Despite a surge in unemployment nationally and broken supply chains for many consumer goods during the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a panel of three agricultural experts say much of the agricultural sector has proven resilient to the most disruptive forces of the pandemic.

About 280 registered for the third webinar in a Covid-19-related series produced by the Council on Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics (C-FARE). This one, like the first, was co-hosted with the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA). The programming is sponsored in part by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service and National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Board member Jane Kolodinsky, director of the Center for Rural Studies and chair of the University of Vermont Community Development and Applied Economics Department, moderated a panel that included these experts:

• Cesar L. Escalante, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Georgia, who discussed H2A work visas and farm labor at a time of heavy border restrictions due to Covid-19.

• Ben Feldman, the executive director for the national Farmers Market Coalition, who discussed the challenges local farm markets face adapting to new safeguards.

• Lilian Brislen, the founding director of The Food Connection, a local food systems center at the University of Kentucky, who helps lead the National Farm to Institution Metrics Collaborative sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who discussed procurement, its impact on local producers and the importance of standardized metrics.

Escalante explained that H2A visas, those given to temporary farm workers mostly but not exclusively from Mexico, are a “last resort” hiring option for farm operations because the regulatory requirements are cumbersome. Still, from 2013 to 2019, the visa program saw a jump from less than 10% of total farm labor to 27.4%, or nearly 350,000 laborers.

Leaning on H2A for foreign farm labor appears not to have been substantively disrupted by the pandemic, based on the available reporting. In the second quarter of this year, the U.S. collected the highest number of foreign labor certifications for H2A visas — more than 97,000. (H2A workers were famously exempt from the southern border closure announced in March.) However, I-94 admissions (actual air and land border arrivals) fell 96.44% year-over-year in April, suggesting the real number of farm laborers crossing the border may be down significantly, Escalante said.

Farms need laborers, and in the last recession more than a decade ago, U.S. domestic workers proved reluctant to migrate to farm labor, Escalante said. This year, employment opportunities have again far outpaced opportunity elsewhere. Farm sector unemployment averaged 9.6% in April and 6.5% in May, while nonagricultural unemployment stood at 15.6% in April and 14% in May.

Meanwhile, at the National Farm to Institution Metrics Collaborative sponsored by the USDA, Dr. Lilian Brislen and a team of researchers are developing standardized metrics meant to, first, identify agricultural products’ source accurately, and secondly, gauge the impact of procurement on producers, specifically local farms.

“Once we have the same language, we’re talking about it consistently, we’re working it into our supply chains for procurement, that helps us simplify the tracking and ease a lot of the barriers for farm-institution procurement,” she said. “So we can ask, are we making new markets for source-identified products through farm-institution procurement?”

Though still in development, the collaborative will show its work at https://ftimetrics.localfoodeconomics.com.

Feldman said in a time of widespread supply chain disruptions, farm-direct markets benefit from few handoffs. Still, shutdowns took place at the peak of many regions’ winter markets in the South and West, namely.

Markets installed handwashing stations and taped off foot traffic routes for distancing. Managers adopted digital sales channels and boxed product (in many cases, aggregated across producers) for drive-through or contactless pickup. The Farmers Market Coalition served as a repository for innovation and best practices, but one of the biggest challenges for all was lack of guidance, or conflicting guidance, from state and federal authorities.

The takeaways, Feldman said, are that while some markets have reported a spike in sales, others are experiencing declines (64% of North Carolina farmers in one survey reported sales declines). Many farmers are taking on additional costs — personal protective equipment (PPE), for example — while experiencing labor shortages of the kind Escalante raised. While local farm markets didn’t experience supply chain disruptions, and moved quickly to protect public health, the impacts have been uneven, and there is need for congressional action to support the farm-direct community.

This free webinar is made possible with the support of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service and National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Those who register but cannot attend any C-FARE webinar can always view a recording of it later at the council’s YouTube channel.