Fresh and safe: Kentucky farmers filling the food void left by panic shopping
When the coronavirus hit the Bluegrass, Kentuckians headed straight to their grocery stores. That mass panic-buying brought the food supply system to its knees.
Now, as workers at Walmart and at Kroger have tested positive for COVID-19, many are searching not just for food, but for safe food.
And local growers are stepping into the breach with fresh grown produce, meats, eggs and more.
In many cases delivered straight to you.
A guaranteed food supply that you know is safe? That’s a hot commodity right now and Kentucky farmers have been able to scramble and adapt quickly.
“We have seen some Kentucky Proud members, particularly Roadside Markets, flourish, and some of our farm-based freezer beef farmers, have sold out,” said Ryan Quarles, Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner. Groceries also have made their biggest purchases of Kentucky Proud beef ever as they look for meat locally, he said.
Kroger bought record amounts of ground beef from the Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association, he said.
CSAs and on-farm stores
Mac Stone, co-owner with his wife Ann Bell Stone of Elmwood Stock Farm, has seen a jump in orders for their CSA farm shares (Community Supported Agriculture) and for the on-farm store they have in Georgetown.
“We’re seeing the growth in interest of whole food security conversation,” Mac Stone said. “That little flurry of empty store shelves sent them to us, and now it’s moved to thinking more broadly how food comes to them. In our CSA model, it goes from us to a bag to them.”
Changing the farmers’ market
CSA isn’t the only thing having a moment.
Farmers’ markets, which have been declared essential businesses in Kentucky and may stay open, are changing to meet the safety needs of customers and vendors.
Last weekend, the Lexington Farmers’ Market opened with a new configuration: Instead of vendors lining the outside of the Fifth Third Pavilion at Cheapside Park facing, they faced out into the chilly open air. They were spaced far apart and each one had a blue arc of chalk drawn on the ground to indicate a space for only one customer at a time.
“We saw a lot of new faces at the market last weekend,” said Josh England, farmers’ market manager. He said the market is “an important way for the most vulnerable people to get food in a less scary environment.”
One of the advantages of farmers’ markets is move a lot produce in one place to a large crowd. “But if you are talking about social distancing, then how do you do that?” England said.
He is working on ways to improve the set-up, which may require moving to a larger space as the weather warms up and the market expands with more vendors. England is talking with the University of Kentucky and with The Red Mile about using their large parking lots, which have multiple entrances and exits to possibly set up a drive-through market, as other locations have done.
Keeping farmers and their farms safe is important. Many in Kentucky and across the U.S. are older, making them potentially more susceptible to complications and death from the coronavirus.
That’s on the mind of Leo Keene and his wife, Jean Pitches Keene, who run Blue Moon Farm out of Richmond. Besides their own garlic, they are purveyors of high quality farm goods from bread to pork from other producers.
Normally, Leo Keene said, they’d be juggling restaurant customers and gearing up to open their booth at the market on the first weekend in April.
Now, they have almost no restaurant trade to manage. And they aren’t sure they will be coming to the market either.
“Green garlic is ready to go. Or I can have it ready in a heartbeat … I just had a request from a customer about ramps. Heard from my asparagus guy. Pressure’s been coming at me from all directions. We’re trying to decide, ‘Can we do this without putting ourselves at risk, healthwise?’” he said. “Normally we’d be trying to gear up for all the graduations, for Easter, for Mother’s Day … what the hell are we going to do?”
Straight from the farm to you
Other farmers are finding other outlets. Normally, Robert Eversole and Thomas Sargent of all-natural Crooked Row Farm in Lexington would be delivery loads of baby kale and tender lettuce greens to University of Kentucky students returning from spring break. But his business, which was built around selling to the UK Dining system, has evaporated with the university sending students off-campus to finish the semester online.
Crooked Row also sells to Vinaigrette Salad Kitchen, Lockbox and chef Ouita Michel’s restaurants. Now hundreds of pounds of greens will probably go to FoodChain or God’s Pantry rather than brunches and Keeneland tailgates.
Meanwhile, Eversole is pivoting. He’s setting up an online market and offering home delivery beginning in May. “What we’re doing is no commitment, no pre-order, no deposit. It’s a way to remove the management that has to happen with CSA, so we can still continue to focus on wholesale when that starts back up in summer-to fall,” he said.
He’s also working with other growers and producers, including plain-clothes and Amish farmers who do not have internet access and may need an outlet for sales.
“It’s a big switch, had to make fast pivot for planting plans,” Eversole said. “We are planting everything. We are going back to what we’ve grown for the CSA, everything from asparagus to watermelon.”
Wildcat Willy’s Distillery in Winchester also is shifting focus from a menu of farm-raised drinks and dishes to selling the produce, hamburger, eggs, bread, CBD products and moonshine directly to consumers instead, with curbside pickup launching at the market.
“Our entire supply chain for fresh vegetables, eggs and whiskey contains eight people. I watch them like a hawk, and we are taking temperatures regularly. Is there still risk? Sure there is, but it is much minimized,” owner Laura Freeman said online. “Most food supply chains involved thousands of people. I just finished reading an article (From NPR, not some click-bait publication) about California farmers anticipating the fallout if farmworkers become ill. ... And it goes from there…from industrial farms to distribution centers, truckers, stocking clerks. We are eight miles, eight people.”
UK is offering a new online market too
With the closing of UK Dining, the university’s dining partner Aramark teamed up with The Food Connection at the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Farm to Table to set up a new way for its existing farm suppliers to sell, but this time directly to consumers.
Anyone can go online and order the local produce and proteins that would normally appear in campus dining rooms, as well as other locally raised foods and some pantry staples such as butter, oil and vinegar. Participating farms are Elmwood Stock Farm, Marksbury Farm, Mount Pleasant Farm, Mulberry Ridge Farm, Prayer Mountain Farm and Salad Days Farm.
Place an order by 10 p.m. on Tuesday and you can pick up the order Thursday at the UK Horticultural Research Farm on Man O’ War Boulevard, Great Bagel and Bakery at 396 Woodland Ave. or Smithtown Seafood at West Sixth, 501 W. Sixth St. in Lexington.
The new food distribution program is open to the public, not just university employees and students. Order online at localfoodconnection.localfoodmarketplace.com/.
New faces at the Good Foods Co-op
Other farmers have shifted their products to new markets as well.
Todd Clark, who normally supplies organic local eggs by the thousands to Lexington restaurants, had to scramble when Gov. Andy Beshear ordered dining rooms closed.
Suddenly he had all those eggs and no customers; meanwhile, eggs were flying off the shelves at grocery stores.
So Clark shipped them over to Good Foods Co-op on Southland and to Wilson’s Grocery & Meats on Cramer Avenue, where customers were thrilled to find them.
“We’re taking as much as we can get from local egg producers,” said Lauren Gawthrop, spokeswoman for Good Foods. Also big sellers: Chicken and ground beef.
“Especially things that can freeze well or come frozen, those are selling like crazy, people can get enough of it,” she said.
And because many are finding empty shelves at Kroger and other stores, people are finding their way to Good Foods, a natural grocery and cooperative.
“We’ve definitely seen a lot of new faces,” Gawthrop said. “People like it’s a smaller space they can get in and out quickly, and it’s easy to find what they need. And it’s easy for us to keep it clean.”
She said the store has added senior shopping hours from 8 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday and devoted the same hours on Saturday and Sunday to those with underlying health issues that compromise immunity. And they are looking for a way to add online ordering and curbside pickup for grocery items as well.
“I think there is a lot of fear around the coronavirus with the news coming out of the other countries,” she said. “People buy what they think they might need in a complete shut down. All the frozen and dried food, anything shelf or freezer stable. People are buying for a very long outlook. But what’s going to keep them healthiest is fresh local produce and eggs.”
Clark, the egg producer, said he and others have been talking about what the changes could mean long term.
“In a weird way, maybe the local food movement will get a shot in the arm from this disaster,” he said. “We’ve got three sons all involved in athletics, that’s our excuse for eating out all the time. But we’ve had to slow our lives down now, we don’t have baseball games to rush around to, so we have time to prepare food at home. Maybe long term we can form new, better habits.”
Will the local uptick stay?
Cliff Swaim, whole director and one of the owners of meat processor Marksbury Farm, thinks the changes are temporary but could be fortuitous.
“There’s an old sports cliche: The best ability is availability. It doesn’t matter how good you are if you’re on the sidelines. In many cases what we’ve encountered is the go-to grocery stores, their shelves are bare, so the consumers have shifted to other stores to meet the demand. So one benefit is being exposed to local food,” Swaim said. “I don’t necessarily think people have made a lifestyle choice, it’s about availability. The chain from grower to user is super short. We’re in a better position to react.”
So when Marksbury Farm’s Pasture and other restaurants closed for dining in, the processor was able to move more ground beef into stores quickly.
An untended benefit, he said, is new customers “are consuming good healthy locally raised food, and maybe learning new habits out of this.”
He’s also seen a significant uptick in people buying Marksbury’s grassfed-beef through online ordering platforms like Wild Pastures and Farm Foods Market.
“Maybe they’ll decided that when they had to go to Marksbury and Good Foods to get locally grown grassfed beef, they decide they want to keep doing it. That’s my dream,” Swaim said. “The world will look very different when this is over.”
Food supply ‘very strong’
Agriculture commissioner Ryan Quarles agrees.
“COVID-19 will effect every industry in America, and our country has changed in the past two weeks, fundamentally changed,” Quarles said.
The last two weeks have raised a lot of questions about the food supply system.
“It’s very strong,” he said. And the grocery store workers who have been frantically stocking shelves every night and day are unsung heroes, he said.
The problem, he said, is “the grocery store business works with precision, and Americans changed buying habits overnight.”
Quarles thinks that farmers’ markets also are poised to see a big increase in demand, which is one reason Kentucky kept its open while other states like Virginia closed them down.
“We want to keep farmers’ markets open to support local ag and to give Kentuckians access to fresh nutritious food,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of Kentuckians who have stepped back and re-evaluated the food purchases they are going to make.”
To help, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture has put out a list of Kentucky Proud restaurants doing takeout and is a list of CSAs you can sign up for.
“There are so many heroes in ag right now, as well as the Kentucky farmers who will get a crop out this year to feed Americans,” Quarles said.
Coincidentally, the last week of March is National Agriculture Week, he said.
“There’s no better time to say thank you to a farmer.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
