“Pandemic Opened New Revenue Doors for Farmers : The Great Shift”

As reported by Joel Reichenberger, Senior Editor in Progressive Farmer, January 31 2025:

“… In many ways, nothing was the same after the pandemic swept into America in the early spring of 2020. It’s changed where Americans work (from home) and what they store (toilet paper). Somewhere high on the list of what’s changed is the country’s relationship with food: what’s in it, where it comes from and where it can be found when grocery shelves are empty.

For farmers, those changes led to unique, even life-changing, opportunities, as direct-to-consumer sales exploded, and the world of Saturday-morning markets turned into a new way of life. Even now, after the tides of panic have receded, and food has long since returned to traditional stores, farmers swept up in the initial craze have not returned to normal.

The shift that began five years ago, to many farmers, now means there’s no going back.

GRINDING IT OUT

Nigel Tudor initially reacted like the rest of the country when the COVID pandemic became more and more real. There was disbelief and concern. Then, expecting to be stuck at home, he vowed to finally finish some lingering projects around his family’s home and small Avella, Pennsylvania, farming operation.

Tudor had little idea how the next few weeks would reshape the next few years and how five years on, he could look back on the wild days at the start of the pandemic as the time that forever changed his family farm.

He never got the chance to get to those around-the-house projects, because starting with a trickle then turning into a roar came hundreds of online orders for the stone-ground flour his family had already been grinding for years. The direct sales of their flour had been an insignificant portion of their overall operation initially, but suddenly, customers clamored to buy it.

‘Everyone started baking. They couldn’t find any more flour in the supermarket, so they went online and found us,’ Tudor explains.

He and parents, Dale and Marcy, make up Weatherbury Farm. Their small fields tuck into hills southwest of Pittsburgh, where large-scale production agriculture has never been an option on their limited acreage. Instead, they’ve found other ways to make ends meet. Most of their land goes toward a grass-fed beef business, but about 15 years ago, they started leaving 65 acres free to plant grain.

The family sells much of that to local craft distillers, but they’ve always ground everything they can into flour on a pair of petite European mills.

But, there wasn’t always a ton of demand. Prior to COVID, they were lucky to get 10 customers a month to their farm for flour, and most of the product went to a local co-op selling farm-to-table ingredients to restaurants. Even that avenue closed just before the pandemic, as the co-op shut down entirely after selling to a larger company.

That was right about the time the Tudors’ email began to ping and the phone began to ring.

Suddenly, everyone was looking for in-stock food staples, including — as the pandemic-era sourdough craze took hold — flour.

The Tudors’ monthly customers ballooned from about 10 to more than 120 in May 2020.

Nothing was ever the same.  …

The Tudor family, of Weatherbury Farm, embraced a similar approach, finding ways to highlight what makes their operation different. They grow 13 varieties of grain, including four different varieties of hard red winter wheat, rye, oats and rare grains like spelt and einkorn. They describe what each is on their website and sometimes even how it came to be planted in Pennsylvania soil. Nigel grew the obsidian black winter emmer, for instance, from 12 kernels he brought back from a trip to a trade show in Germany.

The family goes even further to connect the customer to their hilly fields by including a scannable QR code on each package of flour that takes buyers to a page detailing the farming of that product. A bag of organic rolled oats, for example, shows the crop was planted March 21 and harvested July 26. There are 10 updates with photos in between.

‘We have to keep all that information to have it certified organic anyway, so we just keep a camera in the tractor, and every time we’re in a field, we stop and snap a picture of it’, Tudor explains. ‘Customers love it.’

A NEW NORMAL

Many farmers and ranchers who turned to direct sales reported a dip in 2021 after the initial COVID panic abated, and grocery store shelves were again mostly stocked.

The month of May 2020 did represent the high-water mark for the Tudor family and their organic flour grinding operation. Business had slowed considerably by early 2021. But, they didn’t revert back to the 2019 business model, and new customers kept finding them. By the end of 2024, they were doing nearly as much business as they had in the very height of the pandemic craze.

The experience has been similar across the spectrum.”