It was the week of Friday the 13th when Cliff Davis, the owner of Pig & Leaf Farm in rural Summertown, got a call from one of his largest customers.

Celebrated Nashville restaurant The Catbird Seat was telling him that it would be shutting down. It would no longer be needing a supply of his specialty bred hogs.

At Pig & Leaf, which rests in the Middle Tennessee high forest on a ridge within sight of the Farm Community, Davis and his wife Jennifer Albanese and their team produce craft pork, artisan vegetables and cut flowers produced using water catchment, solar energy, nutrient recycling and low-till or no-till cultivation in an ecologically designed operation.

As the days continued after that initial call, Davis' other top clients, the vast majority of whom are Nashville chefs, left similar messages leaving his primary source of business at a standstill as new regulations were set in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in Tennessee.

To cut costs, he sent a shipment of pigs to a local processor.

“It was one restaurant after another, and then the mayor of Nashville called all restaurants to close,” Davis said. “We had invested a lot and were looking forward to a really successful season.”

Then the farmers' markets closed.

“Farmers, we live on hope,” Davis said. “Hope that there is going to be demand. That didn't happen.”

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Farm pivots to stay afloat

Without their largest clients, Davis and Albanese said they knew it would only be days before he would have to let his farm hands go if a new source of income was not quickly found.

The answer was a major shift from supplying restaurants to feeding households, relaunching a previously suspended box order service and offering online sales to customers who would usually support the farm at local markets.

“We have had to shift everything to the community-supported agriculture model,” Davis said. “We have deliveries and drop-offs. We redid the whole website and put an online store up.”

The move included the creation of tutorial videos that teach customers how to use the new website and the move to a new packaging system for the farm.

They started an upgraded system to clean all the products sent to customers and started to create an onsite store.

Instead of busy downtown restaurants, the farm now primarily supplies households in Maury, Lawrence and Lewis counties with pork, greens and vegetables.

“We adapted,” Davis said. “That was an overnight shift, and we had to run with it as fast as possible. Now, it's about trying to find more demand for our product because we are still growing and hoping that our product sells and there are going to be more and more people wanting local food.”

In the first two days of opening the farm's online store, Davis said he sold out of his stock of frozen pork.

The farm is also consistently selling out of eggs supplied by about 50 chickens that roam the property.

Davis said running the new program requires more time and materials than his usual operation as each order is processed, bagged and then double-checked.

“It's all about establishing the process,” Davis said. “We have the people. It's just setting up the infrastructure. With bulk pork, I ship five animals to the processor and then ship the whole carcass to the restaurant, and I am done. This way, I have to take two pork chops and one bacon and make sure it goes into individual bags.”

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Adding vegetable crops

Davis said the Pig & Leaf Farm quickly diversified its crops in an effort to keep customers returning. It limited the production of its popular lettuce, which is usually also sent to several high-end restaurants in Nashville, a 25% decrease of the plant's usual production at the farm.

“It is still a stressful subject,” Davis said. “We are offering everything that we can offer for convenience – drop of sites and to people's doors. It has been trialing, but we are noticing there has been more demand. We have so much more selection in what we grow now, and we have ordered so much more seed.”

Davis, a longtime farmer who has cultivated plants across the United States and in Latin America, said he expected to continue to support his family and his employees using the new business model for many months to come.

“I think it is going to be a long time before the restaurant industry gets back on its feet. We need to figure out systems and processes,” Davis said. “If that is the case, we need to keep with this model, and we need to figure out the system and processes to make it easy for us and easy for the people.”

Lee Maddox, the director of communications for the Tennessee Farm Bureau, said the coronavirus has had a profound impact on the state's agricultural industry. He said effects of the virus can be seen in a major drop in the price of cattle. There is a growing concern in finding skilled laborers to work on an industrial scale and at the state's nurseries such as Riverbend Nurseries in Thompson's Station, which offers retail and supply major retailers like Lowe's Home Improvement and Home Depot.

“It is a huge industry that we all depend on,” Maddox said. “We depend on this industry more than anybody ever knows. They are being tested like everybody else. It doesn't just come from the grocery store, and we need to do everything we can to keep our farms afloat. It is a part of our national security.”

As store shelves are depleted, Maddox said the distribution supply chain is waiting to catch up.

“I think there is a lot of attention to the food shortages or the fear, and we are noticing that local farmers and local consumers are concentrating their efforts to buy locally, from farmers, they know to ensure that they are healthy,” Davis said. “People are grateful. I have been called a hero three of four times. That is weird. Being able to get fresh food to people's doorsteps is a very big deal, and people are so welcoming and thankful.”

In the northern Maury County community of Williamsport, John Dysinger of Bountiful Blessings Farm said the operation has had to suspend new memberships to its community supported agriculture program due to a jump in new customers.

The farm which holds weekly pickups at Nashville's 12th Avenue South, another location in Brentwood and a church in Columbia.

“We were not totally prepared for the demand and the onslaught that we had,” Dysinger said. “We have had people who have been with us for 20 years. That is what real community is about. Food does not grow in the grocery store and so many people are so detached by what it takes to grow food.”

Dysinger and his wife Pam opened Bountiful Blessings as a strawberry farm 20 years ago. The farm is now a participant in the Harvie farm share program, a national network of community farmers and producers.

The farm and its crops are cared for by the couple, their two sons and their families and a team of interns who live on the property.

“There is this realness that happens when you work with someone who is growing the food,” said Pam Dysinger. Our food comes straight from our farm. Nobody else handles it. To me, that seems like it would be comforting.”

Davis said the current situation is changing the way the people of southern Middle Tennessee think of their food.

“The demand is coming but it is the intention of the people that are buying from us is pretty profound,” Davis said. “It's kind of heartfelt. These large scale systems are closing down and the only opportunity is to buy locally. In my opinion, one of the bust businesses to be in right now is local small-scale farming. Our lettuce will last two weeks in our refrigerator. It doesn't sit in these warehouses. This is sent directly to the consumer and it's healthier. There are more nutrients in local food, and we are on a human labor scale.”