Stay Informed

While all of agriculture has been strongly affected by COVID-19, farmers who sell products directly to the public are facing unique challenges. Like grocery stores, farm markets are considered essential by the Indiana State Department of Health. But how can you sell directly to the public when you’re supposed to limit contact with the public?

The answer, according to four Indiana Farm Bureau members who market directly, is “very carefully.” Among the tactics being used are:

• Curbside deliveries.
• Online and phone orders.
• Use of masks, gloves and other safety equipment to protect customers and employees – or even closing for the duration of the crisis to limit exposure even more.
• “Senior hours” to allow higher-risk individuals to shop when the store is less busy.

“We usually close for a while at the end of March and reopen when the peaches are ripe, but customers seem to want us to stay open,” Troy Eriksen, owner of G.W. Stroh Orchards in Steuben County, said in late March. “They want to buy here instead of in the supermarket. They feel safer here.”

Sold this time of year are jams, jellies, fruit butters, maple syrup, honey, apple cider and apples, the latter kept fresh in cold storage since last fall. In season, the orchard sells peaches, pears and plums.

“We’re offering curbside deliveries so customers don’t have to come in the store,” Eriksen said.

For more than 50 years, Beiersdorfer Orchard in Dearborn County has sold apples, cider, peaches, pears, plums, caramel apples, tomatoes and a few other fruits and vegetables, and a range of jams, preserves and fruit butters.

“It’s been a tough season so far,” Hilda Beiersdorfer said, but added “The peaches and pears are in bloom right now.” Beiersdorfer Orchard is still letting people come into the store because they don’t get many customers this time of year, she noted.

The orchard’s big concern right now, Beiersdorfer said, is their cider, sold on-farm but also wholesale in the tri-state area through Kroger and directly through Jungle Jim’s International Market of Cincinnati. The difficulty is getting the cider to the stores. Labor shortages, caused by the pandemic, have made scheduling difficult and sometimes time consuming, she explained.

For Tuttle Orchards in Hancock County, the pandemic has forced the owners to expand into online sales more suddenly than they’d intended. Tuttles, owned by the Roney family, sells apples, cider, jams, preserves, fruit butters, honey, canned goods, as well as meat throughout the year, and they have an on-farm café that’s open year-round. In season, they also sell a variety of produce as well as plants from their greenhouses.

“Everything is online starting today,” Ruth Ann Roney said on March 30. “You order everything online or call an order in, and then you drive up and we deliver to you curbside.”

“Currently our top items are listed online and more are going up all the time,” she added. That includes everything in the farm store, plants from the greenhouse and take-out from the café, closed for the duration of the stay-at-home order.

“We have seen an uptick in sales since the stay-at-home order was issued,” Roney said. “It’s not necessarily more people, but they are buying more. They are doing their shopping here, not just buying a jar of apple butter as a souvenir.”

For The Market in Madison County, owned by Smith Family Farms and Shuter Sunset Farms, along with Maddie Moo’s Custom Meats, there’s no question what effect COVID-19 has had on business.

“We’ve been harvesting five times the normal amount since mid-March to keep up with demand for meat,” said owner Neal Smith. “We also have had 10-15 people working – three to four times our usual staff.”

However, the two families made the difficult decision to close for at least two weeks starting April 12.

While The Market sells baked goods, frozen vegetables, some fresh produce and a few other products, its main business is meat, most of it produced by the Smiths or the Shuters.

“We couldn’t live with ourselves if someone got real sick,” Smith said. “And we have farms that need our attention and provide our primary income.”