Here's how they've pivoted, and how to help.
Smaller farmers, in contrast, primarily process their animals at local, on-farm, or mobile facilities where the risk factors are substantially lower. The Weiks’ processor has just three employees and little potential for spreading the virus. As supermarket butchers see a run on their meat departments, and word comes of an uptick in sales of mass-produced canned products like, small farmers like the Weiks offer healthy, sustainable, secure supplies of meat—if they can get word out to the public.
It’s easy to understand why a farmer with a premium product like Weik’s would want to sell exclusively to restaurants. Trent Sparrow and his wife Jackie raise goats, sheep, and pigs at Illinois’. They used to sell at farmers’ markets, but they stopped. “If it rained, sales were bad. If it was cold, sales were bad. If it was hot, sales were bad. Produce and flowers do well at farmers markets. Frozen meat did fair on a good day,” Sparrow says.
Not everybody is in that position. Farmers who already had online stores have seen them mobbed by customers stocking up on supplies emptied from grocery shelves. Beth Whiting and her husband Bruce have long soldgrass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork, chicken, and turkey to Vermont restaurants and at the Burlington Farmers Market; both avenues are closed now. But they launched web sales for pick-up orders a year ago, and they had recently added home deliveries when the coronavirus crisis hit.
The virus blew up instead. Now the food truck is mothballed for the duration of the shutdowns; the Weiks don’t want to compete against hurting restaurants. And that meat club? It’s almost all they’ve got.
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