The Chick’s in the Mail? Rural America Faces New Worries With Postal Crisis
https://news.yahoo.com/chicks-mail-rural-america-faces-141543289.html
“This is an attack on a tried-and-true service that rural America depends on,” said Chris Gibbs, a farmer in western Ohio who voted for Trump in 2016, but this year started an advocacy group arguing that the president has failed rural America. “It pulls one more piece of stability, predictability and reliability from rural America. People don’t like that.”
Across the country, rural residents already have been affected in several ways.
Checks and plant shipments are delayed, and tracking them down can take hours in rural towns without quick, reliable internet. Replacement parts for farm machines are late in coming. Prescription refills are taking a week or more to reach mailboxes, a particular threat because rural communities are older than most of America.
On Native American reservations, among the country’s most remote places, families are driving five hours to get medicine and worry about being disenfranchised in November.
Then there are the chicks.
For decades, postal carriers have delivered day-old chicks, ducklings and all manner of plants and animals to small farmers and families with backyard hen houses. Industrial-scale farms have enough money to truck around their own animals or operate sprawling hatcheries. For everyone else, the mail is how the chickens come home to roost.
Some chicks are getting lost in postal warehouses or spending days on trucks, farmers said. Others are getting smothered or crushed in the deluge of boxes created by America’s coronavirus-induced online ordering. One hatchery in Pennsylvania lost 3,000 chicks in a recent shipment.
“We just don’t have any other options,” Hampson said. “There’s nothing sadder than seeing a box of tiny little fuzzy peeps and all of them are DOA.”
Farmers said they were so afraid of losing more chicks in transit that they were driving hundreds of miles to pick up shipments from hatcheries. Hampson’s parents and in-laws Pony Expressed their way across Pennsylvania and New England to bring 15 boxes of just-hatched turkey poults to their farm.
Other farms are telling customers not to expect products to come quickly. In Beech Island, South Carolina, Jenks Farmer, who ships 2-pound lily bulbs across the country, has been getting bombarded with calls from anxious customers whose flowers had not arrived. He shipped one bulb to a customer in North Carolina, and a week later, the package was still stuck in Shreveport, Louisiana.
“My business isn’t political, but it depends on the economy and political leadership,” Farmer said. “I don’t have a leader who’s doing anything to help my businesses thrive.”
Rural post offices have struggled for years with staffing shortages and high turnover, and rural carriers say their days can be long and perilous if they get stuck in a blizzard on some remote county road. Unlike their city counterparts, rural carriers said they do not generally earn overtime, so when the mail is heavy or weather is bad, they say they work extra for free."