Wear Your Mask
I’m not messing around anymore. No mask, no service, period. And if your nose is hanging out you can shop somewhere else, too. The same goes for all the other vendors at Central Farm Markets because if we sell to an unmasked patron, we can kiss our weekly spot goodbye, gone, not welcome to sell anymore so don’t put us in that situation. The market is taking this pandemic seriously and you should too.As a farmer, the Corona virus is no big surprise to me. I still believe it will be a zootonic swine virus that wreaks the ultimate havoc on humanity. At the rate we are tempting fate with factory farming, overuse of prophylactic antibiotics, lack of international biosecurity, and experimental organ transplant technologies it still may happen. For the last year I’ve been warning customers and anyone who will listen that the cost of pork is poised to skyrocket as its availability diminishes. Over two thirds of Asia’s swine have died over the last year—not just China, but in all of Asia. What do you think would happen if that many of the hogs in the United States were cut from the supply chain? And you thought Jamón Ibérico was expensive.Biosecurity is something that every farmer takes seriously. We have quarantine pens for sick animals and pens for new animals being brought on to the farm. Some of us choose to use medications to control disease and other resort to more stringent protocols that often result in culling. I know it sounds harsh, but if you’ve ever had to milk an animal with chronic mastitis (an infection in the udder), you’d know that under no circumstances would you ever drink milk, eat ice cream, or make cheese from that animal. That’s literally money down the drain. It’s tough being a farmer and a businessperson when it comes to these decisions.
But it doesn’t have to always result in the worst-case scenario when the effort is made to overcome the issue. Today I had to deal with a sheep with an abscess. It would have been really easy to turn him into sausages and burgers or shoot him full of drugs, but I like him and he serves a purpose, several in fact. That led me to put up the quarantine pen, isolate him, and doctor him multiple times daily to combat the infection without the use of drugs.Does this sound familiar?It’s not only the livestock farmers who have been on the isolation bandwagon when it comes to stopping disease. Talk to some of your fruit growers and ask them how many stone fruit trees they lost to Plum Pox. The government came in and tore out all the trees in a specific radius of outbreaks in order to eradicate the scourge—even healthy trees to prevent the spread of disease. When your favorite vegetable growers get disease outbreaks they don’t let the plants live—they pull them out regardless of where they are in the production cycle and often at a financial loss, but you don’t hear us screaming tyranny or about our constitutional rights.Imagine if farmers refused to follow the scientific directives to prevent, limit, or eradicate disease in their livestock and crops. That is exactly what humans are doing when they refuse to wear a mask or social distance. Ever seen floating row covers on vegetables? They’re giant masks for our food! They keep out the bad stuff.At a farmers market I helped get started many years ago one of the vendors still attending lamented some of the farmers and customers are still refusing to wear masks. “If God wanted me to wear a mask I would have been born with one,” said one of their vendors to which the reply was, “You wear pants, don’t you?”Summer is cranking up the heat and wearing a mask is uncomfortable, but I still wear a mask when I’m out cutting brush on the farm along with heavy canvas coveralls, gloves, heavy boots, and safety goggles over the sunglasses. Now that’s uncomfortable, but critical for my safety. I’m not out there in my bright pink sun dress exclaiming it’s my right to get a terrible case of poison ivy.Our way of life has been interrupted these last six months and will continue to be if we don’t begin using common sense and community policing. Some may feel as if their freedoms have been trampled upon when they encounter inconvenience, including to the point of screaming, bullying, and behaving badly. Unfortunately, the farmers market has not been immune from such behavior. A big shout-out and thank you to all who demand that others around them put on a mask. That’s true herd immunity.Each week at least one customer tells me they come to Central Farm Markets because of our strict COVID19 safety protocols. Even Walmart and other retail giants are coming around to the fact that wearing masks is going to be what beats back the virus. As of July 20th you’ll need a mask to enter one of their stores. We’ve been leading the pack since March. Countries like Japan have been ardent mask wearers for years and their numbers of infections and deaths reflect it.Let this serve as a warning to those who in the future want to ignore the solid science of mask-wearing. Farmers will have zero sympathy for you idiocy, especially when such behavior puts those around you in danger. Livestock farmers in particular regularly deal with ornery animals, some with horns, some that outweigh us by a long shot. A person throwing a tantrum over being asked to wear a mask or social distance will be a piece of cake to muscle out of the market.I’ve seen numerous insults from the anti-mask faction refer to masking wearing folks as sheep. I’ve got news for them—sheep are smart and they wear their damn masks, too!Just wear your mask.