Rebuild FarmerLabor Solidarity: C0VID-19 has created new opportunities to reform the nation's food system.

• Author: Lloyd, Sarah
• Position: On Wisonsin

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the deep divisions and inequalities in our economy, especially in food and agriculture. We can now see, clearer than before, just how fragile our food system is.

Looking across the supply chains, the impacts are vast and interconnected--from the farmers with overstuffed livestock barns and overflowing milk tanks; to the processing and distribution bottlenecks caused by quickly shifting demand; to the sickened and endangered workers in food-processing plants, food service operations, and retail spaces; to the millions of families unable to buy food due to unemployment and loss of household income.

We've seen farmers, already in dire economic straits, being forced to dump milk and euthanize animals because of supply chain disruptions. Prices paid to farmers have been at record lows for many years, largely due to overproduction. Meanwhile, the costs of production are rising, thanks to increasingly consolidated markets that give farmers little choice of where they can do business.

This issue was around long before Trump came into office and disrupted trade relationships with his heated rhetoric. Where I live in south central Wisconsin, I see the auction notices in the farm newspapers and hear about farmers selling out or going bankrupt. The state, known as America's Dairyland, has lost 5,637 dairy farms over the past decade, a decrease of 44 percent. In 2019 alone, 818 Wisconsin dairy farms bit the dust. Similar large losses are taking place throughout the country.

My family's 400-cow dairy farm is hanging in there, but just barely. The prices paid to farmers like us do not cover our costs of production and, despite our 100-year history and asset building, we are at the end of our rope as dairy producers.

As we move to the next stop on the supply chain, from field to fork, we're seeing the highly consolidated meatpacking industry, aided by dictatorial mandates from the Trump Administration, forcing workers into environments made deadly by COVID-19. Leah Douglas of the Food & Environment Reporting Network has tracked the COVID-19 outbreak on farms and in food-processing plants in real time.

As of July 27, at least 510 meatpacking and food-processing plants have had confirmed cases of COVID-19, sickening at least 47,006 workers and killing at least 189 of them. Workers in more than forty states have been affected, from egg farm workers in Arizona and blueberry pickers in New Jersey, to cheese plant workers in...