Farmers fight poverty with ingenuity, Chip Blalock says

MOULTRIE, Ga. — Between COVID-19 and damage from April 23’s tornado, Colquitt County farmers are in need of relief and solutions. Fortunately, they’ve already come up with ideas.

Many restaurants closed up shop while Gov. Brian Kemp’s shelter-in-place order was in effect and some even before that. Regardless of when, the balance of supply and demand was affected.

According to Sunbelt Expo Executive Director Chip Blalock, supply ran high while demand was low or wasn’t there at all. Consumer buying habits have changed.

“There are not that many fresh vegetables being purchased in the grocery store that would’ve been used in restaurants across the country,” Blalock said, including schools too.

Farmers had to adjust and start planting less so they wouldn’t have to throw out food like some did early on. All this is on top of the depressed commodity prices for produce items, row crops and livestock.

It’s all hitting together, Blalock said. Finding a solution to that just needed time.

“As we got into this, the USDA started a program that actually gave food banks money to buy those products,” he said, adding that food was donated too. “The other side of that coin was the food banks had been overwhelmed at the sheer volume of produce that’s been donated.”

A double-edged sword, he said. Local farmers had to find another way to adjust. This time, they started boxing up whatever they’re growing and shipping it out to stores and other areas of the state.

These boxes may be filled with individual vegetables or a mixed variety, and range from $10-15. An example of this is Chill C. Farms which does deliveries and free pickups. 

Chill C. Farms is currently assembling boxes of yellow squash, cabbage and zucchini. Just recently, it made a delivery to Colquitt Regional Medical Center as an anonymous nurse bought vegetable boxes to show appreciation to Environmental Services employees.

The farm performed its first retail delivery on April 16, but other farms started making boxes as early as March 1. 

Market Produce, located at 1609 First Avenue S.E., has served as an intermediary for quite a few of these farms, co-owner Terry Clark said. 

The store always buys locally where it can, he said. Market Produce has been working with a non-profit to send these food boxes through Colquitt, Terrell, Lee, Sumter, Worth, Dougherty, Mitchell and Tift counties.

“We purchase boxes for people who don’t want to go to the grocery store,” Clark said. “We’ll probably do around 1,000 boxes this week.”

Market Produce started out selling around 200-300 boxes, but it increased over the weeks. When restaurants closed, Clark said, the store was hurt badly, so this has been a saving grace.

A chunk of the produce has been steadily bought out by churches in the aforementioned counties. On the morning of May 4, Clark delivered 500 boxes to Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany.

“They’re doing bags, boxes or something to take for 500 people,” he said.

Whereas this has been a solution to deplete the excess supply these farms have, farmers still have to deal with the monetary losses from storm damage and COVID-19 closures.

Farmers are just getting relief money for Hurricane Michael and Sen. Kelly Loeffler is supposed to return later this week from Washington D.C. with news of tornado relief. 

If created, according to her, this relief will have a separate fund than that of the CARES Act, which is for COVID-19 relief.

Blalock said it’ll be a tough road but that’s something they’re used to.

“I don’t think it’s ever easy in agriculture,” he said. “It’s going to be a long road and we’ve just got to continue to watch our input costs, hopefully get over the hump on this pandemic and get the restaurants open across the country.”