Farms Find Ways Around COVID-19 to Continue Production

By John Conley

 

Local farms in Butler County are losing business as much as any other farm in the country during the COVID-19 pandemic and are looking for ways to still produce product and provide to the community.

As COVID-19 started to threaten the United States, the Marburger Dairy Farm was ready for something like COVID-19, as they had a plan put in place ahead of time.

“We had procedures in place for something like this if it happened. We have been following protocol and have added more cleaning and social distancing procedures,” a representative from Marburger Dairy Farm said.

Marburger Dairy Farm did see a decrease in business from places that make cheese and ice cream.

“Our processing plant was affected in terms of business as we were not able to continue at full speed, but we have been doing well just not at the pace we want. About 50% of our farmers milk that we get never came to our plant to begin with it always went to cheese and ice cream plants that had to unfortunately be dumped. The milk coming to our plant is not being dumped. We are selling the product and people still want it,” a representative from Marburger Dairy Farm said.

Since non-essential businesses have closed, Marburger Dairy Farm has created different ways for customers to still buy their product.

“We have started a curbside pickup service so customers can call ahead and come directly to the dairy and buy whatever they need or want,” said a representative from Marburger Dairy Farm.

Selling dairy products online isn’t possible with dairy being perishable, making it harder to sell to people who don’t live close to the dairy farm.

Another local farm affected during this pandemic is the Zimmerman Family Farm, which had to temporarily close during this time.

“We tried looking towards other avenues as COVID-19 started to threaten our area and had to scale back in the preparation, but we had no idea how long the pandemic would go on,”  Josh Zimmerman, owner of Zimmerman family farm said.

Zimmerman Family Farm had to think of how they could still sell their product and reached out to a few farms around the area to see what they were doing.

“We contacted Harvest Valley Farm, which is making essential boxes and they are using some of our product on a weekly basis to keep us moving. We are not producing as much volume wise with the restaurants being closed,” Zimmerman said.

Harvest Valley Farms has created a program making essential boxes containing produce from farms and sending them to customers. Zimmerman partnered with Harvest Valley Farms so they could use some of their product in the boxes.

“Harvest Valley Farms was already setup to do a CSA program with the client base and website. It was a lot easier for them to jump into something like this and expand on it. They had to close their storefront because of their family and trying to keep up with everything,” Zimmerman said.

The CSA program is a Community-Supported Agriculture system that connects the producer to the consumer, allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. This has allowed the Zimmerman farm to work with Harvest Valley farm in staying afloat.

Harvest Valley Farm did not answer the call when I tried reaching out to them for comment on the essential boxes. I was curious to see how the essential boxes were doing and how they were using those to help other farms like the Zimmerman’s.

Due to COVID-19, the Zimmerman farm has taken precautions on how to manage the produce that is being grown at this time.

“We are just unsure on when to gage on our plantings, because we do events and catering. Along with just growing everything its kind of hard to gage when were going to pull out of this and whether people will respond on getting out in public to come to fresh markets and how quickly restaurants will recover,” Zimmerman said. Farming is a perishable commodity and it goes to waste so in a matter of a couple of days you must find customers. You only have a couple day window to sell the product.

Within the farms themselves, Marburger Dairy Farm has not had to cut any employees and have actually seen an increase in sales based off the support from the community. Zimmerman’s on the other hand, has had to cut employees that were not family members. 

The local farms have seen a hit in all different areas and to see how each one is reacting to the pandemic is interesting in how they are helping one another. With COVID-19 still looming, it will be interesting to see how the farms react if this continues to go on for a few more months.

Farms like the Zimmerman farm cannot afford to lose business and relied on events to keep production up. This also shows how vulnerable farms are to pandemics, as almost all farms are taking a hit from this.

Zimmerman Family Farms is taking steps now incase the pandemic looms on through the summer months.

“We are creating a website to do CSA boxes if this were to pop up again in the fall and hopefully be able to do our own thing. Right now, we have stuff growing, it’s just not going to be ready within the next two weeks we must wait and see how this all plays out,” Zimmerman said.

Local farm continue to be impacted by COVID-19, but are finding solutions to still deliver their product to consumers.

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