Coronavirus in California: What Is the Effect on Agriculture? – The New York Times

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The coronavirus pandemic has left no industry and no global system unchanged.

The way we grow, harvest and distribute food has been thrown into particular disarray, as workers fall ill and big companies struggle to adapt to demand that has almost instantaneously shifted from restaurants and cafeterias to supermarkets.

He said that, although painful adjustments were underway, there were also silver linings in the pandemic, particularly for smaller growers like the Masumoto Family Farm, which has about 80 acres south of Fresno.

Heres our conversation, lightly edited and condensed:

How are things going?

All in all, good, in that were not in the middle of harvest. But its that cloud of uncertainty. Farmers are used to that, because of nature, but this is totally different.

Were reading the tea leaves about how consumer tastes are changing.

For example, we make organic raisins and a lot go into raisin bran. Cereal sales are going fantastic after they were declining for some time.

So after we lift the shelter in place, are people going back to skipping breakfast? How do peaches fit into this? Are peaches a luxury item or part of a new, healthy diet?

[Read more about growing peaches as the climate changes in this Opinion piece.]

Were in a good position because weve always diversified some small farmers are hurting because their main buyers were restaurants. We sell some to restaurants, but some to wholesale and direct sales.

Each of those are starting to shift. Were getting word that people may buy produce like peaches packaged in clamshells because they dont want to touch the fruit so how does packaging affect how we do things? Does that change the kind of fruit we want? Medium or big? I dont know!

This is one time where small is beautiful. When youre small you can make these shifts much more easily.

Do you supply to community-supported agriculture boxes? And is that something youre shifting toward more?

Absolutely. Our friends are small farmers who do C.S.A. boxes.

People are paying attention to food theyre paying attention to what they make, and so small-scale C.S.A.s have been booming.

We sell into some C.S.A.s, but we dont have a system set up to do our own. If we were a little closer to the Bay Area we probably would have set up something much more direct.

How do you see sustainability fitting into all these changes?

The broader question has to do with living with nature. People draw the comparison with World War II and victory gardens this is working with nature, and the key with that is knowing there are unknowns.

[Read more about the re-emergence of victory gardens.]

Do you think this will change how you actually grow the peaches?

When I got here, the huge shift was me keeping heirloom varieties we grow, as opposed to breeding for shelf life. Were very fortunate the market grew with us and we found an audience for that when the whole food revolution took over in the 1980s and 1990s.

I wonder now, is it one of those pivot moments, where were in the middle of another food revolution?

I think this whole crisis has accentuated the middlemen: the distributors, the packers, the shippers theyre the ones at the heart of all this and they have tended to be ignored.

A static example is toilet paper. There are truckers and shippers, then the local store gets their Tuesday shipment of toilet paper. No one used to pay attention to when toilet paper arrived.

The same thing is happening with the food chain. I always had a little struggle when people used the term farm to fork. It leaves out the middle thats so critical.

Another thing that were in the middle of accentuating is labor.

I was just going to ask about that.

What is the safety of farmworkers? We need sick-leave policies. But I think this could be a shift to people paying attention.

For us, we did a lot of the work ourselves and initially just had seasonal employees at pruning, trimming and harvest time. But about 10 years ago, the labor supply was getting very inconsistent and so we got one full-time employee and a few seasonal employees. At the height, were talking about only about a dozen and they tend to be the same.

[Read about how the pandemic has essentially halted migration to the U.S.]

And about five to 10 years ago, we started transitioning so the farm fits the labor. Usually in business, its the opposite. Im not faulting big agriculture for doing that, but we have efficiencies on a small scale that work to our advantage.

Are you worried right now about finding even the labor you do need?

Were definitely concerned. All these hands that feed us what happens with politics and immigration. All those factors come butting into what we do. I always think that were in Fresno, which is hundreds of miles from the border but were actually on the border because it affects us directly.

I think thats true with a lot of people in the industry and the food world.

[See every coronavirus case in California by county.]

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Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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Coronavirus in California: What Is the Effect on Agriculture? - The New York Times