RALEIGH, N.C — During the last 18 months, every aspect of life and work has been impacted by the coronavirus.

 

What You Need To Know

  • There is a second round of CFAP applications open
  • The Coronavirus Food Assistance Program helps supplement funds that farms lost over the last year from market changes
  • Brooks Barnes of Wilson County says it helped them make ends meet

 

Farmers, like Brooks Barnes, had challenges like everyone else, and now Barnes says he’s starting to see things even out.

“I think generally, I think the supply chain is pretty much on. Everything is starting to work its way back out now,” Barnes said.

Barnes is a second generation farmer with around 3,000 acres in Wilson County.

“You know the business we’re in is not a cheap business to be in,” Barnes said. “It takes a lot of capitol, a lot of investment, a lot of time, you know, and if we’re not sustainable and not efficient, we can’t be here.”

Even though he was able to sell his crops and stay open and operational over the last year, Barnes says because of supply and demand, the prices he was selling for were much lower than normal.

“The market got extremely cheap on some of the crops that we grow that there was no way that we could come out on them,” Barnes said.

He, like many other farmers across the country, found relief from CFAP, or the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program.

The USDA program gives monetary assistance to farms impacted by the market changes over the last year and a half.

Even though they were selling, Barnes says, like any other business, you have to make ends meet, and this supplement was one that eased he and his broker’s concerns.

“When he’s calling me saying ‘We’re in the hole right now, and I don’t see it getting any better’ it was like, it was like a sigh of relief. It was some great supplemental income,” Barnes said. "I don’t think it wouldn’t have put me out of business, but it would have stung, and it would have stung bad.”

There is another round of CFAP open, with applications closing October 12.

Barnes recommends farmers check to see if they qualify, and credits the federal government for having farmer’s backs.

“The American farmer is sort of the backbone of this county. I don’t see how they can’t, for a lack of better way of saying it, I don’t see how they can’t protect us,” he said.