Dr. Christa Court is director of the Economic Impact Analysis Program at university
The pandemic continues to cause issues across multiple industries, but agriculture has faced several unique challenges — from crops rotting on the vine during shutdowns to having to find new ways to sell their produce.
Dr. Christa Court, director of the Economic Impact Analysis Program at the University of Florida, is an expert in regional economics and works in the school’s Food and Resource Economics Department. Court has been studying the impacts of the pandemic on the state’s growers and farmers.
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“One of the things that we did early on — we have some a rapid assessment process that we go through for hurricanes and we retooled that survey that we use to be specific to the pandemic early on in the shutdown stages,” Court said. “So we released that in March to mid-May of 2020. It happened to be peak harvest season for a lot of producers — especially in that Southwest Florida area that were producing fruits and vegetables — and we estimated at the time — again, just in that one period of March to mid-May of 2020 — $895 million of losses for producers.”
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