Farms destroys 750,000 unhatched eggs, or 5.5 percent of its total production, sending them to a rendering plant to be turned into pet food.

Last week, the chief executive of Sanderson Farms, Joe Sanderson, told analysts that company officials had even considered euthanizing chickens to avoid selling them at unprofitable rates, though the company ultimately did not take that step.

In recent days, Sanderson Farms has donated some of its chicken to food banks and organizations that cook meals for emergency medical workers. But hatching hundreds of thousands of eggs for the purpose of charity is not a viable option, said Mike Cockrell, the company’s chief financial officer.

“We’re set up to sell that chicken,” Mr. Cockrell said. “That would be an expensive proposition.”

Link to story on the New York Times web site.

By Tom Karst

The Packer’s Tom Karst visited April 6 with Scott Horsfall, CEO of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement.

Horsfall related how the staff of the LGMA has adapted to the shelter-at-home guidance in California related to the COVID-19. He also paid tribute to the grower community.

“Growers are in the midst of this difficult time; they are trying to follow the various advisories that come out that both state and federal level, and yet they’re out there harvesting crops and shipping crops to provide food to consumers, and I think they should be applauded for that,” Horsfall said.

Horsfall said the work of the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement continues on in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re determined to continue our food safety oversight,” he said. “It is essential that these crops get harvested and shipped, and what we do has been deemed essential as well, in terms of making sure that crops are safe and for doing what we can to protect consumer health.”

At the same time, the LGMA is looking at ways to minimize human contact during food safety audits.

“(Auditors) still go to the farms but we working to do as much on a remote basis as we can do,” Horsfall said.

Every LGMA audit includes a great deal of documentation relative to water records, soil amendment records, pre-harvest assessments, and more.

We’re looking to take as much of that off-site as we can,” Horsfall said. “There’s no real reason for two people to sit in a room and pass papers back and forth.”

Horsfall also spoke of the ongoing work to update the food safety metrics of the LGMA.

Western Growers has launched an interactive website that allows the public to participate in discussions relating to leafy greens food safety while allowing the industry to follow the process to strengthen those guidelines.

The site, www.leafygreenguidance.com, will track changes to the Commodity Specific Food Safety Guidelines for the Production and Harvest of Lettuce and Leafy Greens adopted by the California/Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements.

Horsfall said California industry leaders are hopeful that the COVID-19 pandemic made ease but said there are plenty of uncertainties ahead.

“Here in California, we’re seeing a definite flattening of the curve and some of the drastic steps that were taken out here, obviously have helped in that regard,” he said.

Link to article in the Packer

By Adam Behsudi and Ryan McCrimmon

The coronavirus pandemic is leading the food industry and regulators to change policies as they grapple with empty shelves, a glut of fresh produce and milk, and sudden shifts in consumer buying habits.

The problem isn’t a shortage of food and commodities. If anything, food waste is becoming a bigger issue as traditionally big, bulk buyers — like college dorms and restaurant chains — suddenly stop receiving deliveries. As a result, millions of gallons of milk are being dumped, and farmers have no alternative but to turn fresh vegetables into mulch.

Federal agencies are scrambling to keep up with the altering landscape by easing rules governing trucking, imports, agricultural visas and labeling requirements for restaurants and manufacturers.

“The way a client described it is they’re seeing a tsunami of demand shift from foodservice to food retail,” said Bahige El-Rayes, a partner who co-leads the consumer and retail practice at Kearney, a consulting firm. “If you’re a manufacturer today of food, it’s basically how do you adapt? How do you actually take what you sent to restaurants then sell it now to retail?”

New alliances are being formed as demand from restaurants dry up and consumers look for new ways of delivery. Kroger, the largest U.S. supermarket chain, has partnered with foodservice giants Sysco and U.S. Foods, which normally supply the restaurant industry and large institutions, to share labor and keep store shelves stocked.

The partnerships offer employment to foodservice workers that would otherwise be furloughed or laid off as a result of a near shutdown of the restaurant sector. It also provides much needed manpower to the overwhelmed food retail industry.

Rewiring the U.S. food network, however, comes with logistical headaches.

“Since we’re buying more at the grocery store, it means [food items] have to be in that form,” said Pat Westhoff, director of the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. “We have a bunch of stuff that’s still stuck with restaurants, and they’re trying to decide what to do with it at this point.”

Farmers are also scrambling to recalibrate their production.

Richard Guebert Jr., Illinois Farm Bureau president, said his state’s meatpacking companies have fewer employees showing up because of concerns of being too close to other workers.

“The industry is backing up on bacon and other products that they put together as cut-outs, so they’re slowing down and not doing the volume that they had,” Guebert said.

“There’s a concern for pork producers because they just can’t turn their buildings on or off like you can an assembly line,” he added. From the time sows give birth to slaughter, “it’s a nine-month process that started nine months ago. Pigs continue to be born every day, whether they keep the whole capacity.”

In the meantime, major food distributors including U.S. Foods and Performance Food Group are begging the Treasury Department to prioritize loan applications from their sector as companies shift operations to supply retailers.

“This kind of transition, even if temporary, takes time and investment as we adjust our warehousing, logistics and purchasing processes to meet a consumer-facing market,” they wrote in a letter to the Trump administration.

A group of food worker associations also made an appeal to congressional leaders that any future aid package should “include support for America’s essential critical industry workers” through tax exemptions or direct payments.

In the U.S., an excess supply of food production is forcing some sectors to take extreme measures and ask for extra creative solutions from the government.

“Clearly we’re in a time of crisis,” said Gordon Speirs, owner of Shiloh Dairy in Brillion, Wis. “We’ve lost 25 percent of our income just through the crashed market. Now we face the reality of having to dump milk on top of that.”

John Umhoefer, executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, said the foodservice sector accounts for half of all cheese sold in the U.S., while only one-third is sold at grocery stores. Without that critical market, milk producers need the government to “immediately begin to purchase dairy products” and distribute them to food pantries and school feeding programs, he said.

Westhoff, of the University of Missouri, said the drop in restaurant dining will eventually hamper demand for high-end meat products like steaks.

“Even though we have a short-run rush to the grocery store that gave us a run-up in prices very temporarily, we don’t think that’s going to last very long,” he said.

The radical change in the age of the pandemic is a seismic shift for the food industry. In 2018, Americans spent more on food from full-service and fast-food restaurants — about $678 billion — compared to the roughly $627 billion spent at grocery stores and warehouse clubs, according to USDA data. Spending on food away from home is even higher when counting meals at schools, colleges, sporting events and other entertainment venues.

Now, the National Restaurant Association expects the industry will shed $225 billion over the next few months, along with some 5-7 million jobs.

“Grocery stores just aren’t set up to restock shelves to meet that kind of demand,” said Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

For the most part, food analysts say consumers don’t need to worry about other countries that are putting in place export restrictions on food and agricultural goods. Vietnam, the third-largest exporter of rice, has temporarily suspended exports of the grain. Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, major wheat producers, have capped exports of the commodity.

“The signs are all disturbing on the foreign side, but if you look at all the actions taken they don’t seem at least yet to have very big ramifications,” said Glauber, who previously served as chief economist for the Agriculture Department.

So far, the U.S. appears to have faced fewer hurdles to transporting food and farm goods than other countries. Border checks across Europe, for example, have snarled trucking and at one point backed up traffic as far as 50 miles.

The European Union has tried to ease the congestions by opening so-called green lanes for trucks carrying farm goods. U.S. highway regulators, for their part, have lifted driving hour limits for essential products including “food for emergency restocking of stores.”

Some governments have asked their citizens to help pick fruits and vegetables and considered designating special planes and buses to transport workers from Eastern Europe to farmlands in the West.

Andrew Walmsley, director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said there haven’t been widespread transport disruptions yet. But he said flexibility on trucking rules could be crucial over the long term if there’s an eventual shortage of drivers, to ensure “that those who are healthy can continue to move products as safely as possible for as long as possible.”

In the U.S., strict border controls have disrupted farmers’ access to migrant labor, exacerbating what was already a massive problem for the industry, with harvesting right around the corner for some sectors.

If produce is stuck decaying in fields in the coming months, it could potentially drive up retail prices and cause shortages at grocery stores.

Meanwhile, the lack of commercial flights is also crushing the capacity to bring in perishable foods, like berries from South America, which often hitch a ride in the belly of passenger planes.

“Anytime you go to the grocery store in the winter, you see that most of the fresh fruit and vegetable is not coming from the U.S.,” said Peter Friedmann, executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition. “This continues year-round. A lot of the processed foods, canned food, etc. are imported.”

Jim Alderman, a vegetable farmer in Palm Beach County, Fla., said the lack of big buyers has cut off growers in his area from critical buyers including cruise lines and Disney World.

He started dumping his tomatoes. Nearby farmers are doing the same with zucchini and yellow squash, which now fetches market prices far below the cost of picking and packing.

“They’re cutting their squash every day and throwing it on the ground, hoping the market will turn around,” Alderman said.

Link to article in Politico

By Liz Crampton

Farmers who sell boxes of meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables directly to consumers are seeing a huge spike in orders as the coronavirus outbreak changes how people buy food.

Food delivery businesses run by local farmers across the country are flourishing as people grow wary of making frequent trips to the grocery store and choosing to cook at home instead of eating out. It’s emerged as a bright spot in the agriculture industry while other types of small to midsize farms are struggling due to many farmers markets shutting down and restaurants and schools scaling back contracts.

The spike in traffic for businesses that have been delivering to customers for years has also prompted other farmers to consider adapting their own business models. And many farmers are hoping that it will result in long-lasting shifts in more people buying from local producers rather than commercial grocery stores.

“It’s great for farmers and ranchers, we all hope it continues after this is over but I believe it will on some level,” said Mary Heffernan, who runs a cattle ranch with her family in Fort Jones, Calif.

“I think it was a wake-up call for consumers to realize they can easily go directly to the source and buy from farmers who ship right to doorsteps all over the U.S. as easily as an Amazon package.”

Five Marys Farms, Heffernan’s operation, typically ships about 15,000 pounds of beef, pork and lamb per month, Heffernan said. But that amount has jumped to more than 35,000 pounds in the last two weeks, and the farm has received orders from both returning customers and a flood of new ones.

“Business has been very active,” said Hannah Neeleman, who raises pork and beef at Ballerina Farm in Kamas, Utah. “With people staying in and cooking more of their meals, as well as being concerned with food storage, the uptick in our online meat sales has been significant. We ship nationwide and the trend has been true across all states.”

Yet local farming operations have also been plagued by shortages like the big-name grocery delivery companies that are rushing to hire more workers to keep up with skyrocketing demand.

Instacart, Amazon and Walmart grocery delivery services have also seen a boost — each saw at least a 65 percent sales increase in the past week compared to the same time last year, according to estimates from Earnest Research.

But many of those companies are paralyzed by supply chain delays, and now, are confronting worker strikes as employees demand better safety protections and pay.

South Mountain Creamery, which delivers milk, eggs, produce and meat in the Washington, D.C. area, has “been overwhelmed with orders,” said CEO Tony Brusco. His company, based in Middleton, Md., has had to stop taking new customers and scale back meat and ice cream orders.

Still, farming operations that rely on delivery orders are just a slice of the local agriculture sector, which on average has been struggling since the outbreak began. Local and regional agriculture and food markets stand to lose up to $700 million in sales through May because of the shutdowns caused by the coronavirus, according to an analysis by agriculture economists.

Heffernan says she believes the outbreak has proven that the public can support family farms that choose to diversify how products are sold, and it’s possible more farms will start shipping instead of relying on farmers markets and other channels.

“It’s good timing for farmers and ranchers who started [shipping] earlier and good for farmers and ranchers to realize there is a direct consumer market,” she says.”It just has to be easy.”

Link to Politico web site

By CDFA Secretary Karen Ross

Thank you, farmworkers. Thank you for the physically strenuous work in all kinds of weather to bring a crop from planting to harvest.  Thank you for the daily contributions you make to bring safe, high quality food to our tables from the front lines of a food and agriculture supply chain that delivers California’s bountiful harvest to grocery stores and restaurants, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture programs, and food banks throughout the United States.

On this Cesar Chavez Day, we honor the legacy of  Mr. Chavez for his tireless work on behalf of farmworkers, and we reiterate our profound appreciation for the essential role of farmworkers in making California the No. 1 agricultural state in the nation and one of the most productive in the world.  

The COVID-19 crisis brings us all to uncertain times and shared anxieties. Our focus on food – how we source it, prepare it and share it brings a sense of purpose and a reminder of the importance to care for one another.  We see this every day with stories about extraordinary efforts by volunteers to shop for senior citizens; school districts finding resourceful ways to continue feeding school children who count on that meal for their nutritional needs; and restaurants creating innovative family meals for take-out and offering special services for the families of our health care profession.  Californians can be proud of every part of the food chain continuing to ensure the availability of food and ag products produced according to our state’s high standards for worker protection, food safety, and environmental stewardship.  

Our food producers have been focused on enhanced worker safety measures from the very beginning of this crisis – taking guidance and best practices from the CDC and the California Department of Public Health to introduce social distancing in fields and on production lines. And they have made sure to incorporate that guidance into training and illness prevention programs.     

Today, like every day, I am grateful to each member of the critical food and agriculture infrastructure for working to provide us with the nutrition we need to survive and thrive.  But especially today, I offer a special thanks to our farmworkers. 

CDFA’s Office of Farm to Fork (F2F) is committed to ensuring that all Californians have access to healthy and nutritious California-grown food. F2F would like to highlight the important work of partner agencies to make sure that needy school children continue to receive nutritious meals during the COVID-19 crisis.

The California Department of Education (CDE) received a special waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), enabling any California school district previously approved to operate summer meal programs to also offer meals to students during a COVID-19-related closure. CDE’s Twitter account @CADeptEd offers continuing updates of school districts and volunteers offering free lunch services throughout the state. CDE also shows meal sites on its free CA Meals for Kids mobile app. Select Emergency Meal Sites in the app that is updated daily.

EdSource highlights how grab-and-go and drive-up allow families to pick up food at closed California schools, and the organization regularly posts articles about school issues related to coronavirus. 

The Dairy Council of California provides a HealthyEating.org/SchoolMeals landing page that comprehensively aggregates all feeding sites throughout California that provide children with free meals. The format is web-based and mobile-friendly, and allows users to easily self-navigate to find the closest location to their home.

No Kid Hungry is offering $1 million in immediate emergency grants to support home-delivered meals, grab-and-go meal programs, school and community pantries, backpack programs, and other steps to help reach children and families who lose access to school meals. Click here to submit interest in receiving grant funds. No Kid Hungry also offers a resource called Emerging Strategies and Tactics for Meal Service During School Closures Related to the Coronavirus.

The National Farm to School Network offers weekly updates about the latest news in the farm to school movement, including resources available to help school district nutrition specialists through the COVID-19 pandemic.

CDFA-F2F connects school districts and community members directly with California farmers and ranchers, providing information and other resources. Click here to subscribe to the California Farm to School Network newsletter.