Difficult year hard on farms

Some Pennsylvania dairy farmers, after years of struggle with volatile and evolving markets for their product, entered 2020 with cautious optimism.

But as LNP-LancasterOnline’s Sean Sauro reported in September: “Then, COVID-19 hit. And by mid-March, a governmentordered shutdown forced dairybuying restaurants closed, instead sending customers to clear out grocery store shelves. It was an abrupt change in the farm-toconsumer supply chain — one that left processors unable to quickly adapt, leading to waste and yet another round of profit loss.”

The pandemic has had devastating ramifications for so many aspects of our lives, economy and culture.

Sauro examined the difficult and heartbreaking year that local dairy farmers have experienced.

Their stories and their livelihoods are intertwined with the necessary shutdowns to keep the deadly novel coronavirus from spreading further in Pennsylvania, causing more deaths and potentially crippling the health care system.

But the necessity of the shutdowns doesn’t lessen the anguish for farmers.

Farmers also found themselves dealing with an inefficient industry and government framework that — for a time — couldn’t provide enough places for perishable products to go.

In a May editorial, we wrote of “the incredibly frustrating scenes of milk being dumped by dairy farmers because there was no market for it amid a pandemic that has jolted traditional buyers and supply chains.”

Additionally, “there was no appreciable infrastructure to distribute surplus food from farms to food banks before COVID-19.”

For dairy farmers, profits were literally going down the drain.

While the situation has recovered somewhat from that lost spring, there remain no easy answers moving forward for the Pennsylvania dairy industry.

Not with the continuing double jeopardy of COVID-19 and an ongoing transformation of the dairy industry.

In recent years, LNP-LancasterOnline has detailed the struggles of dairy farmers who have seen the value of milk drop more than 2% since 2012 and are battling to keep their farms viable.

Said one dairy farmer in 2018: “I’d rather keep on going, but I don’t see any milk futures as being profitable, so there’s no sense in keeping cows. It’s not profitable.”

Don’t give up on Halloween

Coronavirus pandemic recommendations and decisions are a mixed bag. You never really know what you will pull out.

Reach in and you might get a real treat — something factbased and commonsense that everyone should be able to realize is the way to go. Don’t cough on Grandma, for example.

You might also pull out the wormy apple of a contradiction that flies in the face of the last thing you were told.

Buckle up, because Halloween is coming and things are already getting tricky.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in September that trick-or-treating should be avoided because of COVID-19 and the need to practice social distancing to stay safe.

Some local governments are already saying “smell my feet” to that idea and announced they will continue with official, designated trick-or-treat dates and times in the traditional manner.

And it makes sense.

For months, people have fought about whether it’s necessary to wear masks in public. Halloween is the day many of them will do it quite willingly.

Halloween can be less a celebration of ghosts and goblins than it can be about creativity.

People who can find a way to make a kid a Transformer costume out of cardboard boxes can probably figure out a way to not just hand out treats in a socially distant manner but to do so in an innovative and entertaining way.

And kids need this. Communities need this. We all need this.

We have lost a lot since March. Easter and birthdays and graduation and prom and a whole summer’s worth of festivals.

More than anything, we have lost people — more than 206,000 deaths to date in the United States, more than 1 million lost lives worldwide.

But this could be one piece of normal that kids and families and neighborhoods could take back as long as they do it safely.

It just has to be approached that way.

People need to remember that if we want this treat, we can’t play tricks.