The Core

Already Reeling from Flooding and Heat Waves, Farmers Struggle as Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold | The Weather Channel
https://weather.com/health/coronavirus/news/2020-04-01-farms-struggle-amid-coronavirus-pandemic

Yeah... just convinced a friend to stock up based on this.

As per your other link, grocery sales are decreasing (though you still can't get eggs, rice, flour, pasta etc.) and so I think we'll have a time when things will be more available than they are now, but then the supply chain might get hit by closed borders and so forth. Thinking forward to that, I broke isolation yesterday and went to the grocery store and spent $500 even though I could have stayed away for another few weeks.

Also am willing to spend 2X for things like flour and oatmeal if I can find them. I did notice that in general, if you want to spend a fortune on gluten-free organic products, the shelves are still mostly full! I have my limits though. I won't pay more for rolled oats than I would pay for a fine cheese (saw some at $19/pound).

I heard an interview with a farmer a couple years ago who said (roughly from memory): "Don't kid yourselves. You have a choice. Your food will be picked in the US by a Mexican or in Mexico by a Mexican. Those are your two choices. As it becomes harder for us to bring in immigrant labor, we're buying up land in Mexico and moving our farming operations there."

So even if you can bring in the labor, "high-touch" crops just aren't grown in the US much anymore.

Some people are saying it will be like when we were kids and things will only be available in season. But it won't be. I grew up with all kinds of fruit and vegetable farmers in Vermont where we would have these ridiculously short seasons for things like strawberries and asparagus.

Now, lots of those fields are growing houses and Home Depots, which are very hard to eat without lots of condiment.

>high-touch

The truck farms around our major metro areas are largely gone.  There are houses built where those fields were or the remaining fields have switched to grain.

wheat, potatoes, & peanuts.  I think our farms around here can process those without much field labor.

Perhaps, but those are among the hardest things to find at a grocery store currently. They had potatoes some yesterday because they limit people to one bag per customer.  At least in the short term, flour, potatoes and peanut butter are challenging to find.

Oh and yeast is hard to find. If you don't have your own starter, it's hard to make your own bread currently.

I'm buying up instant mashed potato flakes.

"Even the honeybees normally imported from other countries to pollinate Canadian crops could become harder to source"

CAN: Food security experts warn of supply shortages, higher prices due to global pandemic
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/food-security-covid19-trudeau-1.5520492

>Victory Garden

RC: we suck at it also BUT our next door neighbor is excellent and we have a DEAL :-)

Read an interesting article (sorry, don't have the link handy) on the toilet paper problem. It's not just hoarding and the problem is not going to go away soon.

The basic problem is they can ramp up production and distribution 20%, but demand is up 40%. This is because the commercial and the residential markets are completely separate. Different products. Different supply chains. Different contracts. Different packaging. Getting commercial TP into grocery stores is not a fast process.

Meanwhile, because lots of us used to crap at work, at restaurants, at gas stations and so forth and use commercial paper, but we're all doing it at home now, demand is way up for the home-grade stuff. And in this case, commercial-grade does not indicate a better product ;-)