Salmonberry Goods’ farm box delivers a selection of produce and pantry items from local farmers to Seattle customers. (Salmonberry Goods Photo)

Alex Johnstone and David Rothstein dreamed of changing the world through food. They started with pastries. Then the coronavirus hit.

The roommates and bakers behind Salmonberry Goods were crushed when Seattle shut down farmers markets in mid-March in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Their farmer friends and suppliers feared the order — combined with dwindling restaurant sales — would be a death knell. Johnstone and Rothstein always imagined expanding beyond the bakery to provide local food to a broader range of customers and suddenly it felt imperative to make that fantasy a reality.

Within 30 hours, Salmonberry Goods stood up a website where customers can buy farmers market items a la carte or subscribe to a weekly farm box, similar to the Community Support Agriculture (CSA) subscriptions many farms offer. Two weeks later, they’re fulfilling online orders and deliveries for hundreds of customers.

“Farms were legitimately afraid of going out of business,” Johnstone said. “It’s such an unpredictable time for everyone right now. We thought this was the time that we really need to put our heads together and try to connect people to farm produce in a different way.”

Update: Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan announced Wednesday farmers markets will be allowed to re-open with new safety measures in place.

Salmonberry Goods co-founders Alex Johnstone and David Rothstein. (Salmonberry Goods Photo)

As farmers know — and burgeoning crisis gardeners are learning — early spring is not typically a time of food abundance. Winter crops have withered away and the first harvest of the new season is still around the corner. Yet March 2020 will be remembered as a pivotal moment in the history of sustainable agriculture, a time of high demand, rapid innovation, and abrupt pivots for an industry that typically spends the month preparing for the busy season.

Local farmers across the country are reinventing themselves as online food delivery businesses and embracing social media to connect with customers in a remarkably fast response to our new food reality. The restaurant supply businesses in many states dried up virtually overnight due to shutdown orders at the same time thousands of consumers, wary of exposing themselves to the virus, started searching for new ways to get food delivered to their doorsteps.

Coronavirus Live Updates: The latest COVID-19 developments in Seattle and the world of tech

Fast-acting farmers, and the technology companies that support them, are poised to reap the benefits of the new landscape. Their gain won’t necessarily be the Big Food’s loss. You need only to try ordering groceries from Amazon Fresh or take a peek at the empty shelves of a Kroger grocery store to see that. A new survey found the percentage of consumers shopping for groceries online has nearly doubled since last year, with 60% of shoppers turning to Amazon’s food delivery service and 47% using Walmart.

But the pandemic is driving many consumers to reconsider the length of their food supply chain and support local farmers for a complex range of practical and psychological reasons.

Small farmers in Washington state relied on farmers markets for direct-to-consumer sales. Now they’re finding new channels. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

Amy McCann is the co-founder of Local Food Marketplace, a Eugene, Ore., company that provides farm management software and a consumer-facing website where customers can buy products from local farms. She said small-scale food producers are able to more nimbly respond to a change in market conditions than industry behemoths.

“When you need to pivot it’s like, you’re in a canoe,” McCann said. “They know how to make adjustments to current conditions. They do it every single day and technology is an extension of that.”

Local Food Marketplace onboarded more small farms in the month of March than it typically does in six months. The site is fielding 2-3 times more orders than this time last year and McCann’s team had to revamp its onboarding process to handle the increased demand.

“In this particular case, farms have utilized technology as just one of the tools in their tool belts to make those changes that they’re so good at doing,” McCann said.

But large-scale operations are struggling mightily to adapt to the closure of restaurants, schools, and other institutions that feed large groups. Some farms are forced to destroy entire fields and dump out millions of pounds of fresh food, even as individual consumers are eating far more meals at home. In a matter of days, many farmers lost buyers for more than half of their crops, according to the New York Times.

Many farms are donating the surplus to food banks, which face overwhelming demand from people impacted by the crisis. But America’s biggest farms produce more fresh food than charities can store and distribute before it perishes. It is also expensive and arduous to transport large quantities of perishables to the communities that could use them.

Until now, the cutting edge of innovation in the food industry involved widening the chasm between farmer and consumer. Even Whole Foods, a pioneer in food sustainability, is now under the Amazon umbrella where engineers are developing a cashierless grocery experience that, by design, disconnects the customer from the food’s origins.

But as the Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service buckles under demand, consumers are starting to consider potential vulnerabilities in a large-scale system that relies on food grown hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile, farmers are embracing technology to offer an alternative.

Scenes from the Ballard Farmers Market in Seattle this time last year. (GeekWire Photos / Monica Nickelsburg)

The team at Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Markets immediately started building online resources to help vendors connect with customers when the shutdown order took effect. They created a living Google doc with information on how to order and collect items from more than 70 market vendors.

“I’m hoping that this really drives home the point that the one solid thing that we seem to have out of this crazy COVID situation is that our farmers are still out there every single day, growing our food, and they’re still trying to get it to customers by any means possible,” said Sarah Schu, marketing and development manager at Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Markets.

A box designed to feed a family of 3-4 starts at $106 per week from Salmonberry, or $424 per month, before tax. That’s less than the $516 per month that the average Seattle family spent on groceries from 2017-2018, according to the most recently available Labor Bureau data. CSA boxes typically don’t include grocery staples like coffee or milk but the Salmonberry box comes with produce, eggs, and baked goods, bread, or pasta depending on the subscription. The farm box, supplemented with some grocery store items, would be on par with the average food budget for Seattle families.

The same impulse that compels consumers to build a relationship with local food purveyors is also driving a major resurgence of home gardening. Online seed stores across North America are reporting unprecedented spikes in vegetable seed sales, with many temporarily closing their stores to catch up on orders. The trend even has a name: “Corona Victory Gardens,” a nod to the World War II movement to grow food at home so that supplies could feed soldiers overseas.

There are practical reasons for the shift in attitude toward local food. It’s planting season and widespread shutdown orders make gardening one of the few sanctioned outdoor activities. The desire to limit exposure at grocery stores has many consumers turning to any food delivery service that still has items in stock.

But there may be cultural and psychological factors at play too. The emergence of a mysterious, highly contagious virus suddenly makes a long and opaque supply chain feel risky to some consumers.

“People realize that if they’re buying from a farm, somebody’s harvested it, maybe the same person packed it, and likely that’s the number of hands that have touched it,” McCann said. “Versus, if you’re buying something from more traditional channels … the same product has interchanged hands many times before you go and pick up that head of lettuce or the bunch of carrots.”

Conscious consumerism could also play a role in the shift toward locally grown food. The economic uncertainty brought on by COVID-19 has many consumers avoiding non-essential expenses. But food, our most essential need, presents an opportunity to support members of the community who are struggling. It can be an antidote to feelings of helplessness in the face of daily layoffs, unemployment figures, and grim economic prognostics.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic is not expected to last forever, its impact on farmers and consumers could. Many local farmers will come out of this crisis with direct-to-consumer e-commerce businesses and new customers who came for the free delivery and stayed for the seasonal, feel-good food.

“The feedback that we’ve gotten by and large has been super positive because people see the value across the board, holistically,” said Rothstein, of Salmonberry Goods. “People see the value in having the best small farm produce curated and delivered to your door.”

Consumers are not likely to forget the spring when grocery store shelves were emptied and the same-day shipping services they’d come to rely on suddenly couldn’t supply. And novice gardeners who see the fruits of their labor in the backyard, after the masks have been put away, may be more likely to stop at the farmers market than the big box store.

That’s not to claim that anyone has an easy road ahead. Many small, sustainable farmers rely on business from restaurants, an industry that celebrity chefs like Tom Douglas and David Chang predict could never be the same.

But as this crisis — and many ecological and economic disasters before it — shows, farmers find a way.

“As far as how people live in the wake of this trauma as individuals, it is my profound hope that people see the resilience of their local food system … it’s my impression seeing that here in Seattle and I’m deeply inspired,” Rothstein said.

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