We’ve all been there- you’re in need of a particular product or food item and it’s not on your store shelves. While this scenario has always played out for consumers, it’s likely that this happens to you more now than it did before COVID. But alas, we now can reason the cause to be from “supply chain disruptions,” a term more widely used by the public than possibly ever before. Throughout the pandemic, supply chain disruptions became the rationale for so many consumer misfortunes, and to a consumer, supply chain disruptions may look like empty shelves, but what does it look like to a producer or farmer? Workforce safety, lockdown policies, financial assistance, burnout and exhaustion, and emergency food dispersal were just some of the challenges that farmers, wholesalers, and retailers had to manage in a short amount of time. 

In this episode, Michaela Kandzer speaks with Noah Bloedorn, specialist in the areas of urban planning and food systems, about a multi-region, multi-institution project that assessed the impact of COVID-19 on food and agricultural systems to develop strategies for coping with future crises. This research and outreach project was supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Resources:
Lessons from COVID-19 Toolkit
Reimagining Resilient Agri-food Supply Chains Course Registration
Listen to our previous episodes on food systems during the pandemic:
COVID-19 Food Systems Part 1: Pandemic Purchasing and Problem Solving
COVID-19 Food Systems Part 2: Combatting Interruptions in the Food System

Transcripts available here: https://piecenter.com/media/podcast/#transcript

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Music "Headway" by Kai Engel Available at https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel/Sustains/Kai_Engel_-_Sustains_-_04_Headway/ Under CC BY license Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The views, information, or opinions expressed by guest speakers on Science by the Slice are solely those of the individuals and do not necessarily represent those of the UF/IFAS Center for Public Issues Education or the University of Florida.