Food Supply Chain Is Being Tested by Coronavirus

Atherstone says his 40,000-square foot USDA Safe Quality Food (SQF) Level 2 facility has seen an increase in a smaller catalog part of the business that provides frozen food online to retailers such as Williams Sonoma. One of the biggest challenges overall, he says, is adjusting to the unpredictable fluctuations in demand. “You really are living day by day,” he said. “What we are doing here is focusing on today, celebrating a new purchase order when it comes in, and getting to tomorrow.”

Produce farmers are also concerned about markets and sales, as well as worker safety. “Fruit and vegetable producers in Minnesota are facing similar struggles as many other industries right now,” says Annalisa Hultberg, MS, an educator in food safety through the On-Farm GAPs Education Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “Some of the biggest challenges are staffing and personnel concerns, and how to manage a crew who will be planting, working in the greenhouse, and then harvesting and packing while maintaining social distancing guidelines.” Larger farms that employ many workers, including those with H-2A visas, are particularly worried about finding adequate labor to plant, weed, and harvest produce.

Many of the farmers she talks to are being proactive in mitigating the risk of COVID-19 to their operations, she says. On top of the usual safety measures, many are limiting the number of visitors and trying to implement physical distancing among workers. Some U-pick operations, like berry farms and apple orchards, are adjusting by limiting the number of people allowed to pick at one time, enforcing physical distancing, and increasing handwashing stations while they await guidelines for further direction.

For some farmers, sales are increasing. Protein farmers and fruit and vegetable CSA (community supported agriculture) members are seeing more interest in their products, with an increase in pre-orders, says Hultberg.

Some Good News

Peter O’Driscoll, executive director of Equitable Food Initiative (EFI), a Washington, D.C.-based consortium of food industry stakeholders, says the growers in his network have not yet seen large disruptions due to the virus. Members of the consortium, which sells to both foodservice and retail buyers, have shifted sales to retail with the collapse of foodservice demand. He says that EFI-certified growers have not seen outbreaks among workers that have led to labor or produce shortages. These growers are being proactive to protect workers and avoid labor shortages. “A number of suppliers we work with have encouraged older workers to stay home with pay, which is huge,” says O’Driscoll. Some suppliers are also trying to identify workers at high risk of contracting severe illness from COVID-19 and offering them the option of staying home with reduced pay or reducing their work load or exposure.

When asked about the financial sustainability of this approach, he emphasizes measures put in place prior to COVID-19 that strengthened EFI growers’ ability to implement social distancing measures in response to the pandemic. A key measure and aim of EFI is to drive workforce development within the produce industry, he said, which includes a new approach to labor.

As in many sectors of the economy, COVID-19 has laid bare the impact of worker vulnerability on the food supply chain. “For the produce industry to survive the pandemic, you need to professionalize the workforce,” says O’Driscoll. One way to do this is for farms to create a worker-management committee to solve problems that arise, such as COVID-19. These teams are comprised of members from across the workforce, such as pickers, sprayers, quality control individuals, irrigators, and managers, and are trained by EFI in problem solving, conflict resolution, and communication strategies. “This was our basic tool before COVID-19,” said O’Driscoll. “When COVID-19 hit, our growers said they had the worker-manager dialogue piece ready to go and they were able to talk to their leadership teams about the crisis and how to make the real mitigation steps work.”