How the recent government shutdown affected agriculture

You may be familiar with the effects the government shutdown had on government workers who had to continue work with no pay.

However, what about the workers that were prohibited from doing their job with no pay?

This scenario sums up what many workers essential to the agricultural industry faced.

If the shutdown had continued on longer, it could have meant a halt in produce on grocery shelves.

First to be affected were the researchers who play a role in keeping produce safe to consume.

“A lot of that is multi-institutional research so we work with the USDA and we work with the FDA and there’s a lot of federal agencies that are part of research efforts,” said Paul Brierley, executive director for Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture.

Instead of working with no pay, these researchers were not allowed to work.

“They’re not allowed to use their emails such and try to communicate with a scientist who is part of this ongoing project, collecting data 24/7, we weren’t allowed to communicate with them,” said Brierley.

In other words, these government positions were considered ” non-essential .”

“The airport and some of the border security agents, those were considered essential services and they were required to work and not be paid but the rest of them that were ‘non-essential’ they were not allowed to work,” said Brierley.

Before the recent shutdown, was a romaine lettuce e. Coli outbreak.

The FDA had since been working to determine the cause and how to avoid another outbreak, but had to halt all research.

Only several sectors of the FDA remained up and running such as food safety testing sector.

“Parts of the FDA were working, they were doing inspections food safety inspections and things like that but the research part was considered non-critical,” said Brierley.

Other research groups such as a drone group working with agriculture students at Arizona Western College also had to be put on hold.

However, all licensing was put on hold as well so students were not able to continue drone research.

Also, a crucial part of the agriculture industry put on hold, was reporting by government agencies.

These reports include “regular market reports, a lot of the planning for how much you plant of what crop especially in other parts of the country. How much soybeans how much corn, all these things they look at market reports to see what’s going on,” said Brierley.

A continuance of the shutdown and even the talk of shutting the border down completely would have had a large impact on agricultural workers.

The federal agencies which supply visas for temporary workers would not be able to supply those visas.

So, in turn, “there was concern that that backlog would be to the point where you couldn’t get the workforce that you needed to harvest the crops,” said Brierley.

If the shutdown had continued, when would consumers and agriculture industries feel the e ffects ?

“I think what would’ve happened is the impact would’ve been seen immediately of how production would stop and millions of dollars lost and shelves going empty, sometimes people make decisions and they don’t realize what’s going to happen from them and I think that’s one that people may not have fully appreciate how much of what ends up on their table is a result of for example the workforce coming across the border,” said Brierley.

Overall, the shutdown proved just how important research teams are to agriculture.

“The shutdown , what it did show is a lot of places where you do rely on the government that you didn’t realize it, and so it does have a big impact and it has an impact on ways that you may not think of,” said Brierley.