Kevin Cummings- Oyster farmer.

What is your name?   

Kevin 

What do you do and are you still able to do it? Have you had to improvise, change things up to survive. If so please talk about what it is you do when life is normal and how you have adapted to make the business stay afloat.  How long do you think it’s sustainable for? 

I am a farmer and sales manager for an oyster farm in Rhode Island. Pretty much all of our sales are direct to local restaurants here in Rhode Island, so our sales went to zero when the restaurants shut down. 

We've had to get creative in order to try to sell oysters. We set up a store on our website where people can order oysters, clams and scallops to be shipped to their home. We also teamed up with some local fishermen and some land farmers and are now delivering meat, cheese, eggs, oysters, clams, scallops, flowers and coffee directly to people's homes. We are not selling a lot of seafood, but it is really cool to be part of this group of people who are providing an essential service to the community. Customers leave coolers outside their homes, I put their order in the cooler, and we usually smile and wave at each other through the closed window. When I drive away, they go out and pick up their order. It's eerie to go to people's homes and not be able to interact with them...feels like we're living in a sci-fi movie. 

It has been a huge learning curve for us to shift gears from delivering direct to restaurants to setting ourselves up to ship oysters on a weekly basis. Not to mention, shipping small amounts of oysters in styrofoam coolers inside cardboard boxes on multiple trucks is pretty much the opposite of our mission as a company that takes pride in restoring the environment and reducing our carbon footprint. 

We're also just not selling enough to cover our expenses. Depending how long the shutdown lasts, we estimate that we will have about 100,000 extra oysters that we would have sold otherwise. The good thing is that they will stay alive, and hopefully we'll be able to sell them later, but if we can't sell them soon, we'll run out of space on the farm and need to find an outlet for them. 

All of that being said, we are very aware of how lucky we are to still be working, and we also know that a lot of people have much bigger problems than we do. We start every morning with a company phone call. The first thing we discuss is how everyone is feeling physically and mentally. We have split our staff into 2 groups of 2 and the groups do not interact in person. For now we are continuing to work as long as we all feel safe and healthy, but we are reassessing every day.  

Where are you social isolatingand with whom? How is it being home with them all the time?! 

I'm at home with my wife Cara and our dog Lucy (10 year old black lab). So far things have been pretty easy for me. Cara is a teacher, so she is working from home now, and I am still going to work, since food production is considered an essential service. Cara's work seems stressful since they are basically learning as they go.   

Do you have a routine you try to stick to? 

I am still working Monday through Friday, so my routine hasn't really changed, but our operations have changed pretty drastically. We are trying to adapt to the new normal. I'm usually out of the house by 6:30 every morning and home around 5:30pm (although we've been working some longer days lately). We were just about to hire 4 seasonal farm workers before this all started, but weren't able to, so there's a lot of work to be done with a skeleton crew. 

Do you get dressed in the morning or stay in your PJ’s?

haha some days I wish I could just stay in my PJs and lay in bed! When the wind is blowing and it's cold out and I'm putting on my waders and elbow length insulated gloves and preparing to jump into the water, I sometimes wish I were at home under the covers, but I know that I am lucky to still be working. 

What frightens you the most about this, do you have ways of calming yourself?

My brother and his girlfriend just found out that they are going to have a baby. I'm super excited about this news, but I worry about them. They live in Manhattan, so I worry about their safety and their ability to have regular checkups without putting themselves in danger. 

Have you managed to find any silver linings?

Last week the little girl across the street had a birthday. Her dad texted all of us in the neighborhood and asked us to all come out on our porches at 5pm to sing Happy Birthday to her.  It's cool to see people finding creative ways to do nice things for each other. 

Are there any conspiracy theories you subscribe to?

Nope

If you were president what would you have done differently?

Oh man...I should not be president! I guess I would just say that facts matter and speculation, opinion and politics have no place in a response to a pandemic.  

Using the color chart below please tell me in general what colors you are feeling. It can be a whole rainbow if you want or just one…!  

 Red- angry    

Yellow- scared

Green- inspired, this is giving you time to reflect and/or create

Blue- sad/depressed 

Pink- happy. You see and focus on the silver linings.

black- doomed this is hard

cream- you feel no difference

orange- over whelmed

Green, orange