Farmscape for April 9, 2020

The National Pork Producers Council is shining a spotlight on the need for solutions to labor shortages in agriculture.
National Pork Producers Council members have contacted more than 11 hundred lawmakers, USDA officials and other policymakers, calling for the reinstatement of TN visa processing in Mexico and asking for expanded agricultural guest worker visa programs that will work for livestock agricultural producers and processors.
NPCC Science and Technology Legal Counsel Andrew Bailey says COVID-19 has aggravated an already limited availability of workers, especially in rural areas.

Clip-Andrew Bailey-National Pork Producers Council:
Just like broader society, every step of the value chain has been impacted to some degree or the other by COVID.
Obviously, at any stage, there's concern that if there’s a bottleneck on farms or if there's a bottleneck in trucking or in plants, that could have knock on effects up and down the chain, even in grocery stores.
So there's a lot of work right now being done to make sure there are plans in place, not just to protect the workers, the farmers, the plant workers, the truckers, the grocery store employees.
But, if someone gets sick, how do you appropriately respond to that?
What sort of sanitation steps do you take, what do you do with other workers that are potentially exposed, how do you backfill that labour, things like that?
At every step and NPPC worked very early on with the Department of Homeland Security and several other farm groups to make sure that when they put out that critical infrastructure employees list, what are the critical infrastructures in the U.S. for this sort of a COVID outbreak?
Originally it was a pretty sparse list and we worked very hard to get pretty much everyone throughout the value chain on that list, whether it was feed manufacturers or veterinarians or hog farmers or food produce truckers, people working in plants, pretty much everyone up and down that chain, making sure that they are on that essential employees list.

Bailey stresses farmers are critically important and they take that seriously.
He says farmers can't telework but they're doing the job every day.
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Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Wonderworks Canada Inc.