Keep Your Farmers Close
Last week I was having lunch with my mom and brother when he warned me to stock up on toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Wasn’t this my admonition to them only two and a half years ago when my customers in the know showed up at market bearing plastic baggies containing surgical masks and news of a growing virus that was going to severely impact our lives? It was funny until it wasn’t.
My brother is an engineer for one of the major rail service providers in the Northeast. He spent most of our meal telling me how he hadn’t had a contract or raise in four years despite being in a labor union, how his workload has doubled, how his employer refuses to hire more workers despite the demand, how America’s rail infrastructure is in woeful need of upgrades, how he’s owed back pay that the railway refuses to pay, that he has no paid sick leave, and when he does take time off for healthcare or emergencies he risks losing his position or even his job. Not to mention the crazy long hours and work weeks. I was tempted to say that it sounded a lot like farming, but his distress was genuine so I kept quiet and listened. Then he let the zinger fly—regardless of what Congress says, railway workers are going to walk off the job on September 16th. Amtrak has already cancelled service on all of its long-distance routes.
I’m old enough to remember the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and how Reagan handled it by firing all the striking workers. But back then we didn’t have the Internet, Amazon, and on-demand shopping. FedEx and UPS serviced mainly businesses and the postal service carried mainly letters. The big difference is the air traffic controllers were federal employees. Railways are public companies with shareholders, only once being nationalized for three years during WWI.
So what does this shutdown mean for market patrons? It means that more customers will be shopping at local farmers markets when food that travels by rail goes missing from retailers. Remember the snarled supply chains during COVID? During the blizzard on I-95? There’s a very real potential to see this again, right before the advent of the grand holidays season.
Consider this your annual reminder—even more so this year—to pre-order your holiday specialty items like turkeys, roasts, pastries, and flowers NOW. Just because you’ve always purchased from that particular vendor in the past doesn’t automatically guarantee your goodies for this year. Communication is critical from here on out. Over two years ago most of the vendors created one way or another to keep in touch with customers as well as pre-order online. When you see those emails, newsletters, social media posts, and signs at the market telling you to place special orders NOW, do it!
Food security is building relationships with the people who produce your food. It’s been quite a change from years of a steady supply, on-demand access to seeing sad, and sometimes angry customers expecting to have unfettered availability.
Several years ago I had a visit from a large, commercial lamb purveyor friend of mine on their way to visit their processor. Their lambs were butchered near their farm but transported via rail several states away to where they were turned into chops, roasts, and burgers, packaged, and then shipped to distributors for restaurants and retailers. Compare that to your vendors at the market who drive their own animals to the processor and then pick up the packaged products. When the news broke about the looming rail strike I had six telephone calls in one day from assorted restaurants and retail butcher shops worried about their access to product. One chef had the audacity to offer to pay my market prices if I’d sell to them. No, I’m not going to be a schmuck to the people who have patronized me and my fellow vendors at the farmers market year after year.
When researching statistics for the weekly blog I found it interesting that the Association for American Railroads’ web page had a big splashy image of produce overlayed with the tag line: Food Products: Helping Achieve Food Security. By the numbers—1.6 million train carloads of agricultural commodities and 3.3 million in food products are moved by rail each year. That’s not including consumer goods and energy items like coal and oil. At the top of the key takeaways from an infographic, “Without railroads, it would be impossible to keep the shelves in our grocery stores full.” I can’t stress this enough; when grocery store shelves are empty those shoppers turn to the local farmers markets. We’ve kept our patrons fed during the last few years as best we can and by golly, we’re going to keep doing it railway strike or not.