Planning for Uncertainty: A COVID-19 Update

Dear friends,

At this time of year, we are finishing up pruning, watching for swelling buds, ordering supplies, and cleaning out the barn.  We’re ALSO selling fruit shares, communicating with wholesale customers, and making plans for markets and sales.  That second list is hard right now.  We are preparing for a season of abundance and getting fruit into the hands and kitchens of our community.  Simultaneously, we’re preparing for disruption, cancellations, and extended isolation. In Wisconsin, our Safer at Home order is in place until April 24th, but we hear every day from experts who say it may take much longer before the COVID-19 virus slows.  While farms are “essential businesses” and we are able to continue to buy and sell, the places where we do that are the places that person-to-person contact encourages infection.

This is hard.

I wanted to update you on what we’re doing to protect our customers and make this season work as well as it can.  I’m not exactly sure what that is yet.  Since our season of sales begins in the second half of June, it’s possible that we’ll be able to carry on as usual.  This could go on a lot longer than that, though.  We know that our farmers market managers are considering contingency plans, and we will follow their lead.  We’re preparing to have online sales available by the time our fruit starts coming in, so that customers can pre-order for arranged delivery times.  And we’re considering alternatives to delivery sites if the sites we’ve used in the past seem unsafe. We believe we can deliver fruit shares with minimal disruption, and that we’ll be able to supply our local food co-op.  We will not be planning for on-farm events at all this season, and we will not offer on-farm sales or pickup until a point when the threat of the spread of the virus has passed. I promise to keep you updated when we are able to make firm decisions or changes.

Know this: if you eat our fruit because you’ve purchased a share, or you get it from Menomonie Market Food Co-op, or you buy it at the farmers market, that fruit has passed through very few hands on its way to you.  And all of those hands belong to people who know each other, and care about each other’s well-being.  Contrast that with fruit from across the country, or internationally, that’s been picked and aggregated and distributed and shipped and distributed again.  At many points in that journey, workers are exploited, and the well-being of the people in that chain is secondary to profits.

One thing we’re all learning right now is how essential healthy and thriving communities are.  I never take for granted the support we get from all of you, and the choice you make in joining our farm. I honor that support by passing it along and doing all I can to build a local ecosystem of abundance and sharing.  We are all in this together IF we choose to be. 

Thank you for being part of our farm!

Your orchardists, Anton and Rachel