NORWICH — Jeannine Kilbride is watching the 1,500 wheels of unsold cheese stack up in her cheese cave, and she’s starting to worry.
Kilbride, a partner in Cobb Hill Cheese in Hartland, has seen her cheese sales to New York- and Boston-area vendors plunge more than 75% during the coronavirus pandemic, a loss of income between $8,000 and $9,000 per month for the artisanal cheesemaker.
“We’re a little stressed out over it,” Kilbride said.
Foreseeing a lengthy stretch of pandemic pressure on her business, Kilbride said the company is preparing.
“We’re just going to need to cut production and buy less milk than we normally do,” she said. “If you buy less, then you have money left over to pay the bills and wages. We’re just going to have to adapt.”
Adapting is what farmers, growers and farmers markets are doing just as the spring planting season is getting underway and the pandemic forces quick changes in how they conduct business.
For some in the agriculture economy — such as Vermont dairy farmers who since the beginning of April have had to dump 60,000 gallons of milk that would normally be heading to now-closed schools and restaurants — the coronavirus has been wreaking havoc. Some relief could come from the federal CARES Act, which provides the U.S. Department of Agriculture with $9.5 billion in emergency funding to aid food producers — including dairy farmers — crippled by COVID-19.
But until that federal help arrives, farms are left searching for their own solutions in a rapidly changing economy, with mixed success.
Some farming models, particularly community-supported agriculture, or CSA, have seen a healthy uptick in business as consumers avoid supermarkets and instead turn to subscription-based boxes from Upper Valley farmers for their fresh produce.
“If there’s a silver lining to the COVID pandemic, it’s that people are starting to realize how important local sourcing of food is,” said Norah Lake, founder of Sweetland Farm in Norwich, a CSA that has seen its membership grow from 160 families in previous years to 200 families now. “It’s incredibly heartening.”
Despite the enhanced need to assure the public’s access to food, Vermont has prohibited farmers markets from reopening in full over fears that crowds would spread the virus.
But following heavy criticism, Gov. Phil Scott on Friday, said farmers markets will be allowed to operate beginning on May 1, with guidelines being coordinated by the Agency of Agriculture.
Administration officials said even then, patrons should not expect the same gathering or socializing as before.
Scott also allowed some smaller business operations to reopen, saying the gradual easing of restrictions are “a small step forward, but I believe it’s the right balance to support all our public health goals.”
Advocates for farmers markets have been pushing to allow them to reopen beyond just curbside pickup operations.
The Norwich Farmers Market last week was asking people to contact Scott’s office and argued that, by abiding by protocols developed with the Vermont branch of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, it can operate more safely than “grocery and convenience stores” which have been allowed to remain open throughout the pandemic.
Vermont farmers market vendors also noted that New Hampshire’s farmers markets were deemed “essential businesses” and allowed to remain open.
“We don’t know who (the governor) is listening to but it’s pretty clear there are two food systems in Vermont: Shaw’s food system, which apparently can do whatever it wants, and then our food system, which apparently is not of equal standing,” said Geo Honigford, owner of Hurricane Flats farm in South Royalton, earlier in the week before Scott revised the ban.
Honigford said his vegetable stand at the Norwich market accounts for 40-45% of his sales, the absence of which especially hurts because he does not operate a CSA as some other vendors do.
“We are offering to make the necessary mitigation steps to be even safer than supermarkets but the clerks at my local convenience store are not even wearing face masks,” he said.
The loss of income from a farmers market can be significant. Danielle Allen, who owns Root 5 Farm in Fairlee with her husband, Ben Dana, said they generate about $60,000 in sales at the Norwich Farmers Market.
“We can’t just walk away from that. We need to make that income up somewhere,” she said.
Fortunately, Root 5 Farm has had an online ordering platform and packs and delivers boxes to 11 locations for their CSA members. Demand for memberships has soared, Allen said, and she’s “nearly at the point of having to say we are sold out of spring shares.”
“People are really discovering CSAs are a reliable way they can assure access to food. It’s what we’re built for. We’re built for this kind of resilience,” Allen said.
Steve Hoffman, manager of the Norwich Farmers Market, said that most farmers markets in the state are gearing up to open the first week of May, noting that the current rules allowing curbside pickup don’t work for many of his vendors because they can’t yet accept online or phone orders.
“I have farms who do not even have the internet,” he said.
Scrambling to get an online sales platform up and running is just what some farms and CSAs are doing.
Shannon Varley, who with her husband, BJ Miller, operates Strafford Village Farm and farm stand in Strafford, hopes to have an online store operating within a couple of months. Until then, they are taking orders via email and then assembling the orders for a drive-thru pickup on Saturday mornings.
“Our farm stand is a very small space, and we realized we didn’t want human interaction, so we pivoted very quickly to a drive-thru pickup system that is pre-buy only,” Varley said.
Varley and Miller are also sourcing products from other farms in order to broaden the basket of choices for customers. And the cars are forming a snake line at their farm stand on Saturdays.
“Normally a good Saturday at the farm stand would be 30 customers. Last Saturday (April 11) we had over 100 customers,” Varley said. “It’s been pretty remarkable.”
Sweetland Farm in Norwich has also begun sourcing locally grown food from other farms and making it available at its farm stand on Route 132 for pickup on Friday and Saturday. The first weekend Sweetland had collected products from four farms; the second week, it expanded its network to 22 farms.
“When we heard that other local farms are really hurting right now because of the COVID outbreak, we started looking for ways to support our co-farmers,” Lake explained. “Farmers have been helping each other out through hard times since farming started. We wanted to follow in the footsteps of that tradition.”
At the moment the program, called Sweetland Staples, is available only to the CSA’s members but Lake said they are “thinking seriously” about opening it up to nonmembers as well.
“Right now we’re being careful not to overtax our crew,” Lake said, noting that employees have been all self-isolating on the farm — “working here, eating here, playing here” — and are taking on extra duties packing and handling CSA orders. “We want to work out the kinks first.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
