Cheers To the Fruit Industry for Standing Tall Amid COVID-19 Chaos
January 27, 2021 When voicing their opinion in the media, most people would rather go negative than offer praise. Just human nature, I guess, but definitely true from my long experience with reader responses. Because of that, I was taken aback by the flood of answers to a couple questions having to do with the COVID-19 pandemic in American Fruit Grower® and Western Fruit Grower® magazines’ 2021 State of the Industry survey. A total of 134 growers took the time to write out their answers, which is remarkable. There are great examples of responses in several recently posted articles on this site. Also, in our December cover story, we featured the experiences of six growers of different crops around the country, and how they dealt with COVID-19.
Because 2020 was such a downer due to the pandemic, I can’t resist sharing more stories. Why? Not only can we learn from them, but as I say, they are mostly positive — something we all need right now. We asked growers the following: This was obviously a challenging year with the COVID-19 pandemic. What issues did it cause for your business? What strategies did you implement that have proved effective in dealing with those issues?
Admittedly, the question slants to the positive, in part because that’s how we roll, and because hearing how people solved problems is news growers can use. But to be clear, growers didn’t mind sharing just how tough things were.
One grower was almost completely dependent on restaurants for sales and had to dump ripe fruit. A couple others also said they were reliant on sales to institutions that had shut down. Some are dependent on farmers markets that were canceled. School tours were also called off. One grower fogged the production room nightly for sanitation and still had a 30% infection rate, forcing a two-week shutdown. Still another had to deal with wildfires at the same time, and it was almost too much.
But that’s pretty much it on the complaint front, believe it or not. Instead of griping, most simply took charge. They trained employees to wear masks properly, hung up signs for employees and customers alike, and practiced social distancing. One cashed all the H-2A employees’ checks and even had a grocery service come to the farm to mitigate spread. They clean packing sheds many times a day.
They restricted customer visits to the farm to make visitors feel safe. They limited sales to pre-orders and made appointments for pick-up. They wore masks and gloves during picking and processing fruit. Others who continued to allow visitors to the farm provided more hand-washing stations and asked people to wear masks — not only in the retail store but on wagon rides.
Surprisingly, some said the pandemic actually helped their business. One said direct-to-consumer sales were always a component of their business, and they were able to ramp up those sales during the pandemic and saw a significant bump in overall sales as a result. Others reported the pandemic got more customers to come out to the farm than previous years. Many people just wanted to get out in the fresh air and pick fruit, especially since there wasn’t much else to do.
It still seems incredible how many growers were so eager to share not how the COVID-19 pandemic hurt them — which I bet most people in the general population would focus on — but how they dealt with the pandemic. Fruit growers are a special breed, indeed.
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