Georgia’s farmers have plenty of crops. The problem is who can buy them—and how - Atlanta Magazine

Ashley Rodgers had to have faith—even if it was the size of a mustard seed.

Photo at Freedom Farmers Market in Atlanta by Ben Rollins/Atlanta Magazine

The owner of Rodgers Greens and Roots in Douglasville braced herself in mid-March as restaurants that for years had snatched up her crops—Miller Union and C. Ellet’s and St. Cecilia, to name a few—started to close their doors in rapid succession, to wait out the worst of COVID-19. At around the same time, the threat of the virus temporarily shut down the Peachtree Road Farmers Market in Buckhead, at which she typically earns about 75 percent of her income in early spring.

Rodgers did her best to adapt. First, she scrambled to set up an online ordering form to draw more of the public to the on-farm produce pickup she already had in place. Then, when the Peachtree Road Farmers Market reopened at the beginning of April after Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms deemed it an essential business, Rodgers started offering preorders for pickup at the market.

She was able to rebound from the initially steep loss of income. In April, her revenue was back to a level typical for that time of year. But Rodgers is still taking it day by day, unable to gauge the full effect the pandemic will have on her farm.

“I’m not going to really feel the full brunt of what this could be doing to the business for another month, when I’m inundated with product and reaching out to everyone and they’re like, Well, we can only take about one-tenth, compared to what they’re used to ordering,” Rodgers says. “I haven’t navigated that yet.”

For local growers, spring typically means the reopening of farmers markets and the reemergence of booming restaurant demand. This year, however, spring was anything but a season of rebirth. Instead, it was a time for farmers—and the organizations designed to support them—to rethink nearly every aspect of what they do with their bounty. Among the biggest challenges to farmers posed by COVID-19, after the loss in volume of business from restaurants: how to safely provide fruits and vegetables both to existing customers and a new crop of buyers.

Georgia Organics’s Farmer Fund, a donation-based relief effort, might help ease growers’ burdens. Though the fund was originally created to help farmers during natural disasters, Georgia Organics expanded its purpose to include COVID-19 aid and partnered with other local food organizations to raise money during the pandemic. Since March, foundations and the public have donated over $125,000 to the Farmer Fund, says Kim Karris, executive director of Food Well Alliance, one of several organizations that teamed up to expand the fund to offer COVID-19 aid. Atlanta and statewide farmers soon can apply for $1,000 to $2,000 grants from the fund.

“It’s not necessarily a bailout,” Karris says. The farmers “are the ones with the solutions. We’re just helping them do what they do so well, which is pivot and innovate and grow food.”

Food Well Alliance is providing other resources to small metro Atlanta farms, by offering farming tools and equipment, delivering compost, and sending a small team of growers to help farmers prepare their land and plant crops.

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