NOTTINGHAM, Maryland — It’s been a rough year for the agricultural community because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Farmers have destroyed their own crops or euthanized their livestock due to a sharp drop in demand. Some farms were on the brink of bankruptcy even before the health crisis, and many may never recover from the financial ruin brought on by the COVID-19 health crisis.
But some growers have found that the pandemic presented an opportunity to thrive as they noticed an increased demand for fresh, local produce. The success of small farms at a time when so many others are struggling has not only presented a sliver of hope for the agricultural industry, but it has caught the attention of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
Modernizing and embracing change in traditional agriculture could help preserve farms and enhance their ability to bring fresh, healthy products to consumers, Perdue said during a tour of Bowery Farming’s operation in Maryland on Wednesday.
“Ag innovation is really the key,” Perdue told reporters, including the Washington Examiner. “For the last 75 years of America, growers have been innovative and they’ve been really resilient and very flexible in their patterns.”
Bowery, an indoor farming company that uses technology to boost its production, is one of many small farms across the country finding success throughout the uncertainties presented by the pandemic.
In Florida’s Alachua County, small farmers built a new business model to provide food directly to consumers without needing a major distributor. Demand for local products jumped as consumers found empty grocery shelves at the onset of lockdown measures being taken to slow the spread of the virus. Outside Minneapolis, masked and gloved volunteers at small, sustainable farming operations are hard at work accelerating production as people seek out fresh, summer crops at the season’s peak. And in Maryland, the growth in interest in knowing where one’s food comes from have farmers flourishing to fulfill demand.
Outside of its Nottingham operation, Bowery has two other commercial farms in Kearny, New Jersey. The New York City-based company was founded in 2015 with a goal of using technology to build indoor farms close to cities to provide sustainable, pesticide-free, and affordable produce that could hit local shelves faster than large-scale operations.
It’s exactly the kind of innovative agriculture that’s brought attention to the challenges presented by the traditional agricultural supply chain.
Because indoor farming, sometimes referred to as vertical farming, operates in a controlled environment, it offers a way to circumvent issues such as soil erosion or climate change.
“It is a totally differing way to think about farming,” Bowery CEO Irving Fain told the Washington Examiner.
Fain says Bowery is 100 times more productive than a square foot of farmland per year, and the company saves over 95% of the water used during the growing process. Using proprietary software systems, Bowery uses automation technology and machine learning to monitor plants and drive their growth to the peak of harvest. Because lighting can mimic the spectrum of the sun, weather conditions don’t have to be considered.
“We have to think about how we’re going to grow in the future when resources are more scarce, and indoor farming, what we’re building at Bowery, is going to be a solution to that problem,” Fain said.
Bowery’s modern approach to farming is exactly what the Agriculture Department is eyeing to grow the future of the industry.
“This is really a part of urban agriculture that certainly has a place in the future,” Perdue said. “It’s not going to replace conventional agriculture overnight, but I think it’s got a real place in American agriculture.”
At the start of the pandemic, when strict lockdown measures were instituted around the country, there were reports of an extreme amount of waste presented by large-scale farms unable to sell their fresh food. Crops and dairy products were dumped. The Dairy Farmers of America, the nation’s largest dairy cooperative, estimated in April that farmers were discarding as much as 3.7 million gallons of milk per day. A single chicken processor was smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.
It was even worse for the meat industry which saw animals breeding at unprecedented rates with nowhere to go due to the mass closure of restaurants. Because processors that are used to service the food-service industry can’t immediately switch to supply the empty shelves of grocery stores, farmers had no choice to but euthanize millions of pigs, chickens, and cattle.
Though projections before the COVID-19 outbreak in January saw a potential 2.8% growth in the agricultural economy this year, by April an early estimate from the University of Missouri predicted the pandemic could lead to $20 billion in U.S. agriculture losses in 2020.
The United Nations said the pandemic has intensified the vulnerabilities and inadequacies of global food systems. The international organization is calling for response and recovery investments to help deliver long-term goals for a more sustainable world and resilient food systems to prevent people from going hungry.
Indoor farming could be an alternative to help solve the problems that have come to light since the outbreak.
Since the pandemic upended the majority of the country’s food supply chain, Bowery’s sales went up over three times their normal rate, according to Fain.
“We saw huge increases in both online and brick and mortar,” Fain said. “There’s an enormous amount of demand, and we’ve actually seen that demand stabilize.”
The company has also sought to meet the needs of getting healthy food to the most vulnerable communities by donating more than 20,000 pounds of produce to food banks in the New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., areas.
To continue being successful and even expansive, Perdue said operations such as Bowery should aim to have environmental and social sustainability in addition to affordability.
“It’s got to affordable for people, the average person in the grocery store,” he said. “It can’t be this elite type food to be dynamic across the country.”
Quickly becoming a household name on the East Coast, Bowery products have expanded into over 445 stores in the Tri-State and Mid-Atlantic regions, including Whole Foods, Giant Food, and Walmart.
In the future, Fain hopes to bring the Bowery name and business to even more places.
“The need that we’re filling at Bowery is a need that generally is across the U.S., but it’s even a global need,” Fain said. “We are hoping to see farms from Bowery in cities across the country and ultimately, cities across the world. This is an important problem that needs a solution.”
