When a New Yorker is dying every 10 minutes as a result of the Coronavirus epidemic, does the state of life on our farm matter? In a moment of crisis that has upended the lives and routines of hundreds of millions in this country alone, of what relevance is a place in which the rhythm of life insistently plods on uninterrupted, from chore time to planting time to pruning time to chore time, as it has for decades? “What can I possibly say?” has been my dilemma this week, as I struggle to write my self-assigned bulletin and to remain in dialogue with our customers, colleagues and friends

I could point out that even the farm is not safe from the pandemic, that our feeling of being on the periphery is really an illusion. We interact with the world outside and Infections in rural America have begun to take off. But to accentuate our risk would be to fail to acknowledge the particular pain of cities, particularly New York City, which because of its close interface with the rest of the world and the density of living circumstances offers particularly fertile ground for a highly contagious virus to get introduced and be transmitted. Even at the peak of the epidemic weeks down the road, we in Germantown are unlikely to hear the round the clock ring of sirens already being heard right now in our beloved major metropolis. It may be bad here. We are all likely to know someone who is lost as a result of this pandemic. But it won’t be as catastrophic as in New York City. To my friends and neighbors there, particularly those who are fighting the illness, I send a message of love and support.

I could try to address the moral ambiguities and guilt of those of us who live both in the City and the country and have taken refuge in the country. As was true of those who escaped the annual yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans in the 19th century, it is largely people of privilege who can reduce the risk of an epidemic by moving away from it. And with the Coronavirus, there is the very real danger that those who move will bring the virus with them and overload rural health systems unequipped to deal with the volume of cases brought by seasonal visitors.

But I would, in discussing this migration, have to point out that the virus would have arrived through commerce even without that migration, as it has throughout the country. By coming here, these refugees help reduce density and avoid even more intense transmission in the City. As part time residents they are already integral parts of the local community, and they infuse needed dollars into a local economy about to be hit by a pandemic-induced recession. So to those who would attack the pandemic refugees, I send a message to “cool it.”

I could try to use the farm to illustrate the far-reaching economic consequences of this pandemic. Because even for a place with as microscopic a production as ours, we’ve seen a considerable shift in our business. On the one hand, sale of our frozen meats has taken off as supplies in supermarkets have been exhausted. In the past two weeks, we’ve sold close to 60 of the Freedom Ranger chickens we raised and froze last summer, way more than we sold in the previous three months. We’ve sold so much so that we’ve stopped offering them on the Farm2Tables wholesale app and are holding the remaining stash for our regular individual customers.

On the other hand, our egg sales have gone down. With me sheltering in place here, we are no longer delivering to our weekly egg customers in and around my New York home. Even more significantly, the restaurants which were taking the overwhelming portion of our production through the Farm2Tables app have now closed. There has been some uptick in individuals’ purchase of eggs from the farm, something my sister advised is part of a national trend for “stress baking” that has egg consumption up about 44% from a year ago (