In these long days of COVID-19 quarantining, I rarely leave the house except to go to the grocery store. I, along with everyone else, am out buying food for multiple family members and friends. The stores are still bustling, and the carts piled high with fresh produce, shelf-stable products, and so many cleaning supplies. I gear up with masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer to prepare for those carts that come a little too close for comfort. Everyone is buying what they can, but not always what they need, for a sense of security.

I’m shocked to see empty shelves as I pass through aisles, the after-effect of shortage threats and widespread stockpiling. The image of abundance and prosperity grocery stores represent has been suddenly broken.

What’s the story on the other side of the grocery store shelves? Farmworkers are essential to making sure the country has food, but they aren’t afforded the same precautions and treatment that many others are, which puts them at a higher risk than the general public. Not only is this a consequence of health inequity in the U.S., it is already destabilizing a food system that has already proven to be more fragile than I could have imagined.

There are about 3 million farmworkers across the U.S. hired to harvest fruit, vegetables and nuts as well as tend livestock on farms. While roughly 1.2 million to 1.75 million farmworkers are undocumented, 200,000 come seasonally on an H-2A guest worker visa—a program that has been thrown into disarray due to the tighter restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farmer advocacy group, fears a shortage of H-2A workers will lead to food shortages and economic hardship for U.S. farmers. Last year 87,000 H-2A jobs were certified in the second quarter (April-June), making it the busiest time of year.

“The decision to halt visa application processing in Mexico will restrict the number of immigrant workers being allowed to enter the country,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the Farm Bureau. “Under the new restrictions, American farmers will not have access to all of the skilled immigrant labor needed at a critical time in the planting season. This threatens our ability to put food on Americans’ tables.”

In early March, Armando Elenes, secretary treasurer of the nation’s largest farmworkers union, United Farm Workers, informally surveyed workers on how much information they had received about the coronavirus from their employers. Of the 220 respondents, 90% had received no information at all. No information about the virus, no instructions for disinfection protocols, and no recommendations regarding social distancing. In disbelief of the results, Elenes repeated the survey only to receive the same outcome. One respondent’s employer simply said “Flies can’t get into mouths that are closed,” as though all one had to do to stay safe from the virus was to keep your mouth shut.

Given this response, it’s not so surprising that the precautions recommended by the Center for Disease Control, the ones I follow when leaving my home, are not necessarily being followed by farmworkers. Not receiving any disinfectant, masks, or gloves from their employers, workers have to bring soap from home. While there may be space in the fields for social distancing, housing and transportation for the workers are often crowded and unsanitary (a single housing unit can hold 200 workers or more). There are no federal guidelines, nor space, for quarantining a sick farm worker. What’s more, sick leave is rare and there is limited affordable health care for testing or treatment of any illness for migrant farmworkers, much less COVID-19.

One woman, a migrant worker on a farm in Washington, has seen workers stay home out of fear of catching the virus and to protect their children that have come with them to the U.S. She, on the other hand, had already taken off of work for an injury and cannot afford to take those precautions. She has told her children not to take her to the hospital if she gets sick because her “biggest fear is dying alone there and leaving her family with crushing medical debts.”

Vice President Erik Nicolson of United Farm Workers claims he’s heard of dozens of farm workers testing positive for the virus in Washington state in the last two weeks.

How farm employers and officials respond to the coronavirus could jeopardize the entire U.S. food supply chain. Without enough workers and buyers, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits in WI and OH. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies the majority produce to half the U.S., tractors are plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

Farms are suffering alongside every other sector in response to the virus. There isn’t always the labor to harvest, process, and deliver food, due to the border/visa restriction and inadequate health care. The demand isn’t there either. With restaurant, hotels and schools deemed unessential and closing their doors to avoid spreading the virus, their supplying farms are left with a massive surplus and not enough buyers. Even with the spike in sales at grocery stores, it isn’t enough to buy all the produce that was grown for schools and businesses. Farmers are donating some of their surplus to food banks and other such emergency food response organizations. These organizations only have so much refrigerator and storage space to accept farmers produce, even though their assistance is being turned to now more than ever with rapidly soaring rates of unemployment.

Maybe the stockpiling and mad scramble for food that I’m seeing in grocery stores isn’t as unwarranted as I had thought.

I get overwhelmed with the severity and widespread impacts of COVID-19 like everyone else. Clearly, our national food system wasn’t stable enough to withstand such a shock, as we’re seeing is the case with many other systems and sectors. It’s clear that there needs to be a significant shift in how our food systems function in order to get through this health crisis. This means connecting local farmers directly to nearby communities and individuals in need of food, preserving and supporting our regional ecosystems and networks, and using emergency planning to make these channels socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable and resilient in the face of future challenges.