In March of 1917, Charles Lathrop Pack, who rose from a timberman to one of America's wealthiest men, organized the National War Garden Commission. With agricultural workers in Europe being recruited to fight in World War I, farms and food production inevitably suffered. To help, the United States ramped up the exporting of food overseas. Lathrop's commission encouraged Americans to start gardens and to preserve food so that our farm produce would be more available to help our allies. When America was drawn into World War II, victory gardens reemerged and "Soldiers of the Soil" were recruited to allow comercial crops to be used to feed our troops overseas. Community gardens in Boston and Minneapolis still exist as tributes to this incredible American collective effort.
The Covid pandemic has had a similar effect on home gardening, although not encouraged on a policy level, . Americans accustomed to abundant grocery shelves experienced a shortage of almost everything from meat to produce to, well, toilet paper. True, they werent really shortages - it was more a shortage of people working the jobs that are needed to bring those items to our local stores. But it had the same effect. Compound that with a lot of time spent at home, and the stage was set for a resurgence in growing things.
This garden mania begat a seed demand that caused companies such as Johnny's to have to limit home gardener purchases in favor of commercial entities. The Maine-based company experienced a 270% increase in sales in March of 2020. Canadian company Stokes Seeds saw a 400% increase in March, taking 1,000 orders online. Some companies, like Territorial Seed Company, stopped taking online orders all together. There was never a shortage of seeds, but sales were suddenly lopsided in terms of distribution and shipping. But there was a positive: the building material and gardening supply sector of business saw almost a 9% increase in sales during the pandemic. Home gardeners almost certainly had a hand in the 20% increase in E-commerce.
Americans are experiencing the new Victory Gardens - and are supporting the effort to reduce reliance on commercial food security. The number of home gardeners will decrease with a return to work, school, and normality. The pull of the rat race and subsequent need for convenience will thin out the herd, so to speak. But, hopefully people have learned some valuable lessons about food, about self-sustainability, and about themselves and the power they hold to shape their own destiny.
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