As we approach the fourth year of navigating a worldwide pandemic, one thing is clear: it will likely be decades before we truly understand the myriad impacts of COVID-19 on individuals, communities and industries.
A group of researchers at The University of New Mexico College of Population Health noticed one area where data was particularly scarce – the health impact of COVID-19 on farmers.
In an observational study recently published in the Journal of Healthcare Quality Research, principal investigator Francisco Soto Mas, MD, PhD, MPH, co-investigator and MPH candidate Daisy Rosero and co-authors Rachel Sebastian and Laura Nervi aimed to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on organic farmers.
In collaboration with the Southwest Center for Agricultural Health, Injury Prevention and Education (SW Ag Center) at The University of Texas at Tyler Health Science Center, the COVID-19 study focused on U.S. certified organic producers. Data were collected in 2021 and 2022.
Soto Mas was initially inspired to launch the study due to a personal interest in local food systems and organic agriculture.
“As a social and behavioral scientist, I became interested in learning more about the organic farmer and realized the gap in both data and literature,” he says. “With funding from the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health and the Southwest Ag Center, I began this line of research through a small project here in New Mexico, which has now extended to regional and national levels on a variety of topics, including COVID-19.”
Organic agriculture mostly consists of small family farms, and the number of organic farmers in the U.S. is steadily increasing. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were around 11,000 certified farms in 2008, while as of 2019 there were more than 16,500. With limited resources, these farmers deal with numerous operation tasks – from accounting to production, marketing and distribution.
Soto Mas and the team of researchers set out to explore health and health care issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in certified organic producers, as current surveillance systems do not differentiate between organic and conventional farmers. The survey questions used spanned four distinct domains: prevalence, preventive behavior, collateral damage and resilience.
According to the collected data, farmers had challenges following recommendations to prevent infection, and experienced significant health care delays. COVID also had a considerable impact on their business, particularly making it more difficult to access customers and deal with market issues.
“Fortunately, demand for organic, local produce increased during the pandemic,” Soto Mas says. “The organic farmer did very well in 2020 and 2021.”
While conventional and organic farmers may share some of the same risk factors that determine occupational injury and illness, certain psychosocial, environmental and contextual factors may differ between the two groups.
Given the rising numbers of organic farmers, there is an increasing need to understand them better as a unique community, and Soto Mas and his team recognized the need to begin the systematic collection of data on the organic producer and farmer.
Who they are, their specific agricultural practices and the psychosocial and contextual factors that contribute to their health, safety and interest in sustainable agriculture – this is what our research is about.
“Who they are, their specific agricultural practices and the psychosocial and contextual factors that contribute to their health, safety and interest in sustainable agriculture – this is what our research is about,” Soto Mas says, “food producers are classified as “essential workers” and our studies and data are making a unique contribution.”