GILROY — With the closure of venues and institutions such as restaurants, hotels and schools comes a plummeting demand for fresh crops in the service and catering industries.
According to Earnest Research, restaurants suffered a 42.3% slowdown in the week immediately following California’s shelter-in-place order.
Many farmers working through the coronavirus pandemic continue to lose money as a result of dwindling markets, said Jess Brown, executive director of the Santa Clara County Farm Bureau.
On the other hand, farmers who produce food for retail markets have more outlets available to them. The largest available outlet is grocery stores, deemed essential businesses by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“There’s also the small-scale farmers who have things like community-supported agriculture. They’re called ‘CSAs,’ where you subscribe and get boxes of produce every week,” Brown said. “Their subscriptions have gone up because people want to access local, fresh produce.”
Brown works alongside farmers to promote agriculture in the open fields of Santa Clara Valley, which include cities south of San Jose such as Gilroy and Morgan Hill.
Unlike businesses that were able to shutter temporarily and schools that suspended in-person classes until the fall, still-growing crops could not be put on pause once seeds were sowed.
Paul Mirassou, president of the Santa Clara County Farm Bureau and farmer with B&T Farms, said he’s had to “disc out” much of his harvest – destroying the crop and recycling it back into the soil.
“Right now we’re having problems with lettuce, which we planted in the winter, we’re harvesting now. We’re going to get 25 acres right now,” he said. “It cost $4,000 an acre to grow and to disc it up. $4,000 an acre [is] a lot of money lost.”
Using an agricultural tool known as a disc harrow, named after its row of metal discs, farmers till the soil where they wish to plant crops.
But as the crops Mirassou planted in the winter reach peak harvest, he’s had to churn dead lettuce and spinach back into the ground with the device.
“During Easter, people plant a lot for that, and then nobody had an Easter party, so no demand. You just disc it up into the ground, just kill the organic matter,” Mirassou said.
Along the Pacheco Pass Highway in Gilroy are fields with patches of decaying crops left unharvested and undestroyed by farms facing financial burdens.
Pink flags staked in the ground offer a stark reminder to farmers walking across the crop field – “DO NOT HARVEST.”
Mirassou said he applied for small business loans under the federal Payment Protection Program and has since received them to help keep his business afloat.
To assist struggling farmers, Brown said he discussed federal government assistance with Rep. Jimmy Panetta, who represents portions of Gilroy.
“I think one thing that they could do is to help the growers who are food institution-type growers bring the product to market and purchase it and distribute it to food banks throughout the country,” Brown said. “A lot of people [are] in need of food because of
being unemployed.”
Protecting local farmland and community gardens ensures that locals need not worry about food shortages, said Matt Freeman, assistant general manager of the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority.
The Open Space Authority relies on state bonds to provide grants that fund its work, some of which may be repurposed for an economic stimulus package, leaving less grant money available for it to support farmland and agriculture protection.
“We’re working with a few landowners to protect really critical farmland so that it can’t be so divided,” Freeman said. “We make these properties available for ongoing agriculture.”
He said that the COVID-19 pandemic has not stopped the valley’s mission, though progress has slowed because of the economic shutdown.
Mirassou said he oversees 2,800 acres on his farm just a few miles from the Gilroy Premium Outlets, and although oversupply has led to discarded crops in the past, it has never been so widespread.
“Hopefully we’ll go back to normal when we’re ready to harvest [again], if not, we’ll probably have a lot of big problems when we go harvest those crops,” Mirassou said.
He said economic relief will come once he secures the small business loans he’d applied for, and while his losses for this season’s harvest have become evident, the fall season’s harvest remains as unpredictable as the COVID-19 pandemic.
