After `horribly stressful' year, growers nervously await 2021
Crop-ravaging pests and crop-damaging weather, rising input costs and sinking market prices, global competition, bankers, bureaucrats — it's not like farmers weren't already dealing with a mountain, and more, of concerns and worries. Then came COVID-19.
“It's been a very, very difficult year,” said Joe Sbrocchi, general manager of the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers. “It was horribly stressful — stressful like you wouldn't believe.”
For Ontario's greenhouse food growers, many of them centred around Leamington and Kingsville, the global pandemic's timing was awful. The first wave of the novel coronavirus struck at the start of spring, just as high-in-demand indoor tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers were ripening on the vine and farms were gearing up for the planting season of other crops.
Labourers to harvest crops were desperately needed but Canada's borders were suddenly shut to the thousands of migrant agricultural workers normally hired each year to do work that most Canadians simply won't do. It took a big effort by the growers to convince governments that workers brought in on a temporary basis for more than half a century were vital to maintain Canada's domestic food supply. After weeks of lobbying, those guest workers were deemed essential and allowed in, but they were made to quarantine for two weeks.
They and their employers then came under an intense media and political spotlight as farms joined long-term care and retirement homes as the first and worst COVID-19 hot spots.
As of the beginning of December, more than 1,300 farm labourers in Essex County — the vast majority
migrant workers in congregate living conditions — had tested positive for the virus. Two local migrant farm workers were among three in Ontario whose deaths were linked to COVID-19. As testing spread, hotels from Leamington to Windsor began filling up with quarantining workers who were either infected with COVID-19 or awaiting test results. The Canadian Red Cross and Emergency Management Ontario were among the outside agencies brought in to assist.
The pandemic and the response were unprecedented, and mistakes were made along the way, both in tackling outbreaks on farms and in caring for vulnerable workers far removed from families, friends, home communities and other support networks.
“The Red Cross was less than organized,” Nature Fresh Farms owner Peter Quiring says in a recently produced company video about his Leamington business's response to the pandemic. The documentary describes how farm owners initially provided the outside accommodation and the meals for their isolating
workers, but were then replaced by authorities seeking to limit outsider interaction during the pandemic's rapid spread.
“When the Red Cross took over, it actually went downhill,” Quiring said. Critics at the time pointed to such problems as the imposed social isolation and the types and small sizes of the meals served to workers plucked off the farms.
Those in hotel quarantine complained but were forbidden from leaving to purchase their own food or from receiving outside help. Farm owners, their hands tied, were nevertheless on the receiving end of public criticism.
The 24-minute video, The Hardest Harvest, produced by Garus Booth, describes what one worker calls “the very crazy day” on June 30 after mass testing revealed migrant workers had been infected. Nature Fresh Farms — with about 360 temporary foreign workers among approximately 600 employees — was forced to temporarily shut down, with the eventual loss of about 3.5 million kilograms of fresh produce.
According to The Hardest Harvest, there were 199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among Nature Fresh Farms workers, and “none were hospitalized. Everyone fully recovered.”
While Quiring concedes in the video that “there are always people who don't behave as they should,” he adds: “I can tell you that, by far, the majority of farmers do behave properly.”
Occasional small outbreaks continued through December on local farms, but “we learned plenty, we got better at what we do,” said Sbrocchi. There have been no other shutdowns at local farms or agrifood processing facilities.
The anxiety among some farm operators now is about how much more difficult it might get to attract the necessary numbers of foreign agri-food workers for the next growing season. All migrant workers this year had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival from their home countries, but many had to again be isolated and remain idle for further stretches to await testing results or because fellow workmates tested positive. Some of the workers who otherwise felt healthy and exhibited no signs of illness were frustrated and questioned the sacrifices they were making to provide for families far away. With the approaching 2021 growing season, there's now the question of how open Mexico, Jamaica and other countries will remain to the outward flow of their citizens during COVID-19.
“We are concerned about it, and we're keeping a close eye on things,” said Sbrocchi.
“They (migrant farm workers) are incredibly important to us, and by `us' I mean not just the farmers but also Canadian consumers,” he said.
“Their well-being is absolutely critical.”