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25-page COVID-19 preparedness plan and paid people to stay paid quarantine and sick leave to keep them safe. Because these
home when family members had symptoms.” devoted workers returned to Minnesota, despite the pandemic,
Thanks to solid procedures and low infection rates in that local organic food reached hundreds of families this year.
part of the state, no one got sick, despite working extra shifts “Demand for what we grow is unprecedented, nothing
to meet demand. I could have imagined. On the first of March, we projected
“This spring, our normal retail orders doubled,” Pete we’d have carrots until April 1 but ran out by March 10.
recalls. “We were wiped out of peas, green beans and We’ve also seen a crazy, huge increase for CSAs [Community
edamame early on and had to turn down customers. Workers Supported Agriculture, where consumers pre-purchase a
pulled extra shifts and weekends, and the processors [who produce subscription directly from the farmer]. The CSAs
clean, prepare and freeze Sno Pac’s crops] worked seven days had generally been seeing a downward trend over the last five
a week.” years. This year, we had hundreds on a waiting list.”
Yet Pete knew, in some cases, it wasn’t going to be
enough. “COVID took our inventories down to nothing. We
ran potatoes in the spring—all the organic potatoes we could
collect. We have enough to cover orders until fall but had to
scrounge around, getting product from as many other growers
as we could.”
As demand from retail rose, institutional orders ended
abruptly. “Stuff I sell to Reinhart [a distributor] completely
died because schools and restaurants were closed.”
Sno Pac wasn’t the only farm feeling the heat. With
COVID-19 shutting government offices and closing borders,
Jack Hedin also had concerns about how his business would
fare. Featherstone Farm—a 250-acre, certified-organic, Tatum Evans, Marketing & Membership Manager, Fifth Season
2
produce farm in Rushford, Minn.—relies heavily on seasonal, Cooperative, Viroqua, Wisc., unloads lacinato kale from Enos Miller of
nonimmigrant labor to grow, harvest, wash, package and ship Westby, Wisc., as part of a larger order headed to Indianapolis Fruit.
their wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Fifth Season aggregates local products from farmers, producers and processors
“The vast majority of our crops are hand-picked by 25- to meet demand throughout the Midwest. www.fifthseasoncoop.com
30 people coming from central, highland Mexico with H-2A Photo by Tyler Dvorak, Fifth Season Co-op.
visas. Without these skilled workers, we couldn’t feed people,”
says Jack, a fourth-generation farmer in southern Minnesota. Pivot or Close
“Think about this: 30 people, working eight months of the
year, feed thousands of others. After 8-10 years of coming Unfortunately, some food producers have had the opposite
back, these workers know the industry so well and are so experience under COVID: steep losses and the risk of losing
efficient, if they didn’t do this work, it would greatly impact everything. Kim Olson, owner of Grandma’s Gourmets
the farm and would shake the reliability of our production.” in Albert Lee, Minn., had a 66% plunge in sales between
Luckily, the pandemic didn’t stop these essential laborers, February and March. Her small-batch, handcrafted pickles,
and Featherstone implemented extensive new protocols jams, jellies and salsas are artisan items usually sampled in
including additional housing, spacing, and cleaning, as well as grocery stores, so when the pandemic cancelled demos, her
sales plummeted.
“I was really worried,” says Kim about the horrifying
drop. “I didn’t know how I was going to pay my bills or how
my business would continue. I had a choice: cry in a corner or
figure it out.”
Figure it out, she did. Short staffed, she examined what
she could produce—mainly alone—in her commercial kitchen
without a retail space. “I had sheets and pans for baking and
decided to make stuff and sell it on Facebook. I didn’t want

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Nonimmigrant visas are for foreign nationals wishing to enter the United States on
Hardworking team at Featherstone Farm, including over 25 H-2A a temporary basis for tourism, medical treatment, business, temporary work, study
workers who return annually to Minnesota to bring local food to or other similar reasons. See, cbp.gov
hundreds of families.
FRONTLINE continued on page 20

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