Opinion | How Farmers Got Florida to ‘Swipe Ripe’

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — As chickens pecked the ground around me, a young woman in a face mask signaled that it was my turn. I walked up to the farm stand and added tomatillos, lentils, fresh herbs, lettuce, avocados, eggs and even toilet paper to my basket. Everything was cheaper than it would have been at a grocery store in Miami, about a half-hour away, where items were sparse and the aisles were crowded. For about $40, I left with a big box of produce, while back home my sister’s Instacart bill inched ever closer to $300.

Tourism is Florida’s No. 1 industry, and in the early days of the pandemic, the state was rightfully criticized for letting spring breakers crowd the beaches. But I’d hate for that to be the only thing Americans know about Florida’s response to the outbreak, because I’ve been watching how the state’s No. 2 industry, farming, found creative ways to keep people fed under the most difficult circumstances.

Many of us associate small, local farms that grow a diverse group of crops with bougie markets and expensive produce. But this crisis shows us that they can play a vital role in moving food from field to plate when traditional supply chains fail. Before the coronavirus upended our lives, a majority of Americans knew little of how food is brought to the dinner table or about the plight of the nation’s farmers. Now we know better.

The Produce Marketing Association estimated that nationwide, at least $5 billion of fresh fruits and vegetables have gone to waste during the pandemic. Florida farmers were hit especially hard. Lisa Lochridge, the director of public affairs for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, told me that the losses have been “swift, staggering and devastating.”

With big buyers like schools and restaurants shuttered, and supply chains disrupted, many farmers had no choice but to let their crops rot in the fields. They couldn’t even give the produce away to food banks, because social-distancing guidelines made it too complicated to process donations. In Homestead, Sam S. Accursio and Sons Farms left bins of zucchini by the side of the road for neighbors to pick through.

Congress allocated $35 billion to help keep farms and ranches afloat, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Florida growers can apply for up to $750,000 from the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, but a farmer could easily lose between $3 million and $4 million this season.

What farmers needed was a way to get food directly to people. So as news broke of shortages at grocery stores, farmers started setting up stands and markets, where they instituted social-distancing practices and even offered contactless pickup. Bigger farms purchased produce from smaller ones to put together boxes they distributed to hungry families.

By the end of March, Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner, had created Keep Florida Growing, a website that connects consumers to farmers in their area.

Around that time I discovered Little River Cooperative on Instagram. It’s a tiny farm run by Tiffany Noé and Muriel Olivares near my parents’ house in downtown Miami. Its page showed a perfectly curated salad box of watermelon radishes and lettuce.

Ms. Noé’s life partner, Chris French, supplied the cooperative with produce from a larger farm he runs in Homestead. Whenever he harvested a crop, he sent photos to Ms. Noé, who then uploaded them to the website so people could start buying.

But it seemed that I could never get on early enough to put in an order.

“It got kind of frenzied,” Ms. Noé told me over the phone.

People were calling as soon as the items went live. She had a few customers who tried to buy up all the eggs on the site.

“It was literally like farm customer service therapy,” she told me. “I was trying to tell people the food is not going to run out!”

It wasn’t a crazy concern. In addition to worrying about personal protection equipment and social distancing, and picking through what was left in supermarkets, Americans were also paying much more for food, thanks to a combination of shutdowns, supply chain problems and hoarding.

Americans paid over 4 percent more for meats, poultry, fish and eggs, nearly 2 percent more for fruits and vegetables, and 3 percent more for cereals and bakery products in April — the sharpest increase since 1974. At the same time, more than 20 million people lost their jobs that month, leaving many without the means to feed their families.

In April, the farms Taste of Redland and Unity Groves, and the nonprofit group Redland Ahead, all of which are based in Redland, Fla., created a program called Adopt-a-Box. The program puts fresh South Florida produce into the hands of hungry families while helping farmers move their crops. Donors could give $25 to pay for a 20-pound box containing produce like tomatoes, oranges and peppers for a family in need. In five weeks the group raised $132,000 and distributed 5,280 boxes.

I visited Unity Groves a couple of weeks ago. Through the Agriculture Department’s new Farmers to Families program, it had gotten a contract worth $1.9 million to get boxes to food banks and other nonprofits from Palm Beach to the Keys. That day, workers in masks and gloves were packing up potatoes from Immokalee and oranges from Fort Pierce.

As the morning sun inched its way up a taut blue sky, Matt Perrotto, a coordinator for the faith-based organization Envision Miami, loaded 400 boxes into a U-Haul. They were to be distributed that afternoon to two Miami schools where at least 85 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

“The truck cost us a little over $200, but it’s 100 percent worth it,” Mr. Perrotto said over the roar of the machines pruning the farm’s lychee trees. “Today, people will get food — you can’t put a price tag on that.”

Homestead and Redland form a strip of land between Miami, the Keys and what’s left of the Everglades. In the 1890s, a trickle of intrepid homesteaders began arriving here. They battled the heat and mosquitoes to carve farmland out of limestone, dense tropical forests, thickets of saw grass and marshes. The Everglades had to be drained, canals had to be dug, the ground scarified to break up the limestone.

In other words, farming here has never been easy. There are pests, hurricanes, too much or too little rain and cheap imports to compete against.

But today, Ms. Noé told me, it’s almost impossible for small farmers to make a living and keep up with the efficiency of factory farms. “We built a really big, broken system,” she said.

That system is failing farmers, consumers and the environment. Big factory farms that mass-produce one crop need more fertilizer and chemicals. And the consolidation of the industry into a few players has made it more vulnerable to crises. Consolidation, Michael Pollan recently pointed out in an essay about the livestock industry in The New York Review of Books, “has given us a supply chain so brittle that the closure of a single plant can cause havoc at every step, from farm to supermarket.”

While many small growers that produce more than one crop in rotation and incorporate livestock may be more expensive and less efficient, they’re also more resilient. And they can contribute to a sense of community and help in the battle against climate change.

“If each consumer in South Florida spent just $50 a month consciously on what’s local, it would be equal to double our entire demand,” said Michael Huter at Taste of Redland. That would help farmers survive the pandemic. But making that a habit could help all of us survive, period.

I used to visit Homestead as a kid. My sister and I would gather just-laid eggs or pluck strawberries and tomatoes off the vines at the pick-your-own farms, gobbling one for every three we dropped into our baskets.

One of the farms we visited in the ’80s was Burr’s Berry Farms. Today it’s run by Karl Wiegandt. He grows a little bit of everything: tomatoes, strawberries, onions, watermelons, sunflowers. When the coronavirus started to spread, the farm began selling $25 boxes of produce over Instagram. Mr. Wiegandt saw it as an opportunity to “get our products in front of the consumers and introduce them to what we do.”

“It’s our job,” he said, “to educate them and keep them on top of what we’re doing. It will be their job to, hopefully, be able to continue to support us.”

Will the pandemic really change Americans’ relationship to food and farming in the long term? Of course it’s too soon to tell.

Ms. Noé thinks that in the fall, “there will be a surge of people who will want to grow their own food at home.” People “got a taste of being food insecure,” she said. She and Ms. Olivares are already seeing an uptick in interest around the edible gardens they create for schools, restaurants and homes. The big hope is that consumers will keep supporting the small farmers who were there when everything else felt so uncertain.

We can demand that our supermarkets carry local produce. We can expand Farmers to Families or work to build a box-subscription program that gets fresh produce into the hands of SNAP recipients living in food deserts.

Considering the challenges, it’s sometimes hard to imagine why anyone would choose to be a farmer. And yet, as we stood looking out over his fields, Mr. Wiegandt buzzed with excitement. In the next year, he’ll plant more berries, corn, sunflowers and tomatoes, and an oak tree for shade. He’ll build out a kitchen and a market.

“I want people to be able to sit out here and enjoy this,” he told me. “Farmers want people to enjoy our world — for our work and our love to be appreciated.”

Isvett Verde (@isvettverde) is a staff editor in the Times Opinion section.

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