Ironically, COVID19 may have had an unexpected benefit: making us more mindful of what it takes for food to reach our plates, and more aware of what local farmers and producers do for us. For local farmers and producers, the boost in consumer interest was a welcome gift. We can’t beat the pandemic without safe production and distribution along the entire food chain and that’s what our local farms have demonstrated as they pivoted and adapted—transitioning customers from grocery store mentality to local seasonal production. With the increased interest in staying home and cooking, many small farms and CSAs are experiencing a boon, both in customers and production volume. Local farm food popularity is still “off the charts” 11-plus months into the pandemic. Let’s dive in with some of our local farmers to see how their lives and their businesses have been affected.
Hollywood Farm
Hollywood Farm, owned by Jean-Francois and Thackray Seznec, is a small, fifth-generation family-operated farm on the Broadneck peninsula of Annapolis, with one of the largest tracts of conservation land in Maryland. They specialize in raising 100 percent grass-fed Katahdin lamb on 70 acres of pasture, but have quite a few other operations on the farm, which help make them a regenerative farm, meaning they are working on improving the land and soil.
I had a lovely tour of the farm and talked to “JF,” as he is called, to learn about special sustainable practices for the sheep, pasture improvements to rectify the soil, and methods used to make the farm more of a homestead, including: their sawmill to make use of wood from fallen trees, poultry processing, converting sod acreage to pasture, jam making from black currants and apples, and bread baking. Hosting multiple acres of gardens has a multi-pronged effect for the farm by promoting community interaction and improving the soil by organic gardening practices. The community garden, Grow Annapolis, is thriving in a half-acre corner of a 126-acre farm.
Gwen Manseau, daughter of JF and Thackray, is manager of Hollywood Farm, as well as mother, farm market manager, chicken processor, and full-time attorney. She conveyed the changes brought about by COVID19. “At first we were frightened of the pandemic as it began negatively,” she says. “We were concerned about the health of the people on our farm—family and employees. The same problems with finding safety equipment applied to us as well. We had a huge concern for our business as the pandemic came right at lambing season, plus at a time when we process our meat. Many of our processors abruptly shut down, while processing demand was way up as farmers in the region needed to get more meat processed due to ‘pandemic hoarding.’ Lack of a processor translates into loss of revenue. It was a huge learning curve for us! We had to make four separate trips for meat processing rather than one.”
COVID also hit at the beginning of Hollywood Farm’s season at the farmers’ market in April. They set up home delivery in an expanded area and then realized quickly that they needed to limit deliveries to just Annapolis limits because they could not fill the demand. However, sales continued an uptick and when they also offered product at Anne Arundel County Farmers’ Market in Riva, they sold out for the season.
Mise En Place Farm
Photo by Stephen Buchanan
Mise En Place is a small forward-thinking farm in Davidsonville, Maryland, using regenerative sustainable methods and specializing in salad greens, mixed vegetables, ginger, turmeric (by the ounce), lemongrass, shishito peppers, serano peppers, Jimmy Nordello peppers(sweet), basil, thyme, parsley, sage, chives, mint, radishes, sunflower shoots, microgreens, broccoli, cilantro, radish, and more! I have gotten to know J.J. Minetola and his wife Cristina as I indulge weekly in his creative delicious tacos at the Anne Arundel County Farmers’ Market. As we talked, JJ relayed the family’s COVID19 experience and told how he came to be a farmer.
“COVID19 affected our family a lot in the beginning,” Minetola explains. “My wife, Cristina, closed her acupuncture office for three months, so she helped a lot on the farm and she is still helping at the market. My off farm part-time job slowed down a lot too, so I scaled up the farm a little. I hired two part-time farmhands and started doing tacos at the market in the summer. Of course, we have been homeschooling our son Dean who helps with the tacos at market.”
He continues, “I’ve always been into food. I worked up to chef in Annapolis restaurants like Tsunami and Metropolitan and a couple of D.C. restaurants. I loved buying from farmers directly as the produce farmers would sell us was always the best. I left the restaurant business to get a better schedule, as I was starting a family and farming sounded like a super-rewarding career where I could continue my love of food and ridiculously hard physical work. I took a couple of online farming courses and got into a beginner farmer program with Future Harvest, which has been fantastic. We have a pretty small farm by most standards, but we keep scaling up every year.
“I like cooking with funky, rare ingredients so I keep trying out unusual crops, as long as they sell of course. We have four greenhouses/high tunnels now and the tropical crops like turmeric, fresh ginger, and lemongrass do well in them.
“The farm that used to sell breakfast sandwiches for years at the farmers’ market stopped coming last spring, so I took the opportunity to start selling hot food. The health department and the board of directors were totally behind the taco idea. We use different seasonal ingredients from the other farmers every week for the taco recipes to promote all the other vendors, so it’s a really collaborative community thing. We always have a breakfast and a vegetarian taco on the menu and I mix it up with the other tacos based on what we can get from other vendors, like a meat taco filled with pulled lamb or pork. We try to be a little authentic Mexican and a little creative. We post the menu every week on Instagram and Facebook, like a food truck would, and it’s been really busy every weekend.
“Our new normal has given us more time to focus on growing the farm. Quarantining on the farm seems pretty easy, honestly. Homeschooling takes up a bit of time, but this year of extra family time hasn’t been bad—we’re not sick of each other yet.
“I sure hope ‘buy local’ will continue because it is so important for so many reasons. Supporting local businesses, freshness, not buying products shipped thousands of miles, and just chatting with the farmers and producers is fun. We shop for ourselves at the market,” Minetola concludes.
Number 1 Sons and The Farm at Sunnyside
For some farms, small scale business models facilitated easier adaptations to COVID-induced market changes. Over the course of a few weeks in spring 2020, D.C.-based Number 1 Sons’ Caitlin Roberts transformed her business from primarily selling pickles and ferments at farmers markets into a home delivery service for their own wares, plus products from local farmers and producers. The creative transition came about thanks to a novel collaboration with Stacey Carlsberg and Casey Gustowarow, managers of The Farm at Sunnyside in Rappahannock County, Virginia, and one of the highest volume vendors at DuPont Circle Farmers’ Market.
Since Sunnyside stopped going to farmers’ markets completely in 2020 due to the pandemic, Carlsberg and Gustowarow started brainstorming when COVID hit on how to keep farming and keep everyone safe. They called Roberts about the possibility of doing a veggie drop at Number 1 Sons. But Roberts suggested more! Home delivery with a collaboration of farmers.
The Farm at Sunnyside changed from being a farmers’ market business to a wholesale packing, distribution business also selling culinary kits as well as salad or hot pepper packs. Carlsberg and Gustowarow enjoyed the creativity of putting the new seasonal packs together, envisioning how people could use them at home. However, it was difficult adapting all of the packaging materials and labor. Employees also had to adjust to the unpredictability about the number of orders every week. Staffing was a juggling act, organization was essential, and they worked it out.
“What a great success and eye-opening experience,” Carlsberg states. “We did $300,000 in 2020 with COVID through a sales channel, which did not exist before!”
Nice Farms and Creamery
Photo by Tom Bagley
Federalsburg, Maryland-based Nice Farms Creamery has had a very strong following for 12 years. You can even see them at the Anne Arundel County Farmers’ Market with a long line waiting to buy weekly milk, yogurt, butter, and ice cream in summer. Bob Miller, owner and operator, told me their story of COVID resilience.
“Well, we will probably sound like everyone else here, but the past year was interesting, scary, and extremely challenging. This was compounded by internal forces, which were already impacting us. The farm had been in my family for three generations, but I was the one who encouraged the family to sell dairy products directly to market rather than to a dairy coop. In the summer of 2019, my parents gave me an ultimatum to buy the farm or they would sell.
“I managed to get loans and we soldiered on through that winter and summer of 2020, which was the time COVID hit. In the winter of 2020, we were able to buy out the dairy farm from our parents and send them off into retirement! I learned a lot thanks to COVID. The core creamery crew, Jaclynne, Brandy, my brother Lucas, and even my little ones (John 14, Anna 8, Mary 6, Aria 4) are some of the toughest, indefatigable people ever. Many days were 18 hours to keep the creamery and farm going, plus do our emergency delivery routes and normal delivery routes and farmers’ markets. I learned that our everyday farmers’ market supporters and families are some of the best people ever—they kept coming out to markets and our social distanced creamery pick-ups during the crazy shutdown periods of winter and early summer of 2020.”
Miller explains that COVID affected his business in several ways. First, some of their larger accounts closed, forcing them to dump a lot of milk for several months. The farm also lost much of the onsite ice cream business at fairs, steam and gas shows, and other events. Keeping additional employees at work was challenging. Every time someone came down with the sniffles, they were not permitted to go into the creamery production rooms or handle product. And they are still having a hard time getting gloves, hairnets, wipes, soaps, paper towels, spare parts, bleach, etc. to keep the creamery going. On the farm side, finding things like tractor spare parts or pricing replacement equipment has been challenging for Miller.
“The first major change to our dairy volume was to find a home for about 60 percent of our milk after one of our large accounts, without warning, shut down,” Miller explains. “Due to this, we immediately lost all of our restaurants, coffee shops, cafes business—they were either closing or scaling back. A donation drive with the Maryland foodbanks in Caroline and Talbot counties enabled people to get onto our home delivery site to buy milk and, in turn, we would send them to food pantries.
“Social media and our email lists were the primary way of getting our adjusted plans out to people. Of course, word of mouth or talking to our customers in person also contributed to getting the word out for our new normal, which was an operation for emergency delivery routes. As the farmers’ markets we supported, in Annapolis, Salisbury, and Lewes, became super busy, we added the extra burden of emergency delivery routes, more foot traffic at our dairy, and of course, longer searches for the supplies we need to keep operating.
“We are going on 12 years now with our dairy business, so we know the Annapolis area and central Delmarva really do care about supporting a local dairy. We are now starting a program with regular home delivery. Jaclynne and Brandy have taken the experience of the emergency COVID routes from last year and have created the Curbside Cow, A Nice Farms Delivery Service. This is a more fleshed out version of what we did last year. This women-run portion of our operation will combine our dairy products with a few other carefully selected local operations such as Easton’s Chapel’s Creamery and Princess Anne’s Twin Post Farm for farm fresh eggs. We are looking to form routes around Easton, Denton, and Centreville.”
If Miller and his farming brethren’s fortitude, creativity, and ever-adaptive business models have proven thus far, our local farms will emerge from this pandemic even better positioned to serve farm-to-table goods and wares to our communities for years to come.
