COVID Continues, Greater Cincinnati Farmers Pivot

BY MACKENZIE MANLEY

Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky businesses are caught in a collective pivot as they grapple with ever-evolving news related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the local food chain, this impact is felt all the way from the restaurants, groceries and markets to — the root of it all — farms. Deemed essential workers, farmers have continued to supply their communities with food and tend to livestock.

“They’re going to go on no matter what’s going on in the human world,” Annie Woods of Boone County, Kentucky’s Dark Wood Farm says of crops and animals. “They’re going to be alive and (the chickens will continue) producing eggs and plants are going to keep growing.”

Woods adds that the past month has been hectic as her staff has tried to adjust to changes that will linger on indefinitely. Pre-coronavirus social distancing measures, Dark Wood acquired a second growing space in Campbell County. Nestled in the Ohio River’s floodplain, this brought the hope of selling more product to restaurants, alongside an expansion in their CSA, or Community-Supported Agriculture program. (CSA is a communal model of farming in which people buy a share of a farm’s harvest at the start of their season and receive weekly portions. Farms who provide CSAs are often small and local.)

“When all this happened back in mid-March, we had to really sit down and assess, ‘OK, we’re going to be growing more food this year. We’re already planning to do that. It’s a good thing, right? Because everybody’s gonna need food no matter what.’ But we were sort of thinking it would go to restaurants,” Woods says. “What we decided to do to adjust and adapt a little bit is to expand our CSA program to more members.”

In the last couple of years, Woods says CSA membership has increased from 50 to 75, with 25 slots added this year.

In a similar move, Richard Stewart of Carriage House Farm in North Bend, Ohio says they’ve increased their CSA shares to account for possible drops in sales with local restaurants, some of which have closed their doors with no set date of return. He says restaurants represented about 65 to 70 percent of their business. For many small-scale farms, that number is even higher.

Following Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s order for all bars and restaurants to end dine-in options in March, Stewart recalls gathering his staff over text/ email and making the decision to open a farmstand. They are open five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday.

“We just started racing to get more products on our shelves,” Stewart says, adding that, alongside their own in-season produce and eggs, customers are able to purchase other locally sourced products: Sixteen Bricks bread, Grateful Grahams, Hen of the Woods Chips, Deeper Roots Coffee, Rising Sun ground beef,

Woodland Pork and more. “By the end of that first week, I was exhausted,” Stewart says. “I think my whole crew was exhausted mentally, emotionally… but I mean, we were seeing everybody that we grew up with as a business — because we’ve been doing this, the local food scene, since 2005 — and every single one of these chefs had become friends of ours.”

At that point, they had sold about half of their CSA shares. They added more slots, posted the announcement on their social pages, and are now sold out.

The irony of moving to full-retail mode? Carriage House has slowly been inching toward a more retail-focused model over the past year and a half — a plan that was meant to unfold over three years.

They also made the decision to take half of the fields that would normally be used for commodity crops and prepare it for potatoes, winter squash, cucumbers and other shelf-stable products. Part of this reasoning was to account for possible gaps in the food network that he says may develop in the next two months or so.

Stewart says they’ve been taking preventive measures seriously from the start. All employees wear masks, they sanitize with isopropyl alcohol and by the time new requirements came about regarding population density and social distancing in buildings, Carriage House was already meeting them.

Carriage House Farm

PHOTO: PROVIDED BY CARRIAGE HOUSE FARM

Woods says her staff has also been wearing masks, maintaining social distancing from one another and sanitizing as needed.

Tricia Watts, executive director of Gorman Heritage Farm, noted similar precautions. Gorman’s plant sale on May 7 operated as a pre-order drivethru. Dark Wood’s recently wrapped plant sale did the same, with customers pre-ordering items, pulling up and staff placing their items in their car.

Farmers markets — like Northside’s and Hyde Park’s — have also moved to pre-order, curbside pick-up and drive-thru models. Michael Hass of Melbourne, Kentucky’s Idyllwild Farm is a vendor at both markets who says the pre-order and prepay online system means that customers don’t even need to leave their cars. “What the crisis has done is sort of dragged farmers’ markets into the 21st century,” Hass says, adding that Northside has partnered with web platform Farmnivorous. (Each vendor at Hyde Park has its own online store from which customers can select goods.)

One spot of light? Each farmer spoke to the support they’ve felt from the community. Beyond the crisis, Woods wonders if those turning to local farms or joining CSAs for the first time will change the way people buy — and eat — food for a longer period of time. “When I look out at the world and at our business, in some ways I’m a little hopeful in the way that I see people altering their behavior to support local businesses — to support local food, especially,” she says.

Stewart says if people want to support the farm, after the crisis is over and things normalize, remember: “We’re still here.”